Happy 200th!

Hard to believe (for me anyway), but this is my 200th post on this blog! Since I am going to recap some of our adventures from yesterday, I decided that was as a good a title as any.

Our fun activities yesterday started with celebrating a friend's birthday at a bowling alley. Evan has been begging to go bowling all summer and we enjoyed getting to see our friends, so it was a nice treat for everyone! This was a really cool bowling alley for the kids. They had the bumpers up on our lanes, of course, and they also had a ball launcher. Joel didn't really like the actual bowling until we discovered the launcher towards the end of the game. Evan did like it, and he bowled most of Joel's game, too, since Joel had given it up. In fact, he even got a strike for Joel! We had warned him that his score wouldn't be as high as it is on the Wii, but he ended up not caring. Our competitive child has been telling us that he won out of the people on his lane, but he doesn't remember any of the actual scores. (I am not sure that he did win, plus I think he and Joel were the only two who finished all 10 frames before it was time to move on.) After some dancing and some cake, the kids got to play in an arcade, too. What an exciting couple of hours for them! I was wiped!!

Since we were only a few minutes away from Ikea, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to shop a little. I was tired, the boys were tired, my chest was hurting a little from the bronchitis, and the store was crowded so I tried to make it a quick trip. It ended up working out alright. Steve took the boys to the restaurant for some meatballs while I hustled through the store. I purchased a few things and investigated some things that I had seen online (for my soon-to-be-new craft room).

Once we got home set up our new (huge) tent in preparation for a camping trip that we are planning. We wanted to practive setting up and let the boys sleep in it before the actual trip. I would call it a "dry run", but it was humid last night and the dew made everything inside the tent wet this morning. Other than that (and getting the boys to settle down for sleep) I think it went well. I wouldn't know from experience, though, since I slept in the house all by myself. ;) If you click on the last picture you might be better able to see the lightsabers stored above Joel's "bed". That was his anti-monster security. Evan had to have a little table for his alarm clock to rest on (mainly for the light-up function, I believe). We've got all the comforts of home worked out, so looks like we are ready to go!