There's no crying in baseball !!!

It has been a few weeks since we last had the chance to blog . . . not for lack of things to talk about, but definitely for lack of time. My birthday was a couple of weeks ago, I can't believe I am 28 already . . . only two more years until I hit 30. I still have David beat though, he only has two more months until he can no longer claim being in his twenties, but will join the thirty something crowd. I think he is having mixed feelings about the upcoming day. We can only hope to be doing as great as David's Grandma Helen as we get older. She also just celebrated a birthday and is 90 years young, and probably has a busier social life than most people my age :) Anyway Riley and I decided to celebrate my birthday by going to check out the zoo. Our zoo just got giraffes, three of them actually so we wanted to go check it out. We talked grandma, tiff, abbi, & elli into going with us as well. It was hot and sticky out of course but we all had fun anyway. Riley's favorite part was the petting zoo where she had to say "Hi goat . . . maa maa" "Hi sheep

. . . baa baa." and proceeded to do that with every animal we saw:) it was really cute. she was way excited to feed them all and was coaxing the animals over by saying "c'mere . . . yum yum." Her least favorite part was definitely the carousel, which she enjoyed last time, but this time scared her at first. we were actually at the zoo almost exactly a year ago, and i took similar pics of riley with the gibbon . . . so i thought it would be fun to compare how they have each grown this past year. That night David brought me home my favorite dinner, Habaneros, so there was no cooking or cleaning up on my birthday either!! It was a pretty great day! We have also been busy swimming, playing at the park, and attending a few ball games. We went to a Swing game with Pete, Tiff, the kids, and Jamie the other night, it was great because Pete got the suite from work so we had a great view of the game off the deck and an air conditioned room to hang out in when we got to sweaty. The best part of the game though was like something out of a movie. The ump behind the plate made a bad call on and outside pitch and the batter flipped out and got tossed out to the game. But to top it off the 3rd base coach came storming down with a red face, veins popping out of his forehead and all to kick dirt all over the plate, and then all over the ump. we couldn't hear what he was saying, but i'm sure we could wager a pretty good guess. needless to say, he was tossed as well as they played "there's no crying in baseball" over the loudspeaker . . . hands down, best part of the game:)

I Solemly Swear I Am Up To No Good

Talk about a weekend full of all things Harry Potter !!! We had a great time this past weekend. It all started off on Friday night, Tiffany tipped us off about an awesome harry potter festival leading up to the release of the final Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, at midnight. It was a bit of a drive to get to the small town hosting it, but it was worth it. They blocked off 3 block downtown and turned all of their shops into different stores from Diagon Alley, Hogsmeade, King's Cross platform 9 & 3/4, Hogwarts, and the even had a Knight bus roaming the streets. My favorite was the sweet shop where us muggles all got to taste butterbeer, dragon snot, blood pops, chocolate frogs, bertie botts every flavour beans, and more. The butterbeer was my favorite. People got all dressed up as their favorite characters; my favorites were Hagrid and Dobby. If they were having a costume contest those two would have won for sure. The kids all got to play a ton of fun games where they had to answer trivia questions, perform spells, get sorted, and more. riley's favorite challenge was a little game called "pin the tail on dudders." she did so good that the nice ladies running the booth gave her a great prize of a harry potter party box filled with all kinds of goodies: suckers, harry potter glasses, stickers, a key chain, and more. abbi and elli also won a ton of great prizes, and can you believe it was all free?? we had to pay for food and some trinkets of course, but the festival, the knight bus, and all of the game booths and prizes were free! Some cooler stores were more expensive though, such as ollivander's wand makers and the pet shop, where we bought riley her own little Hedwig. We had to buy her an owl of her own because they actually had real owls there as well and she was just so excited to see them. Anyway we had a blast and we got home just in time to put riley to sleep, relax for a bit, and then tiffany, gabe, elli, and i headed off to the midnight ball at border's to pick up our books. it was insane and that is a whole other blog, but needless to say we ended up leaving border's at 1am for wal-mart where we got our books with a free poster, a free bookmark, no muss, and no fuss!! i was never a big wal-mart girl, but after that night i have been converted. of course i devoured the final book, it was amazing!! i laughed and cried and cheered, as i am sure all potter fans did. but alas, you will find no spoilers here . . . david has been sucked in and is currently reading book 5, so i don't want to ruin anything for him. riley was so sick of me reading on saturday that when i was only a few chapters away from being done, she started in with a repetitive round of "book go bye bye, book go bye bye." So I bribed her with cookies and Boog, and went about my merry way. I am sad for the series to be over and will miss the excitement of awaiting the next book, but at least there are still two movies to go. In the meantime I am tempted to bide my time and start back again with the "The boy who lived." Mischief Managed!!