Yay!  Brad's parents are here!  They arrived this morning for a week-long visit.  Let the party begin!

My poor banished flowers.
I bought these and set them out in the house, and within a half hour, Adam's allergies were going gang-busters and he could barely take a breath.  So, I had to move the offending flowers out to the winter garden.  Sad.

This moment was preceded by a heaping helping of strawberry shortcake.

And that, my friends, is a Sunday Evening at its finest.

Today, Adam and Lukie took advantage of a positively perfect 

sunny Saturday afternoon:

This fountain in our back yard doesn't work - on purpose.  In order for it to "fountain", we'd need a big 6 foot deep pit in the backyard full of water, which is just too dangerous with kids playing back there all the time.  So, the pit is all filled in with sand, and the fountain just fills with rain water.  But, that seems to be fine with Luke.  He comes out here just about every day to float his boats in the fountain.

Today the kids didn't have school (some random German Catholic holiday), so I went against my better judgment and allowed them to have Screens.  They usually are not allowed to have Screens (TV, video games, computer) on weekdays, but since there was no school, I made an exception.

Well, tonight around 6:00, after a full day of the kids lazing around like slugs, I snapped.  The whole house is a mess of dirty dishes and snack wrappers, as evidenced by this shot of the computer room:

Ugh!

So, I flew around like a crazy woman and banned them all from Screens until every room in the house is S&S-ed (spic-and-spanned).  

They didn't love that, so this was their passive-aggressive move:

Since they can't have Screens, they all congregated outside to play some badminton/t-ball/baseball hybrid game rather than buckle down and clean up.  I figure this will last until somebody gets hurt or Jessica gets bored.

These are my Book Club Girls - Denise, Susanne, and Tracy.  

Tonight was our last book club meeting before we break for summer.  We decided to meet at a restaurant and have dinner while we discussed the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which was a nonfiction book about the woman whose cells have been dividing and living on in petri dishes since 1951.   She was a poor, black woman who died from cancer in Virginia, and her family never knew that her cells were in literally every medical research lab in America for over 50 years.  It was a very interesting book, giving voice to her family who had been pushed aside as their mother's cells were used to develop just about every medical advance since the 1950's, including the polio vaccine.