Braund Graduation

Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, Marina, Hudson and I traveled to Lafayette, IN for Lauren Braund's grad party. Unfortunately I forgot my camera - but thanks to our great friends the Herods....the memories are not lost. Check out the fun we had.....through their eyes.

CLICK HERE TO BEGIN :)

I stole the cutest picture out of the pile to share on our page too :)


Chloe, Marina, Aubrey

Our foreign visitor

We have been visted by a creature from a foreign land. We have some unhealthy ash trees and we thought that it was just from the stress of the construction project (that is what nearly killed us, so why would the trees be any different). Over memorial day weekend we spotted several of these emarald colored buggers - the dreaded Emerald Ash Borer. Another gift from our Chinese Friends.

Fishing with Grandpa Stickel

What a treat to have Grandpa take the kids fishing on Memorial Day. We have an AWESOME next door neighbor with a neat fishing pond. Marina has been begging to go, so Grandpa made it happen. We got out the famous Barbie and Scoobie fishing poles and harassed the bluegills in the pond. The bite was ON. Everyone got their share of catching fish! We made memories that day :)

Marina's new wheels

Paige was sure proud to ride around on her princess bike as well as the trusty old plastic three-wheeler.

Even Hudson got into the action.

The kids have REALLY enjoyed spring. It seems like it would never get here. We got out the old tricycles and cars and blew the dust off of them - and found out that Marina had outgrown them all. So we all loaded up and went down to the local bike store and got her an early B-Day present. Of course her B-day isn't until August, but we figured she would like to have some wheels to ride through the summer. She told us when she woke up, the morning after we bought it, that she was remembering her new purple bike and promised to ride it every morning, except for meeting day. The most important feature was the bottle cage - which the mechanic added especially for her.

Trying a Tri

True to form, we are only one week late on this blog posting. Last weekend we traveled to Galena, Illinois to participate in the Galena Triathlon. This venue has become an annual trek for the Vail family, so we decided to give it a "tri".

On the way up there we picked up aunt Lisa Lerwick in the Quad cities. It was great to see her again and catch up. Of course it would have been nice to "catch up" with her during the race.

The house we rented was set back in the trees a little bit and it accommodated our two families (+ aunt Lisa) perfectly. The kids loved spying on the birds that would come in to feed on bird feeders. Galena in general was gorgeous and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a get-away weekend. Of course "scenic" usually means hilly - which added another dimension to the race. The 59 deg lake temperature was another "eye opener" to say the least. We really appreciated out wet-suits this year.

The other racers (Rob, Lisa, Luke, Darren) all had previous times at Galena to beat. This being Don's 1st one there, he can honestly say it was his best Galena Triathlon time ever!

For more race coverage visit Rob and Andrea's Blog.







Sunday was Rob's b-day and he miraculously had enough lung left to blow out some candles.


Don refueling - the best part of the race :)