Old Spaghetti Factory

 Eli slurping strands of spaghetti.  He took no prisoners tonight.

 I was trying to get a solo photo of Hanna, fresh off of her Mexican cruise, but someone put their big head in the photo.

And then all of them together.  Sorry for the bad cell phone photos, but I have to capture these moments somehow.

Hanna is closing in on 12 years old

 Hanna turns 12 in a few days, and as a special treat, we asked her to vacuum the living room!  Ok, not really.  But she is a very good housekeeper. 

 Like in past years, we got together with the Buck family to celebrate because cousin Max's birthday is within days of Hanna's.  And all the cousins get together and play stuff.

 Eli can have fun with anyone, anywhere, anytime.  Here, he just finished tormenting one of Max's friends.

 I took six or seven photos where Hanna's eyes were closed.  I just decided to go ahead and use this one.  Hey, nice coat!

 Deanna made sure her eyes were WIDE open for this one!

 Ah, finally a photo of Hanna with her eyes open!  And, I think Max's eyes are open, but it's hard to see with the abundance of hair.

Max had no trouble blowing his candles out.  Hanna tried multiple times.  Maybe they were trick candles?  Happy birthday kids.

100 Bike Parts for 100 Days of School

Eli has a project at school that involves 100 of something.  On Friday, it is the 100th day of school for him, so the project can be anything that represents 100.

It was a pretty easy concept for me to wrap my head around.  Eli is always riffling through my parts and tools while I'm working downstairs, and I'm painfully aware while I clean up after him that there are hundreds of small parts and pieces that I currently have little or no use for.

So here it is.  100 individual bike parts, bolted together in a small work of art.  Eli was so proud of it.  It was very exciting for him to go through the counting process, as well as figuring out ways to put them together.

If you look closely, you can see chainrings, bottom brackets, cranks, chainring bolts, headset top caps, star nuts, brake shoes, brake calipers, cables, suspension remote lockout switches, XTR pedals, XTR skewers, headset spacers....it was actually really fun.

I hope it's at least unique.  It is to us.

Ice Skating with a BFF

Eli is always bored and looking for fun when his older siblings are not around.  Thus, he called his BFF Sydney to go ice skating with us at Webster.

Sydney and Eli were chomping at the bit to get onto the ice.  In the meantime, we watched the Zamboni machine.

With his walker...er...ice walker in hand, eli blasted around the rink.  He was doing quite well.

I was standing next to the glass and this came up.

The beautiful Mrs K was tearing the ice up.  Here she was helping Sydney with her...er...ice walker.

The rink became rather crowded and the ice walkers became quite the rage.  If you didn't keep your eye on your ice walker, it would be gone.

I have no idea what Eli is doing here.  Can you tell he's wearing Tyson's gloves?  We left soon after this because the kids were so darn tired.  Apparently it's hard to skate around with those walkers.