Practice run

We are experiencing sort of a beginning practice run for deployment.  Russ is in Alabama.  He's doing a preview and rating of a class that the Intel community is trying to start up.  As usual we carry on our routines as much as possible.  We did have our first major spring thunderstorms move through last night.  Even had a tornado watch!  I don't know how other areas fared, but we got some winds that weren't too bad, a good bit of lightning that wasn't too close, and a nice amount of rain.  So for us it was quite pleasant!  The younger two kids just slept right through it all!  I do notice that for at least the first week he is off anywhere I do have a serious lack of motivation to do any cooking.  Guess it was a good thing we had a fair amount of leftovers!  Lex having a job makes things a little different this time too, as does her having a boyfriend in Abilene.  It's boyfriend's birthday today so she baked some goodies and drove up to spend the day with him and take him out to lunch.  These kids do grow up mighty fast! 
One of our neighbors has a horse that he doesn't have much time to work with.  Mykhal has been gaining lots of confidence in riding and working with horses. So he has volunteered to work with the horse free of charge just for experience and some fun.  The neighbor agreed since he would love for his very young sons to be able to enjoy the horse.  So everybody wins with this! 
Kerrie is greatly enjoying her dance class and doing very well.  Her teacher is most impressed!  She has recital coming up at the end of next month.  I volunteered to make the hairbows for a couple of the classes.  It's a quick and easy project and the teacher is VERY kindly compensating us with no tuition for next month!  WOW what a deal! 
Really looking forward to a mother's day weekend trip to Scarborough Faire in Waxahachie too!  More market research time for us!  And good fun too.  Lex will be working though.  She doesn't seem upset about missing our fun.....our fun is not her fun she says.  Oh well!  The other kids enjoy it.

Concert

What a great concert!  There wasn't near the turn out I had expected, but then I had the big city concert mindset where you have to spend the night in line just to be sure you get a seat even with tickets!  It was still a good turn out and we got to see 3 bands!  The Museum, Chasen, and Kutless all played and it was AWESOME!!!!  I can't say I enjoyed every single song, but with my earplugs in I enjoyed 99.9% of it!  We saw folks of EVERY age there it seemed!  So fun!!!  The average age of the audience though was about junior high level and since they are all afraid of what someone might think or say about them, the crowd was VERY tame!  Kerrie spent a good portion of the concert right up next to the stage and even got a High Five from Chasen!  Such fun!!  After the concert we got autographs from all three groups on their cd covers.  Pretty cool too!  On the way home we stopped at sonic for chocolate shakes....a rare treat!  This after getting to go to Subway for dinner before the concert!  The whole evening was wonderful and there's a GREAT line up of concerts for this summer!  So we may do it again! 

Escape

So on Wednesday night Russ and I decide that we need a night away and since he's going to be in training for a couple weeks starting next weekend and come May we will probably have more kiddos.....well we figured we'd better have our night out THIS weekend!  So I promptly got online and made reservations for us at at the local Fairfield Inn and made of list of things to get for our in-room picnic.  Having thoroughly enjoyed last year's gourmet cheese, sausage, cracker and cookie picnic I decided on a repeat for this year!  Russ and I had a lovely evening sharing champagne, strawberries, cheese and other goodies combined with relaxing music and time ALONE!  The last time we did this was about 3 years ago!  But without the picnic.  Last year was the picnic without the overnight escape.  Of course, since our life is NEVER dull.......

The fire alarms went off this morning just as Russ and I had finished packing up and were ready to check out!  Hadn't made it downstairs yet though.  So we grabbed all our stuff and trooped out, loaded our stuff in the van and watched the show!  Turns out the hotel had a new dryer installed a couple weeks ago and it just burst into flames!  Lovely!  Going to take them weeks to get that smell out of there!  

The rest of the day was wonderful as we did some shopping and then headed home to spend the afternoon and dinner with Lex's boyfriend and his family.  Delightful folks they are!!  

Tomorrow evening we are off the to the Kutless concert!!  Really looking forward to that!!  Then Monday we will go get our produce from our friends who so kindly picked it up and stored it for us over the weekend.....sorry, but I wasn't giving up Date time with Russ if I could possibly help it!  And I REALLY don't mind going out to our friend's house to get our order....of course if it does rain tomorrow there could be issues with her road.....cross that bridge later.  Blessings!