Our Snow day

You will notice that Snow is capitalized.  That is because I refer not to the white fluffy stuff but to my dear cousin Snow who lives a few hours south of us in Austin, Texas.  On Saturday morning she drove up to visit us for the week-end.  Knowing how much the boys love their own cousins I told them that while growing up Snow was my special "best" cousin.  We used to visit each other every summer and to this day there are three things that still remind me of those fun and carefree vacations:  the intro music from the soap opera Days of Our Lives ("Like sands through the hourglass so are the days of our lives..."), Fruity Pebbles cereal (not that our health nut mother's ever let us eat it; but we spent one summer together with our Philadelphia grandparents and rocked the sugar cereal!), and any 80's hair band (Bon Jovi, Guns'N Roses and especially Skid Row).  As we grew up our paths diverged but have surreptitiously crossed again in the great state of Texas.  

The boys are old enough to appreciate the concept of Fresh Blood.  Someone who has not heard the latest knock-knock joke one hundred times, someone who still thinks playing crack-the-egg on the trampoline is a novelty, someone who is not trying to multitask while playing Guitar Hero.  So between playing with the boys and holding Evan we miraculously managed to get caught up in the past five year of each other's lives.  When she left this afternoon both Scott and I felt truly blessed by what we shared.  Once again living apart from family we realize how much visits from loved ones lift our spirits.  I am not sure if I should let this secret out of the bag but Snow is also a top-notch baby sitter.  Scott and I took advantage of her presence to go to the movies on Saturday night - we saw Taken which was the perfect action/thriller type movie.  

Snow and the boys - she's got in all under control!

This week the boys enjoyed fun Valentine's Day parties at school.  I helped out with the craft activities in David's classroom on Friday afternoon.  It was a great chance to get to know some of the moms and dads of his classmates.  David's best friend in the class is a boy named Aaron and boy, I can see that those two combined give their teacher a run for her money - they could not sit still or keep their hands off each other.  Hopefully it was the excess sugar and they are not normally that obnoxious!  Everything is definitely bigger in Texas; the kids actually decorated ginormous sugar cookies with gobs of frosting and sprinkles - Arnold would not have approved!  It was like a clip from a childhood obesity documentary - supersize me anyone?? 

     

Rub-a-dub-dub

Four boys in the tub!