Hi Ho, Hi Ho... It's off to SCHOOL we go!

After a looooong two week vacation Grace finally headed back to school today. I can't say I've ever been so excited to get back into the "routine" of life. These last two weeks have been crazy, tiring, stressful, expensive... but also fun.

It's amazing without electricity (2 days) and internet and TV (almost a week) what you do for entertainment. We enjoyed cut-throat Connect 4 tournaments, laid on the couch and played the Howren version of "Simon Says"(Simon says "don't smell like a poopy diaper...oops Daddy lost!"), watched Kev dance a victory dance after beating us at Blockus, read a few Blaze books, drove two hours just to get some good pizza (guess who's idea that was???), watched out the window and felt like Santa was coming when trash pickup finally came (you can imagine with everyone's cleaned out food what our street smelled like), redirected Kev when we would find him walking around aimlessly in circles muttering "freaking Comcast... I hate them..." (I cleaned that up a bit for your reading), answered the question, "when's Finn going to bed?" a million times, visited with friends and neighbors, pooled our limited resources together to try to make a decent meal... and all around just enjoyed each other (well, most of the time!).

So, hopefully life is getting back to normal... whatever that is. Finn is scheduled to go back next week. I'm sure you can imagine his excitement over that. Once again we're thankful we were spared any major damage... we're thankful for the extra family time this gave us... and we're thankful SCHOOL'S BACK!!!

Here's a picture of Grace and her "sad school" face this morning. I think this had to do with us "cruelly" waking her up at 6:30. She got rather used to sleeping until 9:30 over the last couple weeks. The good news is when I picked her up she was bubbling over with how great it was to see her friends - and exciting stories of who had trees in their houses!