Wabbit Season!

Some days life in the 'sticks' is just way too exciting for me! This evening, as I was fixing dinner, Karl comes running in asking me if I "had a second"......"SURE", I thought......"dinner will just magically appear on the table.....I don't have to stand here and actually COOK it!" (sense any sarcasm there? nah!). I told him (nicely) that I was busy. He informs me that there's a rabbit caught in our fence and that I needed to help him free it. Why?, I'm thinking......is a 5 lb. rabbit too much for him to handle? :) I declined again and went back to dinner. I was hungry...priorities ya know!

A few minutes later, Alaina is banging on the sliding glass door yelling at me to get the camera and take a picture of daddy and "the bunny". Now THAT I will take a break to do. I went out on the deck to see Karl proudly holding the most freaked-out rabbit I think I've ever seen (aside from a few I hit driving my car in the country as a teenager, but let's not reminisce, m'kay?). So here's Karl and his "prize"

Wait a second! Those are MY GARDENING GLOVES! HEY!!! He better be washing those! so that was enough excitement for one evening, don't ya think?

Sunday, while we were in Fairfield, my mom was in charge of the church service and it was all music....woohoo, I said. I volunteered Alaina for her first solo, and she was scared to death:
She sang "this little light of mine" with the veggie tales soundtrack, and aside from mixing up the order of the verses, did very well. I was very proud of her! She's got a really good voice (nope, not a bit biased!)..she sings way better than I did at that age. Need to look into some vocal lessons this fall I think. Oh, and check out that dress.....the "formerly-stained-with-ravioli" one. God bless the bleach pen!

Monday night was Alaina's brownie troop outing to see High School Musical Live at the Muny in St. Louis. I'm telling ya, we need to do one of those "staycations"....'cuz there's just a whole lot of amazing places in this city that we've never seen.......how beautiful is this:

We'd never been to the Muny, and were definitely impressed. It's a beautiful outdoor theatre. We had a great time at the show. The girls got loaded up with all kinds of junk food, then sang their little lungs out along with the show. Alaina got so loud that more than once I was covering her mouth to quiet her...sheesh! But the girls had an absolute blast......DUH, it WAS HSM! And even as we were leaving, Alaina was singing on the way back to the car....we need a casting call for the Disney Channel for this girl, like right now! We got home really late, but it was so worth it to see Alaina and her friends have so much fun!

And yes, I DID get yelled at for taking these pictures. In my defense, the tickets didn't say anything about taking pictures, only "video". The program said no FLASH photography. The announcement before the show said no photographing the SHOW because of some blah blah blah contract with the actors. So I figured I was TECHNICALLY okay taking the pictures I took. I only took this one picture of the SET....and pictures of the kids in their seats. The usher informed me that you couldn't take ANY pictures INSIDE the theatre. A little clarification on the policy please! Help me out Sarah! Do I have a case? :P But anyways, at the curtain call, when I saw 500 flashes go off behind me, I said, "phooey" (you're right, those were NOT my exact words!), and to heck with their "policy"....

I figured they couldn't catch me in that mob of people! So we had fun, legalities aside! And of course I've already scrapped the event:

And yes, I scanned our program and one of our tickets for the layout. That way, when Karl says, "WHY are we keeping this?", in regards to 5 Playbills and 5 tickets, I can let him throw them away knowing it's preserved on a scrapbook page at least. Hooray for my scanner!

Race for the Cure!

This morning, Alaina and I walked in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in downtown St. Louis. It was amazing! Such an awesome experience! I'm SO glad I decided to participate. We got down there super-early (around 7) so we'd be sure to get a parking space close to the race site itself. Then we explored the booths that were set up all along the streets by local businesses and restaurants. We didn't eat any food (shocking, I know!), but did manage to snag some freebies from some of the other booths. It was PACKED full of people!

At 7:25ish, they had the survivors walk, and I cried like a baby watching all those pink shirts walk by. To see that many survivors of breast cancer walking together was very moving. Plus, I'm a great big sap that cries at just about anything anyways. :) After watching that, we had to head over to our designated meeting spot for the Team Boeing picture. And we had WAY more people show up than I thought we had walking. I was super impressed.....can you find me and Alaina in the group photo? Of course you can't! :P But just our group presence there was a donation of thousands of dollars because Boeing donated $100 for every employee that walked! Go Team Boeing!

After pictures, everybody scattered. Some people were doing the run, some were doing the 5K, but we were just doing the 1K. We ended up joining in on the 5K I think, just because nobody seemed to know where we were supposed to really be for the start of the 1K. So we walked along with a huge mass of humanity:

And then ducked out about halfway through when Alaina started saying she was tired and thirsty. I was thirsty too, and it was getting hotter by the second. So we bailed out. Oh well...we weren't the only ones! But we saw lots of strollers and wagons there, so next year we'll know we can take Matthew and Zach with us instead of leaving them with Nanny and PawPaw!

So it was a super-great experience for me to be a part of. Seeing 70,000 people gathered to raise awareness and funds to try and find a cure for breast cancer is a really humbling thing.

Alaina and I wore tags on our backs with my aunt's name, saying we were walking in memory of her. It was very moving to see who all people were walking for: wives, in-laws, mothers, sisters, friends.......so many people have been affected by this disease....we need to find a cure! So thank you to everybody that donated to my walk, I really appreciate it.

10 Years+brownie camping!

Friday was our 10 year wedding anniversary. Wow. That makes me feel REALLY old to say that! We spent the day emailing each other back and forth reminiscing about all the little things that went wrong on our wedding day....NOW we can laugh. On THAT day, however...I wasn't amused when the DJ introduced us as Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Herman! (stupid DJ!) But aside from all the little things that happened, here we are, 10 years later, with 3 kids, just as happy as we were then...if not more so. And since our trip next month is our present to each other, we didn't have any real "special" plans for celebrating the actual day of our anniversary, nor did we get each other any gifts....but we figured we should do SOMETHING to commemorate the actual day....so we got tickets to the ballgame, a sitter (thank you uncle Dean and auntie Stacy!) to spend the night, and a hotel room downtown in St. Louis. So off we went for a night out. Why is it that nobody can operate my camera? This shot took 3 attempts.

After watching what everyone in our section deemed the WORST GAME EVER of Cardinal baseball (seriously, I've never been so disappointed in my beloved redbirds! I refuse to even write the score....you can look it up. The highlight was my nachos. And seeing LaRussa get ejected for arguing...always entertaining!), we took a carriage ride around the downtown area. We would've liked to have gone down to the riverfront, but it happens to be flooded at present, so that wasn't an option. We still had a great time.....the weather was perfect for a relaxing ride around the city. We learned a lot of history from our driver, and saw parts of St. Louis's downtown we'd actually never seen before (and I got that cool shot you see above of the courthouse and the arch.....not bad considering the horse didn't want to stand still for me to take that and I had to stand up in the carriage to do it!). After the carriage ride, it was getting pretty late, so we went back to our hotel and to bed. We actually had to be up fairly early in the morning so we could get back home in time for this:

T-ball pictures! I got yelled at mightily by the photographer's staff for taking this shot. I told her to stick it, that I'd given her PLENTY of money to purchase photographs already, and if I wanted to take snapshots of the process, I could and I would. BLAH! But don't they look cute? Go Bulldogs! And yes, somehow Karl ended up as an assistant coach....you show up for practice and you end up wearing a hat and being a coach! He loves it though...it's something he and Matthew get to share together. After pictures, we headed back into town to get Zach's "summer haircut"...meaning Karl was sick of the "precious moments" hairdo I've been having him sport because it's the only way I can keep him looking somewhat like a baby! Zach HATES the barber too, so that's another reason I've been avoiding it....I hate hearing him cry! But I finally relented into getting his hair cut shorter...not buzzed off like Matthew's, but it's close! Not a baby anymore!

Poor Zach, he was SOOO not happy! Then after the haircut, we headed home to pack for our wild night of camping, which of course was a mini-adventure.....3 kids, 1 tent....what do you expect? Everyone knows I'm not that fond of camping...I know some people love it and go like every weekend, but to me, it just seems like way too much WORK.....getting the bedding/food/tent/etc and then dragging it all somewhere......I'm like, 'Where's the Hilton and the nearest Denny's?" Thankfully, since this was the troop's first "campout", it was in one of the girl's backyard.....which was a selling point to me, because indoor plumbing access is deal-breaker for me. I have my limits. I refuse to rough-it THAT much!

The first bit of fun was said tent itself (the blue one on the left). It was brand new, bought specifically for this campout, 'cuz the instant we heard about the brownie troop doing this campout, Karl insisted on a new tent....as if he needs a reason to run to Cabella's? It took like 6 of us to get this monster of a tent put up. And it never ceases to amaze me that even though everybody that knows us knows I have somewhat of a "mechanical sense".......they still won't listen to me when it comes to stuff like this (uhm, especially MEN). So I just let them mess it up then told them they did it wrong once they were done and how to fix it. Fun for me anyways!

The girls did some fishing, played in a sprinkler (it was pretty hot out in the sun....no A/C...another thing I don't like about camping!), then just chased each other around giggling like 7-year-old girls do! And of course there were smores later on! DUH! That was my only reason for going.......ahhh.....I love smores!

The girls ended up in a tent together.....I ended up making Alaina get out of said tent and into another one around 11:30PM 'cuz they wouldn't stop giggling....which was keeping Zach awake...which was keeping ME awake.....which wasn't making me happy! So needless to say, it was a sleepless night out in the wild. Oh, and there was a little too much excitement over some distant coyote howling.....ah, the drama! Once everybody finally went to sleep, all was well....around 2AM! Zach woke up at first light though (uhm, 6AM?), so it was a short night and I was ready to pack up and head back to civilization (5 miles down the road!) So a fun campout.....I'm never going to love camping....and camping with a toddler just ain't all it's cracked up to be. But I'm sure we'll be doing it again....when Zach's a little older!

Alaina and her fellow brownies had a good time though, even if anti-camping mommy didn't!!

Rainy Seattle and Tball games!

Just returned from spending almost the entire week in Seattle...on business of course. BLAH! I tried to have as much fun as possible, you know me!!....here's the view of the Rockies from my seat on the plane....not too shabby!

And while we were out there....we had nonstop meetings for 2 days. The gnome took notes for me since I didn't feel like it:

Then on the last night, a bunch of guys from our team and myself (the only female...I'm an engineer, remember? I'm always the only female in the group!) went to a Moroccan restaurant for dinner. I'd never had moroccan food before (excluding Epcot...which I don't think counts really), but thought it'd be fun. One of my favorite teammates from southern California, Mike, sat next to me and was a blast to have dinner with....although he didn't quite get the whole self-portrait-with-the-camera thing.......as you can see here:

But after seeing how stupid he looked, he insisted on redeeming himself....so here's the better version:

And if you're ever curious as to what an entire bottle of wine on an expense account looks like....this is it: (hehehehehehehe!)

So that was my week in Seattle....it rained (shocker!), but I was stuck inside at meetings anyways. Had some good food with the coworkers, learned a lot about what I'm suppposed to be doing at the job......and got to see teammates I don't see very often (since we're scattered all over the country!)

And while I was gone.....I missed out on lots of fun with the kids...apparently there was a lot of ice cream involved...which is what happens when Daddy is left in charge! The kids had fun.....but missed me I'm sure! :) Worst of all, I missed Matthew's first t-ball game. I was VERY bummed out about that....but Karl was super-dad...not only did he video the entire thing for me to watch later, but he took pictures as well.......AND kept on track of Zach. SuperDad indeed!

How cute is this?