I haven't been active much on the computer lately. Even the "quick" facebook updates have been few and far between...
The mad bookfair rush that led up to Easter has subsided, leaving me with "normal" 40 to 50 hour work weeks until the beginning of summer. I have some side job leads coming in that I will be following up on over the next few weeks, and hopefully the supplemental income from that work will help get us through the summer again this year.
Since I hadn't been around much for my family during the last two months (really for the last 6 months if you go back through the Christmas bookfair season), I decided to make some family time. The four of us spent Easter with the newlywed Britt and Manny in Columbus. It was our pleasure to be a part of their first holiday entertaining event! We all visited the Columbus Zoo while we were there. Although it was cold, everyone had a great time. The kids have both always loved animals!
We came home from our Easter weekend, packed for a day and then took off for a mini road trip to New York by way of Pennsylvania. We spent a day at Hershey (touring the chocolate factory), stopped to visit with Annie at Philadelphia, spent another day in Easton (and the Crayola factory) before heading up to Albany to spend a few days with Katherine, Josh and Annabelle. Grandpa Mark drove in to spend a day with us there, too, but we missed Grandma June....
There was a lot of travelling in a one-week time, and there were some moments when we were about ready to cut the trip short, it was all worth it to hear Hannah say in the car, "it was nice for you be with us for the ride, daddy."
I put in a 60 hour week last week, and decided to make the most of the long weekend by being with the family again. On Saturday, Heather's dad asked if we could set up for a bookfair in Akron for him, so we took the kids (they were entertained by the empty Rubbermaid tubs and some of the children's merchandise). After the bookfair setup, we went out to Smithville to have dinner at The Barn. We went through the shops on the property after dinner, where we got some spices for Heather at The Oak Cupboard and some goodies for the kids at Toyrifix. We then spent a few minutes walking down by the duck pond before heading for home.
Sunday at church, we were surprised to see Britt and Manny come in with Mammie, Grandpa and Grandma Reel. They took us out to eat at El Campesino for lunch, and after the kids went down for naps Heather and I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on housework. Monday morning came with beautiful sunshine, so we decided to put together a quick geocache list and head south toward Navarre for the day. I had 23 on the list, we searched for 17 of those and found 16. One of our most (if not THE most) successful expeditions! We took a break for lunch at Kremeland, a cute 1950's inspired diner on the main road through Navarre. Good food at reasonable prices, and good ice cream for dessert!
I haven't been very good about posting pictures up here. It's been a struggle enough to keep the pictures backed up to our online archive as quickly as we take them off of the camera! Heather has been doing a great job of posting pictures up to facebook as we go on our adventures, and you can access all (as in "all") of our pictures on the archive as well. If you don't have access to the archive or have lost your access information and would like to see our life's photodocumentation, send me a message and I'll take care of setting that up.
