Philly, DC, NYC

We just had a week long visit from Brittan's family this past week. We loved every minute as we traveled to DC and New York. Here are some of the pics we had taken.

Last day in Philly enjoying Rita's water ice and soft pretzels
Philly art museum

They all wanted to jump in the fountain

Brittan falling in the arms of one of the founding fathers

NYC never stops

Times Square relaxing

Brittan loves her candy and was very excited to see this in the toy store

We loved the MET art museum and here we are on top

Some art in the MET

Walking to find Chinatown took a while

Do you see progress?

Just kissing my dinasours

The Capital Building

Washington monument

Beginning of our trip

Much thanks to the Fanning's for coming to visit with us. By the end of the week we were all exhausted from walking and the go go attitude that we fell asleep (to Seinfeld of course) on our hardwood floor for a Saturday afternoon nap.

Detroit!

Daniel and I drove to detroit this last memorial day weekend. It was a good 10 hour drive, and we couldn't believe that steph and steve made the same drive with 3 boys to be in Philly for only two days, earlier this year (we concluded that they were crazy). I only drove for an hour on the way back from detroit to give dan a break- he drove the other 19 hours! He's a machine. Every once in a while he would ask if I would like to drive (because sometimes sitting in the passengers seat staring at trees for consecutive hours gets boring) so I would say "sure" but then I would say something like "man, i feel like I can't keep my eyes open, maybe I will just let them rest every other 10 seconds to avoid falling asleep while I'm driving." . . . Hence, Daniel driving 95% of the time.

It was a ton of fun hanging out with the boys and steve and steph, they made it easy to forget that there was a life of drudgery awaiting us back in philly (actually philly isn't that bad). Steph made some really good food while we were there, especially her smoothies, salads and pancakes. We played alot of Wii Tanks while we were there, and we are still having withdrawls. Sometimes I will be woken up at night by dan making little missle launching and explosion noises in his sleep. We also went to Greenfield Village, a project of Henry Ford's which is basically a giant indoor/outdoor museum- with tons of historical buildings from the 17th century to present moved from thier original locations to this little 'village' setting. We got to ride on an old steam locamotive and a 1916 Ford Model T. They also had a civil war reenactment going on at the time. So, it was pretty much awesome.

Here are some pictures that we took during our stay, in no particular order:

A view from the steam engine tour of Greenfield village.

Riding the Steam Engine.

Hewitt lovin some sprite.

The confederates about to charge.

Some confederate floosies (according to Dan.)

Tired legs . . .dan wanted a seat too.

Flashing a six pack.

Our favorite 'Donny face'.

Some cool old buildings and what looks to be an alligator swamp.

Some Yankees.

Tanks ubsessee.

Donny was injured in a pool slide fall- but he's a tough cookie

Donny was eating some old halloween candy stuck on the bottom of his bucket (just kidding steph).

More tanks excitment.

Talkin to some old folks.

The best marble tower. ever.

Waiting in line for our sweet model T rides.

Pysanky!!

So for Easter this year we decided to venture from the classic egg dying and try out Pysanky. It is the Ukranian technique for dying eggs. We learned about this from our landlord one evening when we were at his house. He told us where we could get the supplies to try our own and so yesterday we went and got them. The supplies are pretty basic, some intense egg dying colors, a block of bees wax, a small flame and a kistky (the writing tool). We were able to do it as we listened to conference. Here is what we were able to come up with after two sessions of conference...

It is a difficult technique because it is hard to control the wax. The lady at the store told us that if wax falls where we do not want it we have just begun a new design. We started alot of new designs with our eggs. It was fun and we will try to get better by next year.

New york and new art

Here you go Corine- a picture of me and dan for your fridge. If it doesn't print out well due to poor resolution or something just let me know and we will send you one by mail! Also, in person me and dan look much more glamorous.

Me and dan took the 'bolt bus' up to New York yesterday to visit the temple and be tourists for the day. The bolt bus is a great big ol' bus where you can buy a 26$ round trip ticket that will take you directly from philly to the big apple in less than two hours. Which is a really great price compared to just driving your own car if you factor in gas and tolls. So we left early Saturday morning and took the subway from madison square Gardens (where the bolt bus dropped us off) directly to the temple. We had planned to do some touristy stuff after but unfortunately it was monsoon like weather for the east coast yesterday. So we decided to go back to philly and enjoy the evening inside of a warm house. Dan was especially disapointed because before going back he wanted to go to the ESPN zone where there is apparently an amazing sampler platter. We went but they said there was a one hour wait, so suddenly cold cereal back at home sounded very appealing.

Dan has been on Spring break this whole week and has enjoyed his time off, but he says he feels lazy and wants to get back to school. This whole week Dan pretty much spent scrubbing, cleaning, gardening, laundering and I will miss having a maid do all my dirty work and coming home from work every day to a perfectly clean house!

To Dad and Mel: my poor art submissions.

So the first is my attempt at a John Lovett online tutorial, whose mixed media mostly watercolor art work i LOVE. At first i thought "oh, this will be waayyy easy" and before I was done I thought a 5 year old had gotten a hold of my brush. Here is a link to the tutorial in case you would like to try- hopefully you will have better results! http://splashingpaintblog.com/2009/07/29/river-paperbarks-katherine/

The next is just another one of my poster art copies, I'm not done with the boat, sails or water, seagul and actually i'm not really done at all but you can see where I'm going. Maybe I should stay away from the abstract (: I do much better at just copying.

We thought we should post pictures of the amazing snow man we made with the extra snow fall we recieved this morning. (Mostly daniel's work, I just added the eyes, ears, nose and appendages). We are hoping it is close to guiness world record size.

Snow #2

So we are reporting following another snow storm. This time we were given a little bit more time to prepare. For instance we did not park in the middle of our street. As you can see our street gets lots of snow and is not big enough for a snow plow. I am guessing from the last storm that it would be at least a week before we could get out. All we did was park at the end of the street so all we had to do was shovel the car and the short amount of street in front of us. As we were shoveling out the car we would throw the snow onto the sidewalk. After we had just about finished a man came out and started getting angry at us for throwing snow on his sidewalk. So we had to shovel of his sidewalk and place the snow carefully in a pile next to our car. Welcome to Philly where you get fined for not having your sidewalk cleared within six hours after the last snowfall. Later that evening I was shoveling out our neighbor's car. This time we did not throw the snow on the sidewalk because I had learned my lesson that it was a fine. We thought we could just throw it into the street for the snow plow to pick up (side note: He was parked on a larger street wher snow plows can fit, we tried to find a spot but they were all taken). A plolice officer showed up while in the process and yells at us that it is a $300 fine for throwing snow into the street. Welcome to Philly where if it snow's you can get fined for not moving and moving the snow. The lesson learned is to do it all when someone else is not watching. In the end we can now get out of both our house and our parking spot.

This is a picture of Brittan's new "vanity" she got for her birthday. Can you see her enjoyment?