The Blog is Up!

Whew- we made it through the week and it was a tough one.  After a great but sleepless weekend last weekend, mom came down with my cold.  She has decided I am a little machine when it comes to cold viruses.  Although I didn't feel great, I was able to take some medicine and keep on trucking.  Mom on the other hand was completely wiped out by my little bug.  She missed work on Tuesday and went home at noon on Wednesday.  Lucky dad didn't even catch a sniffle.

Thankfully, everyone felt better by Thursday because dad was headed to Prescott, AZ for a mountain bike race and my best friend Claire was coming for a sleepover on Friday.  It was Claire's first time for a sleep over so mom was a little concerned we'd be making midnight run back to Claire's house but she did great.  She and I spent most of the evening locked in the guest room playing Minecraft.  It was a totally perfect night for everyone- Claire and I were totally occupied and mom had wine.  Meanwhile, up in Prescott, Dad was totally being taken care of by our friends who also went up to ride.  He got to feast on baked ziti and enjoy adult company.

Saturday was a quiet day. Claire went home about 11, mom and I ran some errands and then I took a good long nap.  I had to get rested for my 6PM softball game.  We did fairly well, only losing by one run.  I walked once and got a super nice, hard hit single.  I played second and actually remembered to cover first when the time came.  All around a good game.  

While we were napping and softballing, dad was racing his heart out in Prescott.  He actually spent some time riding with the women's 5 time world mountain biking champion.  It sounds like she was pretty impressive (as you would expect).  He finished with total ride time of 3 hours 16 minutes, not including the 1/2 hour bottle neck to go pedal up the first hill.  A good showing overall by team Goedel.

And while mom was drinking wine and eating cookies for dinner, dad was enjoying a well earned prime rib dinner.  Mom is really going to make an effort to be on this trip next year.

Dad came home on Sunday and mom and I headed out to see Newsies.  We switched our original tickets from Saturday evening to the Sunday matinee at 2 PM. We left a little early and stopped to get some ice cream and enjoy a relaxing afternoon.  We arrived at the theater, smile, smile, happy, happy at 1:30, plenty of time to get settled, go to the bathroom etc.  Only to find out the show started at 1.  Bummer. Undaunted, we headed in, snuck to our seats and watched the rest of the show.

I liked it but there was too much kissing in the second half.  Gross.

We got home earlier than expected to find out Grandma Sue was bringing us dinner.  Homemade lettuce wraps with sticky rice.  It was a two-fer.  Mom didn't have to cook AND we got a super yummy meal out of it.  Mom and I took advantage of the extra time and headed to the park to enjoy a perfect kite flying afternoon.

Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

All Around Fun Weekend

So not only are we getting the blog done on time, we are actually early.  It is 11 AM Sunday morning and mom is gettin' er done.  Mainly because we are pretty tired and she knows comes 5 o'clock tonight, there will be no blog writing.

We started our weekend with my school's spring play called "Rats!"  It's a really cute musical about a town overrun with rats.  I got to play Wendy Krinkle and although I only had two lines, I pulled out all the stops.  Everybody did a great job and mom is always amazed at what Ms. Faltico is able to coax out of us.

We worked so hard and for so many weeks on this.  I had such a great time that I was sad when it was over.
Because my softball game was moved from Saturday evening to Friday evening, we had a whole free weekend and decided to take advantage of it and go camping.  So after my play ended, we headed home, got our jammies on, loaded up Ginger and took the RV up to Rose Canyon Lake on Mt. Lemmon.  We made it to our campsite about 9:30 that night and it was a little hard to settle down so we didn't actually crawl into bed until about 11.  Ginger was a little (OK, a lot) restless and spent most of the night pacing and panting in mom's face.  We were up and going fairly early on Saturday- see previous sentence.  Dad made us awesome pancake and bacon breakfast out in wide open outdoors while mom took Ginger for a run to wear her out a little.

Once we all had full bellies, we walked down to the lake to do some fishing.  We thought it was going to be our usual of fishing all day and catching nothing but we found a pretty sweet spot and managed to catch two trout!  It was pretty awesome and I was so looking forward to watching mom and dad eat the trout for dinner.  ( I sure wasn't going to put that anywhere near my mouth- ew.)  But.  My parents disappointed me once again and gave the fish away to the family fishing next to us.  They already had about 8 so we figured they were actually going to do something with them.  I think dad was secretly glad he didn't have to clean them.

So despite the sadness of having to give my fish away, we had a really great day.  We all took naps, mom actually read a whole magazine, cover to cover- you know all the good stuff in life!
We headed home fairly early on Sunday morning and it's back to the grind.  We hope everyone has a fantastic week!

Springtime Update

All kinds of good spring time things to report.  And we figured if we waited much longer, it would the summertime update.

Spring is always so pretty in Tucson.  If you can deal with the obnoxious amounts of pollen from the Acacia trees, the Palo Verde trees and the Mesquite trees, it's almost paradise.

This is the view from mom's work- she just loves all the different shades of green.  

She calls this picture "50 Shades of Green".  See how clever she is.....

We headed  to Albuquerque for Easter.  We never go back at Easter but we had to see Uncle Adam and Aunt Erin's new house.  They moved down from the mountains and have rejoined civilization.  It's a great house and we spent all kinds of time there.  We also spent all kinds of time at the new Dave and Busters that just opened up.  That almost makes Abq. worth it for dad.  This D&Bs had a new Star Wars game that was awesome.  It made all of us a little motion sick but it was totally cool!

After a fun afternoon there, we headed up to Uncle Adam and Aunt Erin's to color Easter eggs and decorate the bunny cake.  This was Sophia's first time with both of those and she had an awesome time (we think).  She was all hands in on the egg decorating and showed a good liberal hand with the jelly beans on the cake.  Just how it should be.  I was a pretty good Big Cousin and tried to show her the ropes the best I could but kids are a lot of work......

( Guess which side is Sophia's?)

Easter morning, we all headed back down to the house for the egg hunt.  The Easter bunny did a great job hiding all the eggs and the whole gang got into it- even Moufasa.  I showed Sophia and Brendan the major "how to's" for hunting and Sophia got it like a champ.  Brendan had his own plan but had fun none the less.

 ( Could I look any more like my dad in this picture?  I don't think so.....)

In the afternoon, Dat dat and Mr. Walker headed out for a mountain bike ride and Nana, mom and I went for a walk to enjoy the sunshine.  We ended up at mom's favorite oak tree.  It's so pretty back there now- too bad there are houses and big PRIVATE PROPERTY!!! signs everywhere.

Everyone came up for Easter dinner and we got a few family pictures.  Nana and mom took turns closing their eyes during the pictures so none of them turned out totally, 100% good.  I think that's why they invented photo shop isn't it?

  (This is how dat dat made through a weekend with the Walkers)


We headed back home Monday morning and on the way into to town, we stopped to pick up Monkey.  We love sending her to this boarding place because she comes home so exhausted, she sleeps for 3 days.  It's awesome!  I was kind of tired too.....

It was back to the grind for the week.  Dad headed up to Prescott, AZ to test ride a course he is racing on in 2 weeks so mom and I were on our own for the weekend.  I had a softball game on Saturday at the beautiful fields in Oro Valley.  While I was warming up, mom took Ginger on a walk around the area and found this huge, flowering Palo Verde.  All those teeny, tiny yellow flowers.  That fall off.  And usually land in the pool.  But they are pretty trees.

Mom then found a sweet spot in the shade with a good view of the game and was able to watch us actually win a game.  We are now 1-3 which isn't too bad considering we have no pitching and no one has really hit a ball yet this season.

Dad got home Saturday night and we all slept in Sunday morning. In the afternoon,   I went to my friend Shelby's birthday party and had an awesome time.  I was the only one tall enough to drive the go carts so I was pretty popular for awhile.

After that fun afternoon, Grandpa Vern and Grandma Sue took me out to dinner.  It was a perfect way to end a pretty darn good weekend.  Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Parental Exhaustion

So you know it's going to be a good week when Grandpa stops by with bacon and a "Bacon Makes Everything Better" sign for you.  Aaaahhh bacon.....how do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.  About the only good thing mom sees in my new bacon obsession is that it is getting my to branch out from nuggets and noodles.  If it has bacon on it, I'm willing to try it and that ain't so bad!

Our chair that we bought about 2 months ago finally arrived.  Mom and I love it- it's the perfect curling up to read chair.  Dad doesn't love it because he has no place to put his feet so he gets the super comfy leather couch.  At least that is one less person to fight over the "curling up to read" chair.

Saturday was the kick off to my softball season.  It was a fun day with a DJ, a jumping castle and a hit-a-thon for a fund raiser for the league.  All the girls in the league got to hit 7 balls off a hitting machine.  While mom wasn't there to see it (she had a very important appointment with her hair stylist- can't miss that!), dad said it looked like I was putting on a hitting clinic.  I don't think he's biased or anything but apparently, I was the only one to hit all the balls and I hit them the farthest.  Yeah me!  Now, hopefully, that will translate to a game....
We had a scrimmage against another team from our league in the afternoon and I was a bit nervous because these are the big girls you know.  I played left field, center field and third base and hit clean up.  Sadly, no one on the other team could pitch so I didn't get a chance to show off ma skillzzz but there is still some season left.  We won 11-3 and were super excited.  I didn't actually get a play at any of my positions but I was paying enough attention that I could go after balls that were close.  That is an enormous improvement for me.

Sunday was off to a slow start.  Mom may have a bit of a hangover.  You would think after 27 years on this planet, she would figure out how not to do that to herself.  Apparently, a long morning run, not drinking or eating much that day, spending all day out at the softball field and then coming home and having two beers doesn't work so well for the next day.  So it was kind of late by the time we got rolling.  I finished up on my big Tucson history project, mom got started on the spring yard work and dad spent %$#&^% hours putting up &^$$& porch lights that turned out to be defective.  So, in true dad fashion, he took them back and started all over again.  But we do have nice new porch lights.

After all that, mom and dad headed out to go to mom's Christmas present.  Dad got her tickets to see Alton Brown Live- the Edible Inevitable Tour.  Neither of them quite knew what to expect but it was really, really fun.  You know any show that starts out with belching, farting yeast hand puppets is going to be good.  There wasn't really any cooking unless you count making a gallon of ice cream in 10 seconds with a fire extinguisher cooking but lots of good stories.

He even took a picture of them for his Twitter feed.  Mom and dad are somewhere on the right about 1/4 of the way up, 5 seats in.  See them??!!

It was a great night but kind of late for a school night.  By the time they got home, it was almost 11.  4:45 comes early.....  So between a bad night of hangover sleep and a late night last night, everyone (except me!) is ready for a 6 PM bedtime tonight.
Have a great week!

Kind of a Fun Week!

Lots to report this week!  I had my first full week of softball practice.  Mom and dad weren't entirely sure I should be up in 10U but my coach seems to be looking after me.  I have some things to work on on the off days and so far, it hasn't been much of a battle to get me to do it.  We'll see how it goes over the next few weeks.  

On Thursday my class went on a really awesome field trip and mom was actually able to go on this one.  One of my classmate's mom is the AP teacher for environmental sciences in the Vail School District.  She takes her students out to the Empire Ranch Nature Preserve and they monitor an endangered species of frog.  My class got to go out and help for the day.  It. Was. Awesome.

We started out at the ranch house that was built in 1886.  We got to tour that and see what ranch life was like back in the day.

After that, we headed down into the wetlands and started with some bird watching.  We heard lots of birds but didn't actually see to many.  Mrs. In-Albon said something about us being a little loud and scaring them away but I don't believe her.

After the bird watching, we tested the water pH, pulled water out of the creek and looked for creatures.  We found a big ol' water scorpion- he was kind of scary looking.  We didn't see any frogs.  Mrs. In-Albon said something about us being a little loud and I think you know how the rest goes.

When we got done with our science experiments, we ate lunch at the hugest old cottonwood tree.  It was an open invitation for climbing and we all took it.

We finally got back to school about 1:30 and spent the rest of the afternoon at the book fair at school. It was such a fun day!

Friday night and Saturday day were quiet- mom spent the morning cleaning and the afternoon grocery shopping.  The evening was much better though.  Our camping friend, Mr. Mike, turned 40 and his wife had a little party for him.  All the adults went out to dinner and left us girls behind with a baby sitter.  The babysitter kept saying she could handle us because she had babysat for boys before but she bolted out of the house pretty quickly when the grown-ups got back.
The grown ups had a fabulous time at dinner and came back for cake and ice cream.  By the time we got back to our house it was almost midnight.  That is pretty much the hour mom and dad turn into pumpkins so we were cutting it close.

We tried to sleep in on Sunday but our favorite Monkey would have none of it.  She was up and raring to go at 5:30 in the AM.  On the plus side, mom was able to get her workout in by taking Monkey for a really long walk while the rest of us slept.

Mom had big plans to take us to the Book Festival that we go to every year but she was too dang tired to even think about it.  We spent a quiet Sunday making pineapple sorbet and because Monkey has a sensitive stomach and mom had nothing better to do, she made home made doggie treats.  Ginger seems to like them and mom feels all organic and pinterestry so it was good day.

We are all hitting the hay early and hoping for a good week.

Ginger's First Camping Trip!

We've had a little bit of a fun week/weekend.  The highlight of mom's week was getting to work out on her new spin bike.  We all loved the ease of exercising in our basement in Colorado- everyone had bikes set up on trainers and it was so easy to pop downstairs for a nice spin.  Ever since we moved back, mom has been struggling to find something that was easy as that.  After trying videos, iPhone apps and just winging it, the fitness gods intervened.  Our neighbors were having a garage sale when a light broke out from the clouds and shined directly onto THE SPIN BIKE sitting in the driveway.  Mom wandered over, asked a few questions and because we are neighbors, she got it for $100 less than asking price.  And it's almost brand new!  We really have no place for it but those are just minor details.  Everyone needs a spin bike in their living room, right?  Mom got in two workouts and is much happier because of it.

After the excitement of the spin bike, the rest of the week was pretty much a let down.  Ha!  Just kidding!  On Thursday, Grandpa Vern took us out to dinner and because he was paying, we let him pick.  Keeping in mind his favorite grand daughter in Tucson, he picked IHOP!  It was a stellar Thursday for me- I had pancakes for breakfast, waffles for lunch at school and then PANCAKES FOR DINNER!!  Oh.  And bacon!  It was a spectacular night!  Made even better by the fact that mom ordered the Cinnamon stack pancakes, which was basically eating a huge cinnamon roll for dinner.  Not the best nutritional choice but pretty dang fantastic if you ask me.

On Friday, after recovering from our sugar overload, we headed out to our favorite, close by camping spot and we got brave and took Monkey with us.  Everyone was a little on edge because she is still a little bit of a wild card but we were pleasantly surprised!  There  were a few episodes of barking at strangers but for the most part, she just took it all in and had a fabulous time.  We went for a hike and found a series of waterfalls and ponds that Monkey just loved and got herself nice and wet and dirty, just like a dog should.  The only small issue we had was her restless at night.  Mom heard her all night rustling around, scratching, licking- you know all that awesome stuff dogs do.  It's bad enough during the day but at midnight in a 24' RV, it's really bad.  No one else heard it so maybe, it was just mom's imagination.....

We came home Saturday, got unpacked and just hung around, resting up.  Ginger was tired and that is what was important.  We all headed to bed early and had a relaxing Sunday.  I practiced my pitching, we did a little hot tub sitting and fired up the grill for dinner.  All in all, a good day.  Have a great week!