To celebrate our first Wednesday home together in weeks, I decided to make a special breakfast. I'd seen the recipe for apple pancakes on Pinterest a few times and decided to give it a shot. It was delicious and super easy! All I had to do was cut and peel some apples in my apple peeler/slicer and then dip the apple rings into some Bisquick batter. Then I just fried them like you would with any pancake other than I set the temperature a little lower to let the apples cook enough to soften. I also made a cinnamon/sugar mixture and sprinkled some on top of the uncooked pancakes to sweeten them up a bit. They were so so good! The boys and I all loved them and we will definitely make them again!
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| Apple Pancakes |
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| Asher "helping" me cut up apples. |
After breakfast, we enjoyed the summer air outdoors in our backyard and then we headed to Pets Park to meet some friends.
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| "You need to wear your helmet when you ride your bike Avery. I don't want you to fall." #lookingoutforbabybro |
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| Asher and Elias |
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| Crazy Monkey insists on climbing everything. |
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| A walk with friends in the woods to take a break from the sunshine. |
After our fun at the park with Allison, Elias and Etta, the boys and I headed to Pizza Hut for their summer lunch special. I had been told on the phone that it was $4.99 per adult and $1.99 per kid. Since the boys love pizza I thought this would be a fun lunch for us, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
The place was completely packed and had only four people working there. I stood and waited by the "please wait to be seated" sign for several minutes until a guy finally told me we could sit at the booth in the corner. We sat down and then waited some more. No one came to bring us drinks or silverware or anything! Eventually I grabbed the same guy and asked if we could get food at the buffet. He gave me the green light so I grabbed some food for my hungry little guys. Asher wanted salad though and it was then that we realized we still had no silverware. Again, I got up and waited several minutes at the counter so that I could ask if someone could bring us silverware and some waters. The boys and I ate up our lunch and again no one came to bring us a bill or to check in on us. I'm pretty sure I could have gone in, ate and left and no one would have noticed. In the end it worked out ok though as the guy at the check-out said that children 3 and under are free and he counted Asher as age 3 (even though I told him he was 4). So, although the service was terrible, the boys and I ate about 10 plates worth of food for a grand total of $6.28 (I gave a $1 tip, but I'm not sure why. No one deserved it.)
That afternoon, we all gladly took naps after a morning of playing hard and then spent the remainder of the day playing more in the backyard. I really missed these Wednesdays with my guys and as I look toward the fast-approaching-future of Asher going to school and know that these days will someday be the past, I have to remind myself to never take them (the crazy and hectic yet wonderful days) for granted!
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| The Hot Days of Summer: Fun in the water to cool down on Thursday night. |
When the work week ended we all celebrated by going out to dinner which we do more often than not on Fridays. Wanting to try something new we decided to head over and check out Milwaukee Burger. I had heard some good things about it and especially about their homemade cheese curds and wanted to give it a try. My thoughts? Well, the food was very good and the cheese curds were ridiculously huge and incredibly tasty, but overall the restaurant was much too loud and a bit overpriced for burgers if you ask me. We probably won't be going back, but we did have a nice family dinner together.
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| Got my cheese curds boy? |
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| One cheese curd. I was born in Wisconsin and grew up 30 miles from the Wisconsin border and this is the largest cheese curd I've ever seen! |
Although the work week showed signs of getting back to normal, the weekend was anything but. Rather it was in typical summer fashion with a lot to do and not a lot of down time. Lucky for us though, it was all fun stuff.
On Saturday we had two birthday parties to go to. In the morning we headed over to the Bailie residence to celebrate Jaxson's 4th and Violet's 2nd birthdays. The day so far had been a mostly rainy day, so the party was inside. Being that Asher isn't much of a morning person and had a hard time waking up on this day due to the rain, he wasn't really ready for a party, so we didn't stay long because Asher was overwhelmed by the other kids and thought it was too loud (he was really just being a grump though). We headed back home and took naps and when I told him we were going to another party in the afternoon he told me he didn't want to go. I was surprised and asked him why and he said because parties are too loud. I told him that it looked like it was clearing up outside so that the party would probably (hopefully) be outside so that it wouldn't be so loud and he was game. By the time the party (Etta McGowan's 2nd birthday) came, he had gotten some extra rest and was ready to go. It was largely all the same people as earlier, but he and Avery had a blast this time running and screaming around the house and yard with their friends.
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| Allison's mom trying to teach the kids how to play soccer. |
All of the kids also had fun playing in the sandbox. I was shocked how they all squeezed into the little box but somehow they all made it work.
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| The birthday girl. I am more than happy to have two handsome little boys and I think at this point in life if we were to have another I'd be rooting for another boy rather than a girl (LOVE being a BoyMom!). However there are still brief moments here and there that I think it'd be fun to have a little girl, and when I saw Etta's little tutu I have to say I was a little jealous. Don't think Eric would be too happy if I tried to put that on one of our boys though! ;) |
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| A flower for me!? |
When the party was wrapping up and bedtime was approaching I told Asher that we would have to leave in a few minutes. Although a few hours earlier he'd told me that he didn't want to go to another party, now he told me that he didn't want to leave. I guess the party was a success! We had fun visiting with our friends big and small and the decorations were adorable. The only way I could get Asher to leave was to remind him of the new bubble bath that he and Eric had purchased that morning that he'd been asking to use all day. I asked him if he wanted to take his bubble bath now and then he was happily ready to leave. We got into the car and as we waited for Eric to get in I asked Asher if he'd had fun. His response: "Yes. The cake was my best part. Can you make me that cake for my birthday?" I promptly contacted Allison to let her know of her success and figure out what I needed to duplicate the delicious cake (happy to find out it was a simple box cake with chocolate chips added....but oh so good!).
On Sunday, we had church and then another fun event after church: a summer church cookout/picnic. We ate right in front of the church so it worked out great because we didn't have to go far to get the boys lunch and we easily walked back home afterwards. We had a yummy lunch, let the boys play with their friends for a little while and then headed home for naps and dinner prep.
Finally, we ended our busy but fun weekend with a yummy shish kabob dinner at home with our friends Paster Dave and Judy. It was a great way to end the week, catching up with our Kenosha family and sharing a good meal together.
And that sums up the A Team Week 100!! How has it already been 100 weeks that I've been a mother of two!?!
