Oma & Opa September Visit

Oma comes to Charlotte!

Happy Birthday, Oma!

Happy girl...fun groovy girls gifts from Oma & Ops

Having lunch with Elise at preschool

Early September

Sunny disposition!

Yum!

Happy Birthday, Ben!

First Day of Preschool 2011-12 School Year

There is one thing that seems to be plentiful in our house these days: drama!! I know other parents of girls can attest to this. Well, on Tuesday Elise was getting ready for her first day of preschool this year & it was FULL of drama. First it was the hair - she didn't want anything in it - just straight. Next, it was the shoes; and finally the straw that broke the camel's back was the name tag sticker her teacher asked the children to wear for the first few days of class. For some reason, Elise hates sticker name tags, arm bands, and anything like it...so it was a battle to convince her that she needed to listen to the teacher and wear the name tag. So - in this series of pictures, you can see that her face progressively gets happier the closer we get to school. Thankfully, she left the car happy & came home happy, too. She brought along a pony with her - it starts cuddled by her neck & then she hides it under her shirt in the next several pictures....silly! I told her I didn't want her to lose it at school, and she could leave the pony in the car, but she doesn't think I know that it's hidden under her shirt the whole time.

Labor Day weekend at Smith Mountain Lake

We had a fun long Labor Day weekend in Virginia at Smith Mountain Lake. Debi, Josh & Jesper flew into D.C & drove down with Paul & Jodi & we drove with mom and dad from Charlotte. My aunt & uncle, Rose & Reese drove from Iowa to join us, too.
Unfortunately, our Jeep started having trouble a few miles into the trip - but thankfully we were still close enough to home to turn around and reload our things into mom and dad's saturn. We were able to get it fixed once we returned home and it wasn't too major a repair.

Road Trip to SML

One of the things we loved about visiting this lake is the center location between Charlotte and D.C - it's a great midway spot. Also, we loved floating in the water & the dock off our rental this year was a bit more challenging to get into the water.

Aunt Rose with Elise and John at the dock

The rental house was great & made up for the easy entrance to the water. There were 5 bedrooms and each bedroom had its own bathroom. There was also a theater room & game room in the basement.

Cooking for a house full!

Babies - and they travel with LOTS of STUFF!

To add a little fun to our meals, I planned our lunch "on a stick." We had corn dogs, grapes on a long toothpick stick, carrot sticks and celery sticks and for dessert, cake pops!

Lunch on a stick

View of the lake

pb&j chillin'

Josh catching some sun

You can see how much the lake is down this summer

Ariana

John and his girls

Reese and Rose

Relaxing

Mom with her grand-babies

A few of the girls

Josh, Debi & Jesper

For my turn to do dinner we had chicken enchilladas and everyone had to draw a "utinsel" they would use during the dinner...here are a few snapshots of them.

Jesper

Enjoying the lake

Brother-husbands & sister-wives

Ratzlaff family picture - we missed you, Curt!