Happy St. Patrick's Day! To those who celebrate. :) We are not this year. I don't have any green jello or anything so we're skipping it. I do realize though that I best get my Easter decorations out soon! We had a wonderful weekend but i don't have much record of it because i forgot my camera! Our computer was down from mid January to the present. Now it's sort of hit and miss so i'm able to get online with the old laptop, or Gary's school laptop when he brings it home. However, I'm not able to upload photo's. Due to this my card was full for a long time and i had no way to empty it and save the photos. Gary did finally put them on his school machine (which means I can still not access them) but i forget the camera b/c I went so long without it! Friday night I had a girls night out with my friend Jen. Her boys have birthday's about a month apart so they did a joint First/Third Birthday party. She had some shopping to do and since her husband is home from the road (actually working near home! What a concept!) he watched their 3 kids while she and I traveled Canton. I had a wonderful time just being away (Gary watched ours) and found some great deals! It was nice for her and I to get to visit as well. Usually when we get together we have 4 or 5 kids running around or on us. :) Saturday morning was the big party at her church's playland. This thing is HUGE. Tyler loves it and Grace wants to be able to do all Tyler can. Gary and I both went up in the monstrosity several times (him more than me) so that we could keep an eye out and let Grace do some things she couldn't do on her own. She loves that slide! The boys were so cute and just loved all the people there to celebrate them, and Jen made the cutest dirt in a dump truck desert. Sinfully delicious too! :) The time went quickly and we'd planned to take the kids swimming after but the playing, noise and stimulation completely wore them out so we came home to take naps and had a fun family day at home. The Bush's got back late in the evening from their cruise and i missed their call! oops!! Sunday we went to church and found out they were doing lunch with Pap so we went with them. I love Alliance Family Restaurant because they have great food and lots of choices but the service is ridiculous. Clearly 98% of their clientele are seniors who have all day to eat. We ran out of there and made our way to the IX Center in Cleveland for the Greatest Hobby Show- TRAINS. It was expensive to get in but SO worth it. Tyler was fascinated. Grace loved it too. They had many many booths set up with model trains and villages etc. Tyler loved every minute of it. They had a section where you could play on the ground with Thomas trains which was a huge hit, as well as a Thomas/Annie/Clarabelle you could ride. They smashed about 14 kids on a ride but the kids enjoyed it! At least I knew Grace could not get out! I was afraid we'd not have time to see everything since we got a late start and it ended at 5 but the 2 and a half hours was perfect. We saw everything twice and got to do some shopping. We got Tyler the train Rheneus and I looked in vain for a Thomas music CD. Our library must have the last one ever made. :) We stopped to eat on the way home and got home in time to play trains a bit before bed. It was so nice to have a family day. I"m glad it all worked out! We told Tyler on Sunday morning (because let's face it- plans change way too often!) and he was very excited. I'm not sure what he expected. :) Yesterday I decided to let the kids get a little more messy than usual and we did pudding finger paint. I did vanilla so we could add food coloring to it after a while and each kid mixed two colors. They loved it. I will say it was very freaky to see them licking their fingers seeing them red/orange and green/blue covered in muck the consistency of real finger paint!Our only other news right now is that we do not have cable!! We figured out that most of the shows we enjoy can be viewed online for free so Gary hooked our computer up to our fancy new tv and when it works we can watch shows online. We also have Netflix which can send us a disc at a time but also allows us to view their "watch now" selections. So far it's only been a couple shows for Tyler but that with the crazy amount of DVD's and VHS's we have makes for more than enough screen time opportunity. :) Time to make lunch and set out some meat to thaw for dinner.