Celebrate!

Zoey's 1st birthday!!! (A few weeks early...shh, don't tell)






May I just say that it was so delightful to attend Zoey's birthday celebration! We had such a great time visiting with Dalene's family and friends.


Dalene and Zoey. So sweet!

Daddy

Thanks for being such a great daddy! We love you!!!

Happy Father's Day!

The boys are thrilled to have their daddy home for Father's Day. It was difficult to prevent them from storming the master bedroom door this morning. Ryan wanted to sleep in and they just wanted to scream, "Happy Father's Day" at him first thing in the morning...just before 6am. Just to make the day even more exciting, Nathan decided to begin to throw up in the van while I was trapped at a red light. Joy! He seems to feel a little better right now and I'm just glad that he hadn't eaten breakfast yet when he chose to get sick.


While Ryan was still out of town I hosted a Father's Day craft playdate at the house. Each child completed a coloring sheet, made a card with a little help and decorated a "tie" for their dad. Too cute! Nathan LOVES to craft and happily sat for all the activities. Ian needed to be bribed with the promise of more snacks if he finished a project. Typical.


Ian...eating. I had to give him three rounds of snacks in order to convince him to finish all three crafts.


Nathan is modeling the tie that he made for Ryan.

He survived!

The blog is back and open for business again now that Ryan's Navy nonsense is out of the way. He is on his way to the airport as we speak and will be very relieved to be back home where the only people who beat him up are 3 and 4-years-old. Thankfully, Ryan will also be able to take some leave until the end of the month. It's about time! Oh, we are all very grateful that Ryan safely made it through this round of training. If only we could post the details here...

Anyway, I think it has been 2 years since our last mini-vacation so I am looking forward to heading out of town next week. We are going to stay in Washington, DC for a night or two and explore some of the sights. Since it's so hot and the weather is so unpredictable this time of year, I don't want to plan an extended stay in DC for right now. We'll save that for the fall or spring!

Want to hear the most exciting news???? We are going to Pennsylvania! Why is this exciting at all? We get to see Dalene & "little" Melissa and meet their precious baby girls! I'd skip DC all together just to make sure this part of the vacation occurs. Dalene has never met my boys and I most certainly have never met her darling daughter. I cannot wait! We also hope to hit up Sesame Place if the weather is decent during our short visit. Soon the boys will be too old to care about Sesame characters...and Busch Gardens lets us military folk visit for FREE once a year. Score!

I Love My Vacuum

In fact, I might be in love with my new vacuum. A few weeks ago our trusty Kenmore that we purchased with money we received as a wedding gift died on us. I freaked out. I was not in the mood to spend $500 to buy a Dyson, especially since we already own a Roomba.

Our old vacuum was nice enough to give up on us just prior to Memorial Day weekend so I remained hopeful that we'd find some decent sales at Sears. After getting sidetracked by the shiny new grills (our almost new grill was blown over during a storm and is broken), we finally arrived at the vacuums. We walked in without any information hoping that the salespeople would attempt to do their job. Wrong! They were capable of pointing and reading the information on the sales tags, but that was it. Lovely. They want you to drop a few hundred dollars on an item and they can't even help convince you which one will work best for your house.

Taking things back into my own hands, we returned home and I headed over to check out Consumer Reports and the wonderful Sears comments. Have I mentioned how much I love the comments on individual items on the Sears website? They approve every comment, no matter how scathing and I know this from experience! I checked out the various Dyson models and a handful of Kenmore vacuums. After reading the hundreds of comments, I was completely sold on the Kenmore Progressive Upright Vacuum with Inteli-Clean System, Slate Blue. I was especially happy to be paying $219 for this $349 vacuum.

This smart vacuum tells YOU when your carpet is clean. My carpet looks brand new each time I vacuum. I can vacuum my entire staircase while leaving the vacuum at the bottom of the stairs. The gentle feature doesn't suck up the corners of my throw rugs while I vacuum. I love my vacuum!!!

Just had to share. I promise my next post will have pictures of the kids.

Temporarily Private

Sorry I had to make the blog private...it's only for 2 weeks. Ryan is off playing in the woods and we don't want any private information out there that we are able to control. If they are able to figure out my name, all bets are off. With a last name like Saarijarvi, I'm pretty sure they will be able to gather all the intelligence they want!