The Last Couple of Weeks

Wow- Drew is 5 months old today.  Where does the time go?  It seems like he was just born a few weeks ago, but at the same time, I hardly remember life without him.  Crazy.  

We're in that busy stretch of summer where it seems like there's always something going on.  Last week we went to Chicago (or the suburbs, really) for the wedding of one of my good college friends, Kurt.  I wasn't ready to leave the kids behind, so we took the in-laws with to do childcare while Mike and I went to the wedding and reception.  It was perfect.  Everyone had a great time.  We loved the children's museum we visited in Glenview on Saturday.  They really need a children's museum here.  We ended the weekend with a stop at the Premium Outlets in Aurora- they have some good shops there!

Here's Zach working hard as a check-out guy at the grocery part of the museum:

Mike and I got dressed up for the wedding:

Then this past weekend we were up in Minneapolis for my sister Sandy's baby shower.  It was a lot of fun to see my mom and my other sister Becky from Denver, as well as other family members and friends that I haven't seen in awhile.  My mom, sisters, and I went and visited my 95 year-old grandpa in his new assisted living home where he moved to in June.  He's doing ok, but he's definitely a different man than he used to be.  He seemed so frail and small, and much more mellow than he used to be.  He was really sweet when he found out Sandy's having a baby soon and he said, "You take good care of that baby in your tummy.  Take good care of her."  We don't know that the baby is a girl, but I guess that's Grandpa's prediction.  It's good we went when we did, because Grandpa seems to have taken a bad turn even in the couple of days since we saw him.

While we were up in MN, Zach had a great time meeting his new friend Henry, who, I guess you could say is his counterpart from my brother-in-law's family.  Henry is my brother-in-law Will's nephew and is about 6 months older than Zach.  The two boys had a lot of fun together and really played pretty well with each other.  One of their favorite activities was, of course, putting laundry down the laundry chute at Aunt Sandy and Uncle Will's house.  Why don't they make laundry chutes in houses anymore?  Zach and Drew also had a lot of fun seeing Aunt Becky, Aunt Sandy, Uncle Will, and Grandma Ruth again.  Of course, on the way home we hit up the Medford Outlets- just Nike, though.  

Here we are after the baby shower giving Clocker Baby (the name Zach has given the unborn baby) a little last love before we all meet him/her in person in a few weeks:

This upcoming weekend we're off to the great Mississippi with some college friends.  No kids this time.  This will be my first time away from Drew overnight, and I'm a little nervous about how he and I will do.  I'm sure we'll be fine, but he just still seems so young to leave.  Hopefully we can drive past the Williamsburg Outlets without being tempted to stop.  Three outlet stops in 3 weeks is just ridiculous!

On a totally different note, today we picked up the CD of songs from Vacation Bible School.  If I ever was worried about if Zach liked it or not, I'm not worried now.  The second we put the CD in, Zach started singing along and knew a lot of the words.  I was pretty impressed.  His favorites are the song about Samson & Delilah- "My muscles, my hair, Delilah's over there!  I don't want to cut my hair!" and the one about Joseph and his coat of many colors.  I'm amazed at what a 3 year-old can learn and remember!  From his singing and dancing to the music today, it's pretty apparent he had a blast at VBS.  He even was telling the FedEx guy who delivered a package to us all about it.  I'll give the FedEx guy credit, too- he was a good sport.  Don't you appreciate it when strangers just humor your kid?  I sure do.