Holder House

Blown Back By the Eastern Winds...

We are back.

Summer Zephyr 2008 has officially come to a close.

I hope you all missed me!

We had such a wonderful time, that I am unable to even express it in words right now.

And many many thanks to my wonderful sister and brother in law who hosted my wild horde of children for an entire month, as well as to my father who flew up and back just to share the fun of the marathon drive with me. I LOVE you all.

Thank you also, to my family who hosted us on our stops there and back again. I love you too.

It wouldn't be a post without a few pics, so here are a few from the trip. There are many more, and plenty of stories to go with them, but I'll get to it another day.

 

Grampie the Rock Star

The other weekend was a big weekend here - a veritable famous person came to visit. We are talking HUGE. Screaming fans, adoring minions - the whole thing. No, it was not Simon LeBon, it wasn't David Bowie, it wasn't even Sting. It was...GRAMPIE!!!

Grampie arrived for a short visit on Saturday and the kids ran him ragged until he left Tuesday morning. I think it will take a vacation for him to recover from his "vacation"!

Grampie's a good sport though, and wrestled with the little monkeys until they almost puked. He let them crawl into bed with him in the middle of the night, let them share his popcorn, and I'm sure would even have let them pull his chest hair. He even let Georgia indulge in a little diva-ness. Well, ok, maybe ALOT of diva-ness.

We let him rest a bit on Saturday, but on Sunday it was off to see the dinosaurs at the Field Museum. Just the boys got to go, so that we could move and groove a little faster than usual. We saw Sue, the world's largest T-Rex skeleton, and saw us some stegosaurus, triceratops and apatosaurus.

We then went to the new Crown Family Play Lab in the basement of the museum where the boys got to dress up as bats, do some Easter crafts and pretend to dig dinosaur bones out of field jackets - here's a quick cell phone pic -

Monday was St.Patrick's Day, so we made sure everyone had a little o' the Green on, then hit the road. We took Grampie to one of our Fave hangouts, the Clow International Airport. Now this may sound Grand, but it's really just a tiny little airstrip about 10 minutes from the house, where light aircraft and helicopters fly out. The big attraction here is Charlie's, which is a diner right beside the runway where the kids can eat Mickey Mouse pancakes and watch the planes taxi, take off and land.

The rest of the day was kind of quiet, and we finished it off with some corned beef and cabbage, and a good old Leprechaun movie. No, not the horror flick. What - do you think I'm on crack? A nice family friendly Disney leprechaun movie.

Unfortunately, Grampie had to leave on Tuesday, so there were long faces all around...we love you so much Grampie, please come back and visit soon!