Weekend Update

Well, the weekend is nearly gone and I have not touched the laundry yet! Not a good thing in the House-o-Perpetual-Laundry. Anyway, here's what's happened the past few days . . .

Friday night was the annual fundraising dinner for CFS (where Chris works) so we attended and had a good time. Every year, the staff puts on a show for the guests and this year the theme was cruising, so Chris sang "Rock the Boat." He did a great job, as did the entire staff, expert musician, techno-guys, etc. The dinner was a great success and they surpassed their goal, so it was a great night for all.

Saturday, we stopped by Bread Co. for a quick breakfast, and then the music store to rent Brandon's violin for his foray into the musical world. Brandon wanted to join the 4th and 5th grade orchestra, so it will soon be evident whether he inherited his father's, grandmother's, aunt's, and uncle's talent in music, or his mother's lack of talent in all things musical. More on that later.

We then embarked to Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, a quick 80 mile drive (according to Yahoo! maps) that turned out to be about 110 mile drive. Once there, we arrived at the highest point in the state of Missouri: Taum Sauk Mountain, 1772 feet. Here are the highest people in Missouri:

After we were done being the highest people in Missouri, we took off on a horrendously moderately rugged 3 mile death march hike to see some of Missouri's natural wonders. We made it out alive and mostly intact, bringing home only one tick amongst the four of us. We had a great time and a special thanks goes to Chris, who carried Matthew and the backpack for 1/2 a mile and only watched 5 minutes of college football the entire day! We had a great time and were exhausted by the time we got home. The rest of the pictures are on my Flickr page, if you're interested.

Today we welcomed our new ministering family to church with the traditional church pot luck dinner. Sometimes these are known as "fellowship meals" (I grew up with that term) or "basket dinners" (a Kansas thing, perhaps, because I've only heard that from a native Kansas-ite? Kansan?), but they all mean one thing: food. We eat to celebrate, we eat to connect, we eat to mourn, we just plain eat.

I have just been notified that something has been flushed down the toilet, so I'm going to investigate/interrogate. Hope you all had a great weekend!

Postscript: The something flushed down the toilet was a piece of a Lego toy, stolen by Matthew from Brandon's room. There was a very short chase which ended when Matthew rounded the corner into the bathroom, threw the Lego into the toilet and flushed it. It is now on it's way to the water treatment plant and I'm on my way to crazyland. Why? Why does the 3 year old feel the need to grab random stuff and flush it? Is there not enough chaos already?