A Birthday and Nostalgia

I stayed over night in St. Helens with the four kiddos on Monday and managed to pack a fair amount of nostalgia into a day and a half! We stayed over to get to do Logan's 6th Birthday Party with my family.

This is the R2D2 cake that Aunt Pam and I stayed up way too late working on. It was fun getting to make the cake with Pam. It was also fun that she did all the dishes! Oh, and that she let me invade her house to host a Birthday party...

She let the kiddos play with the left over frosting tubes. Leeann mostly just put hers in her mouth. Can you tell which color she got?

We have a new crop of kids that have recently blessed our family. This is a picture of each of them with their mommy's.

And one with their daddy's.

This is Leeann in hog heaven surrounded by all those babies. She still says she wants 10!

Thanks to the wonders of facebook I got to catch up with a really old friend while I was in St. Helens. Serah was my best friend from 1st-3rd grade before she moved away. She's staying with her grandparents this summer and we got to spend a few hours together. It was a great blast from the past!

This is a picture of the kiddos walking through the garden with Serah. They have 26 beautiful acres full of wonderfully imaginative places. The kids had a ton of fun! I now want a place with some land... and a gardener to take care of it :0)

Leeann plucked several plums off of the tree for her tasty pleasure.

All was well and good until she started to break out in hives everywhere the plum juice had touched. Add that to her growing list of allergies.

Titus also enjoyed the yummy goodness. He didn't care for the green beans fresh off of the vine nearly as much!

Rank this among the coolest places to sit. It was a little swing beneath the grape vines.

And, this is one of the reasons I haven't been posting much lately. This is our kitchen. Or rather, was our kitchen a few days ago. It's not completely finished, but it looks much better now. There's still a fine layer of white dust on everything in our kitchen, and a few spots that need paint touch-ups.

The people who last painted the cabinets used latex on top of oil based paint, so the paint was peeling terribly. We had to sand everything. Needless to say it's been a pain and time consuming. I feel like Rob and I have been two ships passing in the night for the last month now (between VBS prep, VBS, repainting the cabinets and the kids and I leaving out of town twice). I'm anxious to get these cabinets finished and the clean up finished!

Did I mention we recently put our condo on the market? We haven't had any lookers yet, which is good considering that our house is currently in shambles. It's hard enough to keep it relatively clean with all four kids, let alone show worthy among a fairly significant remodel project. Minor details!