Dave Matthews Band: Chula Vista, CA 2010

Ah. Dave. My favorite singer of all time.

I just love his voice.

So for birthday this year tickets to his show in CA were purchased!

Jeff and Jen let us stay with them and their big lug of a dog Miles, and they went with us to the show.

The tricky part was getting there! I had freshman orientation at the UofA that I couldn't get out of until after 2pm. The drive to San Diego is about 6 hours. The show started at 7:30pm. You see our dilemma here?

So we fed ex'd the tickets to Jeff and Jen and then we got out of town around 3 and just drove like crazy.

We made it just in time to pay for VIP parking (Only $20. Hey! We lived in Chicago, this is all about perspective folks!)

We missed one song. That was it! Soooo happy!

Here is the set list:

1. Big Eyed Fish
   Bartender
   Stay or Leave
   Write a Song
   Seven
   Crush
   Alligator pie
   Shake Me Like A Monkey
   #41
   What Would You Say
   Spaceman
   Cornbread
   Sister
   Gravedigger
   Why I Am
   You & Me
   Two Step
   Encore:
   Some Devil
   Time Bomb
   Watchtower

Tim Reynolds (He is so not my favorite edition to the band. >:/ )  Middle is Rashawn Ross  on the end is Carter. (He is such a cutie!)

Boyd Tinsley on violin:

Rashawn and Jeff Coffin. (He is *amazing* and can stay imo, unlike Tim)

 

Us:

Jeff and Jen: 

And my favorite pic of the night <3

Stefan moves too much and I couldn't get a good shot of him, they all were blurry. Bummer.

The other fun part of the night was the grandma tokin' and the drunk girl climbing the light tower in a mini skirt: (You can't make this stuff up!) 

Speaking of drunk girls! Two very obnoxious drunk girls plowed into Jen and I after the show when the tour busses were leaving! We got to see all the band head out up close in their buses. But right when Dave went past these two girls plowed into us. Knocked over the police tape and about knocked my camera out of my hand. Grrr.

But Jen said "Save the picture anyway!" So I did. And now you too can see a picture of Dave Matthews knee and elbow. 

So thanks lame drunk girls. You suck. 

Yard Work:

And not my own. Unfortunately due to the economy we have a number of forclosed homes in our area. In addition we have several deployed people in our neighborhood as well. So we (the board of the HOA and myself) got together on Saturday to pull weeds and clean up these yards. It helps us all with property values, and of course helping those who are deployed is just the right thing to do.

I was there for about 2 hours and then mommy duty called, but I did help with two of the 5 yards on the list for the day. :)

 
Tools of the trade:

This was house number two. The over growth was insane.

Teacher Visit: Kira

One of the other traditions at *S* is that the teachers do a home visit. It's just a chance for them to have some one on one time with your kid, and they do whatever the kids want to do. In 2010 the Wii is what all the kids want the teachers to do with them. :) After showing Ms. S her bedroom they played bowling on the Wii. Kira is really bad at the Wii, but Ms. S was worse, and Kira won her first game ever! ;P

Thanks Ms. S, Kira had a great time!

Family Movie Night!

One of my favorite PTA traditions at *S* is Family Movie Night.

Free popcorn. Cheap Soda. Cheap Pizza (pre-ordered you just go give your name and get your dinner), a movie on a big screen on the lawn.

Good times!

We went with the Durnan's last night and the Millers found us. We had a great time! All the kids watched a terrible movie and the grown ups chatted the night away. :)


You come a little early, get your spot set up and socialize while you wait for the sun to go down so you can see the screen.

Here is the view from our spot on the lawn:

Chairs for the grown ups, blankets for the kids! Perfect.

We were super early, and glad. The entire place was packed, there must have been about 400 people there! 

Happy First Birthday Liam!

Yesterday we celebrated Liam's first birthday. The theme was The Hungry Caterpillar. Terry loved that book as a child, I did not love that book ever. ;) But I did love planning a party around it anyway!

Earlier in the week Katie commenced with dinner plans. It looked like this:

Katie  So Shawn...how much do you love your nephew? Because he REALLY wants spaghetti for dinner at his birthday party, but he doesn't really like the jarred kind. He told me that you make really good sauce and he'd prefer it if you made the sauce. So you want to do it? We'd buy all the stuff of course ;)

August 5 at 9:57am · 

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    Shawn  Sure. What does Master Liam want, plain sauce or a meat sauce?
    

    August 5 at 10:36am · 
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    Katie ‎:) Meat sauce....and he says "lighter on the garlic than he usually makes it". I know you haven't seen him in a couple of days, but his vocabulary has advanced quite a lot!
    

    August 5 at 1:44pm · 

And thank goodness she did. Because she helped Shawn out by cooking the pasta. It burned to the bottom of the pot. No one knows how that happened exactly, but it was too funny. Poor Katie is known for her cooking disasters. And Shawn always teases her that she could burn boiling water. So...yeah. It was pretty funny.

The comments from the kids were great too.

Collin: "Um, Aunt Heidi, I think someone is smoking in our house, like cigarettes!"
Kira (crying...yes, really crying) : "I can't TAAAAAAKE it any mooooooore! I have to get outside to fresh air!!!"

And everyone's eyes were burning and watering. It was too funny!
This is before Katie cooked and the kitchen smelled wonderful!
Shawn is an amazing cook.  He made two kinds of sauce and bruschetta.

Liam approved! (Once someone else cooked more pasta)

Rather than clean up a baby that just had spaghetti, we did the cake right away.
Kim makes all the kids cakes for their parties every year. They love them. (She actually flew to Chicago to get Kira's done last year, poor Evan had to have one from a bakery, lucky for us they threw a hotwheel on top so he was ok)

Happy little spaghetti covered baby! ;)

He started out like this: 

But ended up like this:

Then his crazy mommy got it in her head that the only way to get clean is in a bath. Liam hates baths. So he got angry.

His protests failed and he came out later all clean and shiny. Poor little Liam!
Here is the decoration I hung above the table. ;)

The kids enjoying their cupcakes. 

Caleb and Ethan also have a mean mommy. They had to eat their dinner before cake. Geez. The adults around this party were out of control!

They were both watching the other boys eat their cupcakes and ignoring their pasta.

Here is their mean mommy:

The plan was to decorate butterfly cookies. Those got burned too, but Katie isn't fully responsible for that I don't think. So we just made circles and the kids got to decorate those instead. They didn't mind.

I couldn't get any decent shots of opening the gifts, but I got this one of Uncle Chris. He wouldn't share with the baby.

And I got lots of shots of people loving on Liam and hanging out at his party. And what's not to love! Happy Birthday Liam! 

Painting for Avery.

I have two little nieces coming this fall! Miss Avery is coming sometime in October and Miss Della is expected some three weeks after that! I cannot wait for them to arrive, but in the meantime I'm planning on spoiling their mama's by planning fabulous baby showers and helping with their nurseries.

Yesterday was Avery's room. :) We had a good time (I love painting. I always think it's a good time) and we had good company.

Here is some progress, I'll post pics when the room is finished.
Tools of the trade: