Fun with the Family

Overall, a fun weekend. Friday night we did the shopping for Saturday’s cookout along with a stop at Walmart and Blockbuster. Adam had the afternoon off thanks to the storm knocking out power at his office so he got a good deal of the cleaning taken care of before I even got home. We shut the cats in their room overnight and he mopped the kitchen. We ate ice cream in bed while watching The Bucket List. While I’m not a huge fan of either Jack Nicholson or Morgan Freeman, the movie itself was decent. A little sad, a little uplifting.

Saturday morning Adam cut the lawn (again! Third time this week!) while I cleaned up the kitchen and started getting stuff ready for dinner. I really copped out this time with pre-fab food. I don’t think I made anything aside from the cookies I had baked the previous week. We bought a veggie tray and dip. I don’t think I’d do that again because the tray came with carrots, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower. Well, one for four isn’t bad I guess. I generally go with cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes. Eh. We bought potato salad and broccoli salad from Walmart. Adam’s mom brought fruit salad. Cheryl brought her fabulous cream puffs which were the star of the meal. So in any case, my prep work wasn’t very complicated this time, which was nice.

We headed up to Greenville for brunch with Adam’s family. We got there right at 10 and were the first ones there. We were afraid we were going to be late! Soon after the others arrived and we had a nice meal. We left first, stopping at Menards, Walmart (again – I had forgotten we needed more Sterno gel burners), and Hobby Lobby. Back at home Adam did some work on his models in the basement while I tried to stay awake on the couch. Everyone from breakfast (minus his two sisters and Chris) showed up at our house a little before 3. The TV went on so Craig and Dave could watch golf. His parents and grandma spent their time out on the deck.

My dad and Cheryl arrived at 5, right as Adam was firing up the grill. I got all the other food out and we started dinner. For only having 10 people there, we sure went through a lot of meat. We had originally planned to cook only part of the package of brats since we intended to take the remaining brats camping. Since we are no longer going camping, we cooked them all up. At the end of the day, out of 6 chicken, 12 burgers, and 12 brats we had 2 chicken, 1 burger, and 6 brats left. Impressive. It seemed like everyone had a good time eating and talking. It was the first time Craig had seen our house and the first time Margaret saw it completed.

After dinner, the Paalman/Van Rooy/Hively clan left pretty quickly. Dave wanted to get home so he could watch the Brewer game on his HD TV. My dad and Cheryl stuck around for a while longer after helping clean up the food a bit. After they left I finished the clean up, started the dishwasher, and watched some baseball with Adam. Yeah, they totally lost.

Sunday morning we intended to go to church but when we got up we decided to just stay home. We looked through the paper, ate breakfast, and then headed out to do our regular grocery shopping trip and pick up some oil and a filter so Adam could change his oil. When we got home that’s what he did, in addition to washing and waxing his car. So it should rain today. That’s how it usually goes. I put away all the dishes from the previous day and took care of some laundry. I laid on the couch for a while with JC laying on top of me. Adam came back in from working outside to discover I’d taken his towels and thrown them in the washer so he couldn’t take a shower. Whoops. We spent the afternoon watching racing, I took a mini-nap with JC and Conner on my legs, and we watched the golf tournament. When the DVR started recording two shows, forcing us to watch one or the other (one of its drawbacks), we turned the TV off and migrated to watch in the bedroom. Ultimate Fighting.

So, eventful, nice weather, good times. On tap for this week: Second IMA board meeting on Tuesday, I have vacation on Friday although Adam has opted to go to work for his QBR. Saturday we plan to head to Bloomington and the Mall of America and IKEA. We’ll see what else crops up.