Catch-All Continued

To continue:

4. Outdoors...

Mike was in Chicago a week or so ago and Jake took over dinner and other duties one night. He really loves to use the grill which is fantastic because I really do not. He grilled us burgers which was happy for Maddie because burgers are not her favorite food and she was a track meet...

After dinner he and I also quickly planted some grass plants that our neighbors gave us when they split their large ones up. Thank you! They will hopefully grow big and block some of the ugly view under the deck! We were working quickly because the sun was going down.

5. Planning...

Neither Mike nor I are in love with our kitchen. The refrigerator has been steadily making louder noises for the past few months to the point that we've started to look at new appliances. While doing that we realized other things that needed to be updated. We did the whole "taping off" trick to decide if moving some cabinets would help with flow and layout. We decided in the end that what we would lose wasn't worth the extra work or cost. So, we'll do some aesthetic things and make a list for new ideas when we have a different house someday.

6. Rain...

The week that Mike was in Chicago this was our view Sunday through Thursday...

Every morning I texted him with, "Still. Raining." There have only been a couple of sunny days in the last couple weeks and we are treasuring those!

7. More Music...

Maddie had her last choir concert for Junior High! It was a Pops Concert and they did an amazing job on their songs; I truly think it was the best concert I had heard from them.

Her select choir sung the theme song from "Bond" movies complete with actions...

I also got to debut my mad African drum skillz.

And there you have it. Our spring in a nutshell.

Catch-All

I have had on my to-do list "Catch Up on Blog" for about the past three weeks. Clearly it isn't at the top of the list. I don't feel like we've really done anything that requires the world to be aware of - but at the same time we seem really busy every day and I don't know how we DON'T have stuff to report on.

So...here's a list of what's been happening here:

1. We celebrated Easter...

We were up early and at church. We helped prepare the Easter Breakfast that the youth host. Maddie, Jake, and I scrambled a bunch of eggs. Maddie and I left for choir and Jake stayed to represent the Murphy's in the kitchen. Mike is currently the president of the congregation and he usually gets pulled aside for various things at church now so he was handling other things. My parents attended the first service with everyone and we all enjoyed a breakfast together afterwards. That's when we noticed that Jake and my dad had matching outfits. Aren't they cute??

Later that afternoon we went to my parents' house for dinner with everyone. My parents always have an egg hunt for the kids. They each had to find 10 eggs (each kid was assigned a specific color of egg so they'd know which was theirs). That meant they had hidden 80 eggs and didn't write anything down as to WHERE they hid them. Somehow only one egg was not found which I think is actually a pretty good percentage. 

My dad's birthday was only a couple days later so we also celebrated his big day while we were all there. He had "helpers" to cheer him on in gift opening and then we had cupcakes to celebrate afterward.

2. Going Wild...

Mike had the opportunity to attend a Wild playoff game with some friends from church. They ended up right beside the rink. He had a ton of fun and was only a little hoarse the next day.

3.  Music to my Ears...

My students' recital was held in early April. There were about 20 kids that participated and Jake was one of them. I loved his piece (Gardens in the Mist by Dennis Alexander) and he did a fantastic job! Here's the video Mike was able to capture:

Maddie was set to play one of my all-time favorite pieces. She couldn't participate in the recital because her arm was still in a sling from her surgery the week before. Now that her sling is off I've asked her to start practicing it again so I can record it at home. Hopefully that will be coming to a desktop near you soon.

In order not to bore you with too many words I'll continue the rest of this catch-all series later in the week.