Brooke and Audrey: Part 2: April 2014

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Random Cuteness

The girls got some manis and pedis before we left Zachary (had to use up a gift certificate!) - they had a ball!

Sending a snow ball back to their friends in LA

I am sure that one day I won't think that they are so cute in all of their winter gear, but as I am Southern through and through, I am not sure when that will be!

Some days I just let them do what ever they want. They wanted to wear dressy clothes and do their makeup. And we actually left the house like this!

We have a dart board in our basement, left by the previous owners. And we LOVE it. For some reason the girls sometimes like to play darts without their clothes....hope they outgrow this by the time they are playing darts in bars!

They had Dr. Seuss week a few weeks ago. This was Wacky Wednesday - backwards clothes and crazy hair

Crazy sock day - the girls thought it was so fun to be matching with the socks but pink and purple shirts. Now that we are out of uniforms, there is a great deal of thought that goes into outfit selection each day. This would usually annoy me, but school starts super late here so there is plenty of time (we don't leave our house until 8:48 each morning!)

And the conclusion of Dr. Seuss week was PJ day.....the day that you realize that your kids PJs are really inappropriate for school and scramble to find something that is OK!

Audrey with her Dad - they are doing some project at school where they needed a picture of just them and the dad. And of course we had none.

And here is Brooke with her Dad picture also for some unknown project

Me and my girls - all wearing our orange stripes.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

St. Patrick's Day

Our second weekend up here was St. Patrick's weekend. And I have learned, belatedly, that it is a pretty big deal up here. Something to do with all the Irish Catholics that settled here :) So next year, we will really do it up right.

This year, we went into the city on Sunday to sightsee and then go to a Blackhawks game. Unfortunately it was FREEZING and super windy. Oh and did I mention that since St. Pat's is a big deal it was super crowded too.

Our first view of the city

We just thought that these signs were so funny.

A family selfie.....really we were just trying to stay warm

We stopped for some goodies at Starbucks

Audrey thought it was hilarious to walk around with her "coffee" and her "broken arm"

In front of the Bean...the girls could not believe it when they realized that we were walking all the way there just to take some pictures of the bean.

The girls were trying to hold the bean but we just couldn't get it lined up right....I blame my frozen fingers!

A family picture in front of the river (dyed green for the weekend!)

We were up in a suite to watch the game....what a great way to watch our first NHL game.

Audrey is straight-up Gangsta! Well a gangsta that wears kitty cat shirts.

At home for St. Patrick's day breakfast. The girls were thrilled that a leprechaun had dyed our milk green.

Monday, April 21, 2014

The move and our first days here

And back in time:

We pulled out from Zachary on Friday March 7 and our movers got here on March 10. Also on March 10, I went and enrolled the girls in their new school but they were not able to start until that Wednesday.

A family selfie on our drive up....as we were stopped for hours on the interstate.

The girls playing out on the interstate. Not sure what Brooke is doing.

This was as we were actually entering Illinois but I did not get a picture of that sign as I was turned around taking a picture the other way! In my defense I had never seen the arch before and it looked super cool!

The girls seeing our new house for the first time. They were super excited to finally get here and see it!

It snowed about 6 inches overnight - the night before the girls were to go to school on that Wednesday. So D and the girls had to get out there and work to clear off the driveway. Fortunately, D went and bought the only snow shovels that he could find that night before it got too bad.

The girls on their first day of school - Audrey wanted to wear this shirt because it would be easy for everyone to know her name! (total aside - this snow pile by the front of our house is in the shade and it did not melt until April!!)

Clearly the girls are southern as they were fascinated by the giant icicles hanging off cars - and they were breaking them off in parking lots!

And back to April in IL...

We moved to IL after what we have been told *repeatedly* was the worst winter EVER! And even though we moved in March, we still have had several snow episodes. But it was RIDICULOUS that it snowed in April. TWICE!

I mean this is on April 15! And again we are probably the only people in the entire state out playing in the snow before school!

Brooke got to bring home the class "pet" Buddy. We wrote in his travel journal and took pictures of him as he spent his days with us. Here he is at Panera Bread.

Here is Buddy eating dinner with us...and here you can see our new kitchen table and if you look closely you can see the new bar stool in the background. (not the offending stool that smashed the cookie's toe)

We have bunnies that come visit our yard pretty much every night around dinnertime. We have seen as many as three in the yard at one time, but not sure how many there are in total as they all look identical. There are two in this picture.

Here are the girls recreating the stuffed animal scene from ET....though they do not know that movie at all as I still remember being traumatized from it.

So that led us to matching up all of the animals into pairs! Though some of them are just friends and not boyfriend/girlfriend :)

Monday, April 14, 2014

It's So Hard to Say Goodbye!!

(Clearly I have not gotten everything up here and have certainly not gotten it in order. I will move the dates around at some point to put it chronologically)

Moving this time was super tough. We liked our house. We liked our neighborhood. We liked the schools and teachers. D liked his job. I liked doing PTO. We liked the small town (though really a Chipotle and a Noodles added into the mix would have made it perfect-o!). We liked our church. We loved our group of friends - both our adult friends and our kids' friends.

Like I said. Super tough.

Here are some pics of some of our goodbyes. Didn't get to get pics of everyone since we moved at the end of the Mardi Gras break so some friends were harder to see!