papa's visit

papa and alli came home with us after the reunion. allie, lexi, and chris left the outer banks at 5am to get christian to his all star baseball game on time. it's so nice having family around! dad left at 3am to get amy, kristi, and quinn to the airport. joe and tom's families left around 5am also. and then mom, jeff, and tjn stayed along with matt, the little girls, and i and we cleaned the funk'n'treasure spic and span and back to beautiful. the ride home was congested, nowhere near as bad as the ride out, but still a little trafficy. we made several stops and took our time and had a nice ride.

all star'n it up!

we had a great visit with papa. he stayed with us from july 6-july 25. 

we rattled the bones a lot.

these kids are getting to be pro domino players.

the mad scientist got a hair cut!

much better!

while papa got his haircut addie and i tried on some summer hats.

 

 we suffered the sequestration blues. matt was officially sequestered this summer. that means his days are cut to 8 hours, every friday off, and 20% pay decrease. :( thankfully it sounds like they are cutting the sequestration days from 11 down to 6. hallelujah!

we tried (twice) to make this ice cream bread that's been circulating facebook, to no avail. first we tried with regular flour and baking soda and salt, then we went and bought self rising flour. both times it looked like this. oh well, it's a nice idea. :)

papa and frankie went for a walk around the neighborhood.

one night lexi had two friends come over to spend the night so they set up the tent in the backyard. then we had a bet about when they would come in for the night. they swore they'd sleep out there all night, but everyone else was pretty sure they'd get scared and come in at some point. we had rented a redbox movie, so after our movie chris and i snuck out to the backyard and scratched at their tent. 

it's just what we do. 

they were probably scared for half-a-minute, but then they totally knew it was us. it was pretty fun.

and they came in around 4am.

called it!

we took papa to our favorite chinese buffet, ogas!

 and papa played with girls.

 

this ends the first installment