We took the kids to the Renaissance Fair today:

Also, a couple of weekends ago, Dave took the kids fishing and they caught an actual fish!  Exciting.

I know I haven't updated in forevs, and this is not what you come here for, but I am in love with bubbletweet: http://bbltwt.com/bxz2z

Arright, and since anyone who reads this is only here for the Adam, here is some awesome Adam for ya:

I am pleased!
Before:


After:


Amazing!  Done in just one day, too.  If anyone is looking for a landscaper in the Baltimore area, I can recommend one!

Here it is, half-eaten.  You can see that the inside is the important part.  As my dad observed, the cake is just the vehicle for the icing.

Seen with mom's homemade oatmeal cream pies.  It was a Little Debbie's evening.  Don't you wish you were in my family?  We will all die of obesity-related issues, but we will have smiles on our faces.

Inspired by http://www.instructables.com/id/Hostess-Cupcake-cake/
I think this is my life's greatest achievement.

Yesterday was amazing.  We threw a big surprise going-away party for Steve and Jocelyn, who are moving to Yonkers in a couple of months so that Steve can attend St. Valdimir's Seminary.  Because I'm lazy, I'm going to cut & paste an email I sent to my brother that sums it all up:

It was perfect.  A lot of people were there and they were really surprised.  Once they got over their initial shock, Nick Ashworth performed "How to be a Millionaire and Never pay Taxes."  After that, we sang "Hey Jo," the Hey Jude parody, during which various surprise guests walked out, each time shocking them more and more.  It was so exciting to see the looks of shock on their faces, again and again.  When the song ended with the "Na na na na, hey Jo!" The whole room was clapping and singing, it was wonderful.

Steve & Jo greeted people for just a couple of minutes and then I took the microphone and said that there was one more message from a guest who couldn't make it & played your bit.  You got a lot of laughs, especially from Steve.  Of course Dad was all confused and kept saying he didn't get it.  And Jeannie McKee kept saying how wonderful it was to hear your voice, etc. 

After that, we all ate a lot and socialized and had a really nice time.  The Barkley girls babysat, and the little kids watched movies, and there was lots of sugary cereal for Steve to eat, which kept the little kids happy, too.

It's funny - Steve and Jocelyn were so surprised when they first walked in, that after everyone yelled "surprise!" They just stood there looking confused and I had to walk over to them and say "This is your going away party!"  But later on, they regained their composure and each gave moving speeches about how grateful they were.  Also Ruthie screeched a lot.

End quote. :-)
And here is a picture, stolen from Lauren Cooper's Facebook page, of Jocelyn keeling over with shock, during the song:

Adam is a fan of marzipan, both the cartoon character and the confection.  Last night, his wonderful grandmom Mamou brought him some marzipan ice cream, which he and his siblings shared, eating it out of cones on the front porch in the fading light.



You can see Michael's green cone there.  As the youngest, he was denied access to the last of the chocolate cones and had to settle for whatever flavor green is.  He doesn't seem to mind.

This was right after one of Hannah's softball games.  Here she is playing shortstop:



Hannah is the one with the long pink sleeves. 

Shortly after the kids finished their ice cream, their other grandmom came over and gave them a bag of skittles.  What a night!

Jocelyn helped me pick out new rugs at Ikea today.  A blue area rug and a funky runner, both for the living room.  The area rug looks really great:

The runner is a little smaller than I would have liked, but it looks nice:

(This is the view when you first walk into my house.  If you are looking at the floor.  Which you should be, since this runner is adorbz.)
Thanks so much to Jocelyn!

Mikey had a happy and exhausting Pascha.

We had to have Indy shaved.  It's apparently pretty common for goldendoodles to need a full-body shave during their adolesence, when the new adult hair is coming in and the puppy hair is growing out.  The two hair types meet in the middle and form impossible mats that Dave and I were spending literal hours working on, to no avail. 

So here are before and after pictures of our sweet guy.  The difference is unbelievable!  And sad.  I can't wait for him to be fluffy again someday!

(This is a post that I wrote on Monday but didn't get around to posting until today.  Mea Cupla.)

Our family is mixed, religion-wise.  On my side, we celebrate Pascha, the Eastern Orthodox version of Easter, which is next Sunday.  Dave's side of the family is Catholic, and we celebrated Easter yesterday with them.  We had a wonderful day, but before I post the pictures, I have to say for all posterity that yesterday was the first day my boys have ever behaved well enough in a Catholic mass that they made it all the way through without our having to retreat to the cry room.  Between that and the recent development of Adam staying dry all night, we are very happy with our big boys! 

And now, on with the show.  I have recently been contemplating purchasing a new camera, as our cheapo point & click (Nikon Coolpix L10) was taking unbearably blurry pictures with a maddening delay between my pushing the button and the actual picture being taken, which resulted in lots of blurs where children once were.  But yesterday I discovered a setting on the camera called "sport" which solved my problems, and saved us having to invest in a pricey camera.  (Which would have been fun to buy.  Maybe another time!)

I say this to alert you:  The indoor pictures were taken before I discovered "sport" setting, and the outdoor pictures were taken after I discovered it.  Okay, NOW on with the show!

Mikey before:


Mikey after:

My brother Steve is an audiophile.  His appreciation for music of all types is open-hearted and unbiased, and he loves music in the way that only those who have taken the time to become truly fluent in it are able.  So from the point of view of someone like me, someone who doesn't speak the language at all, he may look like a music snob. 

But he's not a music snob any more than I'm a food snob for preferring Godiva over M&Ms.  (Oh yes, I do speak the language of chocolate!)

And if you know anyone like this, I would highly recommend giving them full access to your itunes.  Steve has been gernerous in sharing music with me, and fairly patient with how relatively slow I am to digest it.  Since I do not speak the language, it takes me a long time to trudge through a first listening of something that takes real attention; it is easier to just let the noise of Kelly Clarkson or Britney Spears sit in the background.  But once I have taken the time to pay attention to the music Steve puts on my computer, I am always glad.

Sometimes I am more than glad.  Sometimes I wonder how I ever lived without the soundtrack I'm listening to while making dinner, or running, or drving the kids around.

So in honor of Steve and all the music he fills my life with - that is to say, in honor of Steve and the way he makes my life more rich than it would otherwise be, here are 10 albums that I wouldn't know about or own without Steve, and can't live without now:

1) Tally Hall - Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum 



3) Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs/Armchair Apocrypha (...couldn't decide between these two.  I honestly don't know how I ever lived without either one.)


4) Imogen Heap - Speak for Yourself 


5) Feist - Let it Die


6) Girl Talk - Night Ripper


7) Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress (...thanks to Steve, there are 3 B&S albums on my ipod.  But this is my fave.)


8) The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots


9) Dr. Dog - We All Belong



10) The Arcade Fire - Funeral
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Honorable mention: artists that I have heard of but would not be listening to, were it not for Steve:
David Byrne, Paul Simon (that is, current Paul Simon stuff), The Beatles (as in, the entire Beatles catalogue is on my ipod, tanks to Steve.), Bjork, Beck, The Beach Boys, Nick Drake, Tom Waits.  Oh, and the entire TMBG catalogue - thanks so much for that, Steve!

Lessons I hope you learned here today:
1) Please, if you are not already familliar with the above 10 albums, aquire them by any means possible.
2) If you are lucky enough to have a friend who is a generous audiophile, do yourself a favor and let them have their way with your itunes.

Last month, we took Indy to a "Doodle Romp" sponsored by Annapolis Area Doodles.  Many doodle owners meet at a dog park, and it's a great time for all.

This is what a Doodle Romp looks like:


Here are a couple of pictures that I stole were posted on the website that feature Indy & us:

That's me in the blue jacket and Mike mid-fall beside me.  Indy is the dog on the far left - the golden colored one with his tail straight up in the air.  Boy, he was so happy that day! 


And there's Dave (on the other side of the fence) saying hi to our gorgeous, golden Indy. 
Most of the goldendoodles/labradoodles were white, and a few were black or chocolate colored.  But very few were golden like our Indy.  He's a pretty boy!

Last Sunday was my birthday, and to celebrate, Hannah and I went out to tea.  We went to Tea on the Tiber, a sweet Victorian tea room in Ellicott City.  They seated us outside, and though the day was a little overcast, it was a lovely place to sit on a Sunday afternoon.

I am not normally one to take pictures of my food, but looking back now, I wish I had.  We were served food with a sweetly Irish theme, in honor of St. Partrick's Day, including tiny corned beef and cabbage sandwiches with the crusts removed.  Hannah enjoyed the opportunity to quote Brian Regan.  (I SO wish I could find a link to a clip of his bit about "corned beef and cabbage!")

Tea on the Tiber is a very literal name.  The restaurant sits right on a small river named the Tiber, and the balcony we were sitting on extended over the river.  The stone building behind Hannah is on the other side of the petite Tiber River. 

After enjoying her cinnamon apple tea, Hannah got a little silly:

....so silly, in fact, that at one point, she accidentally knocked her spoon into the river below.  Ooops. 
All in all, a really nice time.

And before I go, I want to leave  you with my very favorite photoshopped image on the internet, courtesy of Worth1000:

I started a twitter account for Mike, who may be too young to type, but who is always updating his status, nonetheless. 

Mike is SUCH a talkative kid, and he especially loves to keep everyone posted on what he's doing at any given moment.  For example, he'll alert me when he's about to drink some water, and then he'll update me when he has finished drinking said water.  If he's about to sit in a chair, he'll make sure everyone in the house knows, and when he leaves the chair, he makes sure we are all abreast of the events. 

Dave and I have joked that he was born to twitter (I am resisting using the verb "tweet.") And in what may have been a lapse of sanity last night, I created an account for him.  

I'm not doing this so much to be overly twee (is that redundant?  Is twee always overly done?) but rather because it can be exhausting fielding all of these updates from Mikey in real life, and I hope that by sharing them with all of you, I am able to keep my patience with my very, very talkative guy!

So, if you have a twitter account, please follow Mike: @MikeyParker06

Last Thursday, I took the kids out of school to attend Autism Thursday in Annapolis, where we attended a rally. 

It was touching to see so many people fighting for a very important cause, and we met some very interesting and inspiring people.  I hope the bills pass!

The other pictures I want to share are pics I took today of Michael.  He and I spent the day at the mall - not something we do very often, and we had fun.  Michael got to ride the carousel, and play in the play area:


He had to come back to tell me all about all the playing he was doing ... that kid, talk talk talk!  I don't know where he gets it from!

Even while he was playing, he had to keep explaining, giving me the play-by-play.  Here, he's saying, "gonna slide!  Having fun!"


We stopped by the pet store and saw some interesting turtles, too. 


All in all, a good day!