A Visit from Grandma and Grandpa

I feel like I barely got my life put back together from our trip, and then my parents came to visit!  It was SUPER fun to see them again, and even more fun showing them around Charlottesville!  They've been out here a couple times, but the first time they came was just a few days after we moved, and the second time was for Kendra's baptism and it was still winter time and dead and ugly.  It was WAY more fun showing off the town now that I know my way around a bit AND the trees are all green and beautiful.  Now they could get a better idea of why I love it so much here!

Nothing is ever easy, though, so to make things extra exciting, two days before they were coming my Dad called and asked if I could buy a queen-sized bed before they arrived.  (He would pay for it, I just had to do the legwork to get it here.)  (Apparently he was tired of sleeping on my sister's couch, and not particularly looking forward to sleeping on the crappy full-size mattress that we put on the floor for guests because the hide-a-bed couch that it belongs to falls apart.)  So rather than frantically cleaning house like I normally do before I have company, I was running around testing out mattresses and making room for the new one and then freaking out when they only delivered the mattress and not the box spring or frame!  (They did get everything to me a couple hours later.  It turned out they'd gotten the order numbers wrong or something.)  Naturally, the second time they delivered stuff was during some sudden burst of crazy rain-hail-and-wind storm.  It was kind of impressive watching the guy running into my house carrying a queen-sized box spring!

Four kids in a mattress shop-- what could go wrong?

Got the guest bedroom all cleared out...

...but now the rest of the basement looks like this! 😦

Anyway, that was a lot of craziness, but NOW I have an extra queen bed, so if you and your spouse want to come visit me, you'll be sleeping a lot more comfortably!  Come and visit!


With my parents here, I mostly played tour guide and ate a lot.  All my favorite things to do!  I took them to Carter Mountain, the Downtown Mall, and James Madison's Montpelier (we got perfect weather for that, so that was fortunate!).  I let them buy us dinner at some of my favorite restaurants (Citizen Burger Bar, Mellow Mushroom, and Mission BBQ, to name a few).  I showed off my perfected chocolate-peanut-butter milkshakes (the key is to make them with chocolate milk).  We sat and watched Whiplash (cleaned up) and they really liked it, so that made me happy.  It's an incredible movie, if you can find it.

Montpelier's famous temple in the background

This gorgeous garden has a wall around it to keep deer out, but don't let it fool you-- the gate is unlocked if you want to enter!

Chilling with James and Dolly Madison!  (I love Camille's "gun" hand gesture here!)

We put my Dad to work setting up Camille's big girl bed!

My Dad stuck around for a few days and then headed back to Seattle, and my Mom stayed another week longer.  (Usually I only get her to do this when I've had a baby, but Craig pointed out I couldn't keep having more kids just to get my Mom to visit longer, so somehow he convinced her to stay for a bit.)  We had fun just hanging out and talking and then eating even more.  I made her watch Arrival, since I was pretty sure she'd enjoy it (and I'd just finished reading the short story it was based on, "The Story of Your Life").  She babysat one night so Craig and I could go see A Quiet Place, which I'd been dying to see (and it was awesome).  Craig took a sick day one day and we ran up to Culpeper to visit Craig's parents (his Dad is recovering from his second knee replacement) and all us women went and got pedicures together. 

Friday night was supposed to be the Father-Son campout, but we'd gotten rain all that week, so it was canceled.  After making the trip to Culpeper and back, I was just as glad to not be sending Craig out to do any more driving.  But the kids were disappointed, so we tried to make it fun for them anyway: 

NO ONE ended up sleeping in the tent, but they had fun playing in it!

Too wet for a fire?  No problem!

S'mores by candlelight

Still delicious and sticky

Saturday we got another babysitter and my Mom took Craig and me to the Melting Pot, which is always amazing.  I sure love really good food.  And on the Monday before my Mom left, she came with me to my choir rehearsal, which was a whopping three hours long, since our concert was that week!  It was super fun to get to show off our music to her.  (We'd thought about having her come when the concert was, so she could see that, too, but I was going to be in rehearsals so much we finally decided she wouldn't actually see me at all if she came then.)

Story time with Grandma

So yes, a lot of running around and having fun.

I LOVE it when my parents come to visit!

Come back soon, Mom and Dad!