April weekend

Troy spent the weekend building a fence at his mom's farm. The section that he built is the northern border of her garden, but it's mainly a section of the corral which surrounds the garden to the north and east. He has a goal to rebuild all of the fencing in the corral, which his grandpa built a long time ago and is now at the point of needing replaced. He was out there all day Saturday, I came out to check on how he was doing and took a picture.

It looked great, he built it out of scrap metal pipe that he has been saving. He painted it silver when he was finished and I didn't get a picture of it at that point because it was getting dark. When we returned the next morning it was with the purpose of wiring chicken wire to the new fence, and then all around the perimeter of the garden to keep the chickens out. So we could plant potatoes without worrying about the chickens digging them up. What a pain chickens are!

After Troy, Alina and I planted potatoes and ate lunch at Helen's on Sunday, we had Kylie's birthday party at Jame's house in the evening. Kylie cracks me up, she was over the other day to invite us to her birthday party at 6:00 "at night, not in the morning". Thank goodness. And last night, as we were getting ready to leave for her party at about 5 minutes before 6:00 she again showed up at the door to ask us when we were coming!

My Alina. She is obsessed with two things right now: One Direction (the boy band) or 1D, as we call them. I actually am going to take her to a One Direction concert in St. Louis in August for her 11th birthday. Oh, and also anything Irish. She says the Irish obsession started when she did a report on Ireland for school and she just decided that it must be the best country in the world.

My brother-in-law Tim does a very good Forrest Gump impression I discovered last night. (JEN-ay)

Kylie had to lick frosting off of the Hello Kitty purse because it was a decoration on the cake. And she has a red frosting on her face because she had to lick off the Hello Kitty purse.

And we all went to bed decently exhausted.

10 good things that happened to me this week.

1. My daughter returned home from her spring break trip to Europe with her Spanish classmates. She absolutely loved it, had a couple "best day ever"s! She returned late on Sunday, I didn't get to catch up with her until Monday night, but so happy for her and to have her back home.

2. One night this week, briefly, it snowed the biggest snowflakes ever! They were huge and beautiful and almost made it forgivable that it was snowing after spring break.

3. I received my new debit card in the mail after losing my old one on spring break last week in Overland Park. (at the movie theater, I'm sure of it, but they never found it)

4. I finally clipped off the very last of the damaged toenail from our hiking in Peru last summer. I can go get a pedicure without feeling shame now. Thinking Wednesday of next week!

5. I drank a bottle of plum wine that Kalyn bought for me at Stonehenge. On one of her best days ever.

6. Alina's spring pictures came in! I always love those.

7. Someone came over with some really good flavored moonshine and we drank maybe too much of it around the fire pit.

8. I had a picnic lunch with my husband on a creek bank today.

9. Also today, I ran over to Girard to take pictures of Kalyn getting ready for their prom. She looked very pretty.

10. One night this week I stayed up with Alina to watch just the first part of the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon before going to bed. We felt like we were being bad for staying up so late, but we went right to sleep afterward.

All in all we made it through the first week back to normal after spring break and I think we might just make it through the school year!