This past weekend my dad, Leslie, Chris, Danielle, Gabby (and her friend Brian), Justin and Kate came to our house for a little family brunch. Some stayed overnight and others were just there for the day, but we had so much fun together.

Breakfast is so much fun with your aunt and uncle.

Uncles are definitely the coolest.

And some rough housing :)

Cassidy being a ham.

We did brunch potluck style, everyone brought a dish to share.

Family time <3

And time spent with good friends.

My dad and Leslie were doing the 21 Day Fix so they very bravely stuck to their food plan while the rest of us pigged out.

Justin giving me the evil eye, I brought up the possibility of trimming his duck dynasty beard at our house. See, he promised Kate he’d shave it on their one year anniversary and that happened to be this weekend :)

Love my brother!

Also this weekend, Gabby surprised Leslie with a late Mother’s Day present. Prim the kitten!

Jack, eyeing up the competition.

Meow.

So cute!

Mother’s Day weekend was beautiful this year. We headed to the Lilac Festival on Saturday with Becky, Jared and Andy’s parents. There were only one or two trees actually with lilacs (a little disappointing) but all the other trees were in bloom and gorgeous.

We’ll just have to make do with cell phone pictures. Sometimes it’s just too much to bring the dslr while wearing cassidy and trying not to lose ben in crowds of people.

It was nice, something a little different, thing to do for Mother’s Day. We had a low key rest of the weekend, Andy made me breakfast and we had some friends over for lunch after church. Then we played outside and watched Star Wars. Low key is good.

Also, I’d posted this on facebook but just wanted to share here too:

Happy Mother’s Day to all my lady friends today…married, single, with children, waiting for children, having lost children (and having lost mothers)…we’ve all been influenced and loved by someone with a mothering spirit.

A SPECIAL happy Mother’s Day to my awesome mommy Shelley who raised me, my step mommy Leslie who joined my life later, my mommy in law Judy who let me marry her son and my church mommy Christine. You are some amazing, strong ladies and I love you <3

Happy Mother’s Day!

We had such a nice Easter Sunday with family this year. Ben found his basket in 0.5 seconds and ripped into it quicker than that.

Justin, Kate, Gabby, my mom, Paul and Andy’s parents came to our house for dinner. We did it potluck style, Andy and I provided the ham and cheesy potatoes and everyone else brought a dish too.

After dinner we visited in the livingroom and somehow all ended up watching Frozen together. Plaid buddies!

Colby even snuggled up on the couch too.

Before Gabby left we sent her home with our old vacuum cleaner. Ok, sounds weird and gross…but hers broke and ours actually still works, we just replaced it with a better one. Yes, that’s family love for you, giving away your old vacuum cleaner.

Can I just say how thankful I am I have Andy as a husband? For many reasons, but specifically this week we’ve been looking at replacing our vacuum cleaner. It’s just the standard $60 model from walmart, we’ve had it since we got married (almost 8 years!) and I feel like it just pushes dirt around these days. So Andy took it upon himself to do research, compare brands and models, find out what we could get at different price ranges. What husband does that? It just really made me thankful, that he knew this was something important to me…and while we’ll decide together what one to get, I didn’t have to take all the time to think about it.

This week Cassidy rolled over from back to front. I didn’t see it but she wasn’t the way I’d left her in her crib ;-) She also started clapping when you say “Yay!” And she’s started waving at you when you say “Hi!” It’s super cute but my goodness, slow down baby girl. Actually I don’t know who taught her to clap and wave, but it wasn’t me. I’m totally enjoying Cassidy as a baby but I feel bad, I forgot about all the cute baby things you can teach them, oops. She still has to learn “so big!” so I’ll get on that :)

We watched Frozen this week, Ben loved it. Andy sat on the couch pretending to sing along to all the songs. It was hilarious, I don’t think he knew it was going to be a musical Disney movie. Ben calls it “the princess movie.”

I’m going to be starting a MOPS (Moms of preschoolers) group with a friend at church. We won’t actually be starting until the fall but the church offered to pay for the membership now because it was half off. Andy calls it the Brooms group (mops is an unfortunate acronym). Actually, our church is going to be moving too. We’re technically subletting from the Victor Park & Rec right now and they’re going to be moving. We can’t afford the $30k a month to rent the building from the owners. I honestly don’t know how the Park & Rec can afford that either. So, if anyone knows of any real estate opportunities in the Victor/Farmington area…

We tapped our maple tree out front again. It’s actually not even the right type of maple (it’s a silver maple) but the syrup we’re getting from it is tasty anyway. Sap is boiling away outside right now (you boil the water out of the sap to get syrup). Yesterday we went to the grand opening of our friends’ new sap shed, they have a 3,000+ maple tree production. It was so fun to see their farm and boiler he’d welded himself. Will post about that in a bit.

Who reads this thing? Besides my parents :) If you have time, please leave a comment on this post with your name and maybe a little bit about yourself and how you know me (if you do). What do you like/dislike about the blog? What would you like to see me write about? I would love to know who’s following!

::crickets chirping::

:)