Swimming Lessons

Ainsley is now half way through her swimming lessons. She's having a fantastic time and adores her teacher. During Wednesday's class, I played "Paparazzi Mom." Here are some of the pics I snapped:

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

We celebrated with a pretty low key day here. After running a few errands this morning, we spent the afternoon at home doing several different things. We had lunch then watched the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on The Disney Channel. Daddy surprised the girls when it was over with a new addition to our outside play set--a sandbox! Most of the sand from our sand and water table had migrated to the play set anyway, so this was a good move. The girls definitely will spend quite a bit of time there, I'm sure. While Daddy was working out at the Y and C was napping, A and I made Daddy's favorite Valentine cookies. Don't get impressed, they were just the Pillsbury place and bake kinds! ;-) After C's nap, we iced the cookies with Tarheel blue icing, just like Daddy likes.

While our day was low key, our dinner was not. Matt and I had grilled steaks (his specialty). The girls had boiled shrimp, but they decided that leftovers from lunch, nachos, and salad were better. A did eat some of her shrimp (she usually eats it all up!) but C wasn't feeling the shrimp love tonight. I guess Matt and I will share that for our lunch tomorrow!

Earlier this week (Thursday) both girls celebrated Valentine's Day at preschool. I made cupcakes for each girls' class. They exchanged Valentine's with their classmates and had a small party in their classroom. This picture is from today. The cupcakes are leftovers from Thursday and the roses are mine from Matt. :-)

Snow Sledding!

We took a trip to Beech Mountain this past weekend. The town has a FREE sledding hill for kids and since we've been shut out in the snow department thus far, we figured it would be a fun adventure. A few of our friends have already been this winter and had a great time, so we knew what we were in for. The weather was wonderful--bright sunny skies most of the day. On top of the mountain, it was in the upper 40's, so we didn't need too many layers to keep warm.

The hill's man-made snow had mostly melted leaving the sheet of ice that had formed under it and a nice big slushy puddle at the bottom. We only made it to the puddle a few times, and man was it cold!

The girls definitely had a fantastic time. I think they both were a bit intimidated at first, but after a few times down the hill they were in the groove of sledding. Amazingly, we didn't have any major wipeouts (we saw a few from other sledders though!) and blood was only drawn once. Matt used his knuckles as brakes on his second trip down. Knuckles + sheet of ice = a bloody mess. I managed to find a band-aid in my purse (I usually try to keep at least one for just such an occasion), so we got him all situated and headed back to the hill.

I took quite a few pictures. I've pulled the highlights for this post. I'll try (if I remember) to post a slideshow with the others soon. :)

Me and Cadence coming down.


Matt and Ainsley coming down.


Cadence


Ainsley


Oh, and if you're ever in Boone, NC around dinner or breakfast time, you MUST eat here. We had dinner there and it was as good as you could imagine. I have a hard time saying what my favorite part of dinner was, honestly. The country ham biscuits were amazing. The plain biscuits with cherry preserves were so good that I had to buy some of the preserves from their store. (I'm not a cherry fan at all. They were *that* good!) And, I can't not mention the sweet tea. It was the perfect southern beverage to go with the perfect southern meal! ;-) Thank you Alberty's for the dinner suggestion!