Another fun summer break week

At karate, they were working on their accuracy and control. So, they had to kick a Dixie cup without smashing it or hitting it out of their partner's hand. Morgan got to be the demonstration helper with Miss Loula.

Then, she and Rachel paired up to practice.

A beautiful day for a walk with her favorite dog!

Volleyball with Emily... the girls jumped on the bench and said "take a picture" - ha!

I feel like the summer is flying by! It's already the middle of July! The girls have been having a great time at Avery Coonley summer camp. They are sad that next week is the last week of it. The fire alarm went off yesterday and the kids had to evacuate, fire trucks came, the whole thing! Morgan was texting me from camp to let me know what was going on. Luckily, it was just a false alarm!

3rd week of summer break

We started off the week with volleyball on Monday night.

Sister vs sister!

Emily and Avery made up a handshake/dance

The girls are going to Avery Coonley summer camp for the next four weeks. This is a favorite camp of ours. The girls like it because they have some fun classes and activities and they see some of the same counselors and friends each year. We like it because it is a very well run camp and runs from 8:45 to 3:00 each day. Each session is two weeks long. We missed the first session this year due to the other camps the girls wanted to sign up for. This session, Avery is doing archery and Morgan is doing Author, Author (a writing class). They are both doing a Theater Arts class.

Camp hair

With their camp shirts

This week, unfortunately, smoke rolled in from the Canadian wildfires, which really affected our air quality. The girls' camp is at a school with classrooms, so they were able to go inside for the week and stay out of the nastiness. Of course, it was a bummer they couldn't be playing outside and swimming like they normally would be able to do.

This wasn't even as high as it got!

At karate, they had "beach" week, so Morgan wore a "beach vibes" shirt and a lei to class!

June is Dad's month, so Matt went with Morgan to class and earned his "camo" belt! May was mom's month and I earned a "pink" belt, but I didn't get a picture.

The girls chilling out on the couch after camp one day... and Milo finding his spot right in the middle! He's such a baby!

2nd week of summer break

Our second week of summer break was a fun one! Avery went to Girl Scout day camp and Morgan went to soccer camp in the afternoon.

 Another session of volleyball... the girls continue to love playing! And this week we have knee pads and Morgan is giving those knee pads a run for their money!

Matt finished his surprise for Morgan  - a soccer kick wall! She loves it!

So, Morgan was still getting used to the set up and was kicking the ball and then shooting a the goal towards the playset. She says to me "take a video", so here it is... she accidentally shot it right over the fence and all the way to our neighbor's backdoor!

Here is Morgan ready for another hot afternoon of soccer! We saw the TBK ad, so she had to get a picture! Soccer camp has been really hot this week with 90+ temps. They moved off the turf to the baseball fields a few days because the turf gets way too hot and there is no shade.

Avery had a blast at Girl Scout camp. She was in the In"spa"ration group, so they made soap, gave each other manicures and made yogurt face masks! They also do all the typical Girl Scout camp activities!

Morgan stole my phone and took a selfie before soccer camp!

It was SO hot that we went to the pool for an hour before dinner on Wednesday night.

Avery sporting her new tie-dyed shirt she made at Girl Scout camp.

Morgan after soccer camp on Thursday... so sweaty!

Avery with her Girl Scout camp group. The counselors all have nicknames and her counselor was "Dinosaur". :)

Morgan is getting ready for a karate tournament in a few weeks, so they worked on the form she needs to do for the touranment.

It's Friday! And I guess that means selfies in the car on the way to Girl Scout camp!

Morgan is ready for her last day of soccer camp, too!

I picked Avery up from camp and this is what she (and her group mates) all looked like! She said they were being "Chads"! :) She had a fun week and all the girls signed each others shirts on the back!

Here's a picture of them from the camp FB page.

And to continue the Girl Scout fun, it was cookie reward pick-up night! She got all of these awesome rewards for all the cookies she sold! She loves the new shades!

We ended the week with a trip to the pool. It wasn't too crowded, probably because of the carnival downtown.

When we got home, Avery decided to try out her face mask she made at Girl Scout camp. She said it has Greek yogurt, honey and turmeric! She said it didn't smell great, but her skin was softer!

1st week of summer break

The girls each had a summer camp this week. Avery did a BAM theater camp where the kids learned and performed Seussical Kids. Morgan went to Adventure Camp through the park district. She got to go on three fields trips - Putt Shack, Urban Air and Pelican Harbor. It was a little chilly for the water park, but she said she still had a good time.

We started off the week with a new sport! The girls are giving volleyball a try this summer on Monday nights. They both loved it! Next week, we'll have knee pads, which will make it a little better!

Avery's recital is this weekend, so they had dress rehearsal on Wednesday.

On Friday, Avery's theater camp put on their show. Matt and I went to watch (Morgan was at the water park.) The show was cute and she had a fun time!

DeezNuts Reunion

A long time ago (way before kids!), a group of friends were on a volleyball team called DeezNuts. :) Recently, a few of us reunited for drinks and dinner. It's been such a long time since we've seen each other. It was fun to reminisce about old times and catch up on everyone's lives now!

Eric, me, Hany and Brandon

Another one bites the dust

Another league of volleyball has ended... and in particularly bad fashion, I might add. Our team finished the regular season ranked 2nd out of 10. Not bad! Last night, we lost in the first round of the playoffs. Bad! It was totally frustrating. We lost the first game. We won the second game (that's when we "pulled our heads out of our butts" - something my high school basketball coach used to yell at us at least once a game). The third game, we lost by 1 point. Ugh. The worst part is that we really could have won... we just made stupid mistakes when it counted.

The game was at 9 pm, so I didn't get home until like 10:30. And of course, I was still WIDE awake from playing and all the craziness... it took me FOREVER to fall asleep.

Gotta grab a big cup of coffee this morning!

Slacking

I realized the last post I made here was over a week ago. Oops!

Let's see... what have I missed...

My fall volleyball league started back up, which I'm very happy about! We always take the summers off because everyone is so busy and we're always searching for subs. Plus, I'm not a huge fan of beach volleyball.

Matt and I refinanced and we closed last Friday morning. I'm now officially on the mortgage. Awesome. Pretty easy, lots of signing my John Hancock. I hadn't actually ever signed my new name with my middle inital. It was totally throwing me off. I think my signature looked different on every page!

Also, this past Friday, it was Halloween party day at my company. So, everyone brought in their kiddies all dressed up. They trick-or-treated around the office. I still have leftover candy, which taunts me every time I see it. "EAT ME"... "YOU KNOW YOU LOVE SNICKERS!!!" Yep, I'll probably finish the rest off myself. Awful.

On Saturday, we hung out at Kari's place to watch the Iowa game. We had lots of great snacks and we did a few Hawkeye bombs... but, Iowa couldn't pull it off in the end. Then we hung out with Andy, Michelle and Sam. Michelle made some super tasty chicken and dumplings and we played Scrabble. Fast fact: It was the first time Matt had ever played Scrabble in his life! I'm not even sure how that's possible.

Oh, the guys even tested out the 'quarter trick' with a few cans of beer. My uncle Chuck swears that if you shake up a beer can and then put a quarter on the bottom of it when you open it, it won't explode. Andy decided to not only shake the beer cans, but throw them full force onto the metal balcony. One can ended up totally flat on one side (that takes talent)! : ) I think one can exploded all over him, even with the quarter.

Sunday was 'catch up on everything' day... cleaning, laundry, organizing. Fun times, I know you're jealous. Matt grilled out turkey burgers = yum! We watched the Bears lose.

We've hired a cleaning lady... I'm very excited about this! I don't know why it's taken me so long to pull the trigger on this one. She's been cleaning a friend of Erin's house for over 8 years and has been cleaning Erin's place for a while now, so she comes highly recommended. She stopped by last night to take a look at our place. She starts Thursday!

The current discussion at our house is... what are we going to dress up as for Halloween??? I'm forcing Matt to go to the Halloween party we go to every year. It's at Witt's and it's for charity. Plus, everyone gets really into it and I love seeing what clever costumes people come up with. So, the costumes are TBD. I'm sure there will be numerous pictures taken!

Well, I think that gets me caught up!

Countdown to the weekend...

A few more hours to go and the weekend will be under way! : )

This week was a quick one...

Volleyball playoffs started on Wednesday night. We ended up tied for 1st (but ranked 2nd, based on schedule) in the league this time. So, we had a pretty easy match-up the first round. Next Wednesday are the semi-finals and championship game... and one of our players is going to be out-of-town! Such a bummer!

Also, on Wednesday night, Matt got sucked into a marathon resident meeting with our condo association. They are planning some renovations to our building and we're looking at a special assessment sometime soon. Awesome. About half of the stuff they want to do is required, but some is elective. There's a big vote coming up to see what will be done now and what will be postponed.

Last night, Matt and I tried out a new restaurant by us. Well, it's not exactly new, but it's new to us! We went to Nia on Randolph. It's a Mediterranean tapas restaurant. We really liked the food. We shared five things: (1) arugula salad with panko encrusted goat cheese, (2) shrimp and avocado cold dish, (3) crab stuffed mushrooms, (4) lamb and feta meatballs, (5) baked goat cheese with garlic bread. The prices were pretty reasonable and they even gave us a $20 coupon to come back again. Sweet!

Oh, there was this really talkative woman at the bar telling these two other women about her fiance and how she had only known him 3 weeks and that he was cheating on her already because she read the text messages in his Blackberry. I'm not sure what was up with all that! Seriously, what is wrong with some people?!?

Ooohhh, my new Lill purse came in on Wednesday! I love it! I'll have to take a picture and post it!

Have a good weekend everyone!

I love Fridays

This week has gone by pretty fast, which is always nice.

We had a big win in volleyball on Wednesday night. The other team started off acting like they were expecting an easy win against us (which is strange considering their record isn't that much better than ours, but whatever). But, we took two of the three games and they were none too happy.

Last night, Matt and I went to dinner at The Palm. I still owed him dinner for two bowling bets, so we decided we'd combine them into one really nice dinner out. Matt had a filet, which was amazing and cooked exactly like he requested. I had the sea bass which was equally as tasty and huge!

Today, I had to go pick up my replacement CTA card at lunchtime. I lost the old one and have no idea where it could be. I know it is with my LSAC gym pass, but that doesn't help... because that is lost, too. I'm sure now that I've replaced the CTA pass, I will miraculously find it tomorrow. By the way, I get the impression that the customer service people at the CTA office automatically think you are going to be rude to them, because they start off talking to you with a major attitude. I'm like "whoa, I just said 'hi'"!

I stopped off on my way back to the office at the French Market in the train station. The place was jam packed! With good reason! I walked by the Belgian fry stand and it was packed as well. Can't wait to try that place! : )

Oh, I also picked up some lottery tickets... keeping my fingers crossed! Ahhh, it's nice to dream about the cool stuff we could do with millions of dollars!

Tonight, we're off to see Hot Tub Time Machine with Erin, Ross and Brett!

Happy weekend everyone! : )

Random stuff on a Friday morning

On Wednesday night, our v-ball team had to play the early game (6pm). It's always a challenge to get there that early right after work, but add in snow and pissed off drivers and the time sky rockets. Me and the three guys on the team were able to make it in time to start the first game. So, the four of us played vs. a full team of 6. We ended up doing pretty well, but we lost 26-24. Then, Erin and Hany showed up and we took the next two games. The games were both pretty close, which is way more fun than blowing out the other team. So, it was a good night of v-ball.

We stopped off at Four Shadows afterwards for a quick drink/bite to eat.

Yesterday, I made one of my favorite meals in the world... pot roast and mashed potatoes. I'm a big fan of comfort food! I'm also a big fan of leftovers! : ) Matt gave it the thumbs up!

After dinner, we played this game "Shut the Box" that BJ got for Matt. It's some game they used to play all the time at Blue Agave while Dana was working. Matt spent a lot of time there while I was working overseas. Anyway, the game started off well for me, but soon I was down a few bucks (we were playing for dollar bills). And Matt, being the good winner that he is, decides to take all of his new dollar bill winnings and "make it rain". Dollar bills floating all over the place. Nice, bud. This was supposed to be a friendly game! The game went on for a little longer, I won some money back and then eventually he won all of my dollar bills. The guy never loses!

We watched the Biggest Loser last night on DVR. I'm still trying to figure out who (if any) of these people I like and want to root for. I am looking forward to next week's show... the previews looked good. Hopefully, it's not one of those stupid Bachelor type previews where some girl said she was pregnant as a joke, but they made it look like she was serious... then they cut out that part of the scene from the show. Stupid.

The weekend is almost here! Yay! : )

Friday - yay!

This week has gone by much faster than last week... which is awesome! So glad it's Friday!

On Tuesday night, a few girls got together for a "book" club at Michelle's place. Lots of chatting and snacking and drinking of wine. And about 15 minutes of discussing and trading books. My kind of book club!

While I was over there, Andy and Samantha hung out with Matt at our place. I think Matt actually held Sam - that's moving in the right direction! Of course, Matt holding a baby is usually out of necessity and not by choice. He's not big on holding other people's babies until they are "big enough to walk to him" (a direct quote.) Maybe he thinks he'll break them or something. : ) Matt even got in a little babysitting time (or as I like to call it - practice!) while Andy ran to the store to grab some formula. Sam was none too happy to be left alone with Matt... he is kind of scary!

Wednesday night, we had the first game of our new volleyball season. Our team (now that Brandon is gone) is: me, Hany, Erin, Brett, Brian (a friend of Brandon's) and Jeremy (a friend of Hany's). The guys are all tall, which is nice. Brian wasn't able to make it this week, so Brandon subbed - it was nice to have him play with us one more time. He leaves in a couple weeks for Denver. Our team is looking promising this season, even though we only won one game.

Last night, Matt worked late... again. January sucks for him. I went to Spin class with Erin. I don't know what it is about the Thursday night instructor, but she can NOT figure out how to use the headset speaker. She makes it screech every week. Last night was no exception, she did it 4 times. I thought my ears were going to bleed! Awful! Afterwards, Matt and I went out for sushi at Izumi. Strawberry maki = yum!

I'm looking forward to the weekend - crossing my fingers that Matt won't have to work!

We are NOT the champions... again

The DeezNuts volleyball team lost in the second round of playoffs last night. Disappointing. We played two really tough games and lost each one by only 2 points. We almost won the second game... but, the other team was just a little bit better.

We cheers'd the season at the Purple Otter afterwards. Luckily, this time the food didn't take over an hour to get like last time. Of course, we were the only ones ordering food this time, so that probably helped!

Don't fall off your chair, but this is the third post in as many days! I'm trying to post something every day. But, seriously, my life is really not all that exciting, so I hope you aren't bored to tears.

Another observation and a disappointing loss

It pays to have sirens and lights on your car during rush hour traffic
On my walk home from work last night, as I was crossing an intersection, a cop that was sitting at the red light just decided to turn on his lights and make his way through the intersection... stopping traffic and all the people crossing the street. Once he got to the other side, he turned the lights off and kept on like nothing was wrong. Seriously? He did not appear to be on his way to any emergency, he was just impatient and wanted to cross the road. Why not wait the extra 2 minutes? I don't get it. The best part was he was smoking a big fat stogey. Awesome.

On the other hand, an undercover cop gave a girl that was subbing for my v-ball team a ride to our game because the girl was lost and totally nowhere near where we play. That was nice. : )

Speaking of volleyball, last night was DeezNuts' first (and last) playoff game. We finished the season in 5th place, right in the middle, so we played the 4th place team in the playoffs. We had actually already beaten this team before without much effort, so I was optimistic about the game. Unfortunately, 5 of the 6 people on my team could not make it to the game, so we had to use 5 subs and me. Playoffs are not the best time to throw 5 new people together and expect them to be able to play v-ball well together. It just doesn't happen. In the first game, we got skunked. One of our girls was late (see note above about lost girl!) and by the time she got there, we were already down like 9 points. The second game we lost by 2 points. We were finally figuring out how to play better with each other, but it was just a little too late. Oh well. Maybe next season!

Volleyball

Tonight at volleyball (which, by the way, we won all three games!), something a little strange happened. I noticed a TV camera guy filming everyone playing volleyball... there are 3 courts in the area we play. Then, he picked our court and asked if we would let this high school kid play with us so they could get some footage of him playing volleyball. Huh??? Kind of an odd request, but we said ok. His mom was with him and she said the footage was going to be used on Inside Edition.

I'm not sure if anyone saw this in the news, but it turns out that he is that student, Bruce Zayas, that was paddled by his coach for missing serves in a volleyball game. He went to Simeon High School.

When I asked him what was going on, he basically told me that he got paddled and his mom is making a big deal of it. I had no idea what that meant... and I was really confused as to why he was playing v-ball with us. But, a guy on our team talked with Bruce's mom while we were out playing and she gave him the whole scoop. I'm glad I didn't go to that school... geesh.

Anyway, I'm going to have to check out Inside Edition and see if any of the footage gets used! I'm assuming it will be on in the next few days.

Sushi celebration

On Friday night, we had a little (belated) celebration/sushi night with our bowling and volleyball teams. So, me, Erin, Brett, Hany and Brandon went to Tank Sushi in Lincoln Square.



We had lots of great sushi and fun drinks... also, Brandon got us a bottle of sake that was actually really good. Well, I thought so. I think Hany liked it better after she dropped a cherry in it.

We are NOT the champions

So, as expected, DeezNuts was defeated in the volleyball playoffs last night. We were hopeful in the beginning because we took an early lead in the first game (we were up by 11 points!). Turns out, the other team just needed to warm up. They ended up winning that game by a couple of points. Pretty sad. The second game was more of the same... we didn't have a chance.

So, now our team will take a little hiatus over the summer. We used to do beach v-ball, but it's more of a hassle than it is fun... (1) the weather usually sucks and it's really no fun playing volleyball barefoot in cold, wet sand in 50 degree rainy weather, and (2) parking is crappy and expensive by the beach, and (3) the games start at 6pm/7pm so that we can still be playing in daylight and the 6pm games are almost impossible to make it to. We will start back up in the fall in the indoor league again... hopefully with a few changes in our line-up, but that's a totally different story.