The Buerglers

With Evie's birthday just 7 weeks before Christmas she didn't really *need* (but do we ever need?) Christmas gifts.  So Eric and I planned ahead and thought of some fun things for the summer. I wanted to get Evie a water table. Most of them are half water / half sand.  Obviously the designers of those tables don't have toddlers. All I see is mud. I found this basic model on Amazon for a steal. After 4 months of it sitting in the guest room it was finally warm enough to bring the table outside to play! Evie had a BLAST (I love her standing on her tippy toes). Though she thought she was a cat and kept drinking the water. It took her a while to get the hang of all the little parts.  And she still doesn't get the concept of the diving board -- she just puts the little dude on the end of it and then swats him in instead of using the catapult feature.  But she'll get there. We also moved her tree house outside.  She loves ...

Sorry to interrupt your fine Thursday evening of blog reading and wine drinking. I have an announcement to make. My daughter. Seventeen and a half month old daughter.  Pooped in the potty tonight.  The events took place hours ago but I am beaming from ear to ear, still. Let's rewind. My daughter has been battling a constipation issue since she turned a year old. We can control it with diet but occasionally it gets out of hand if we've been eating out a lot.  Needless to say, the last five months or so we've had a lot of conversations about poop.  Stuck poopies. Hurt poopies. Are you going poopies? She's also taken an interest in me going to the bathroom.  And now that she can open the door ( hooray !), I often find myself interrupted by a little visitor wondering what I'm doing sitting in that tiny room.  So I've taken these teachable moments to tell her that mommy and Evie sit down on the potty to go pee-pee and poopy. Aren...

On Friday, the day before my sister's wedding, all the girls in the wedding party and any of the ladies related to the brides or groom joined together for a luncheon.  As usual my mother outdid herself. They even included a high chair at the head table for Evie! I love the coordinated presentation between the table setting and the gift wrap! My grandmother did all the flower arrangements. This tiny one is my favorite because it's in a teacup that belonged to my maternal grandfather's family and is an estimated 100 years old. L-R  Kim, Keri, Katie, Nannie, Kelly, Lynn L-R aunt, aunt, sister, grandmother, mother, married-in aunt (I joked for years that my name should have been Kelizabeth)  Mommy and the Bride! The little flower card holders were my mother's father's mothers.  And the tiny silver spoon was my sister's -- from back when people bought your newborn a silver spoon as a gift. All the lovely ladie...

One of the last things Pope Benedict XVI did before retiring was to name my boss/pastor an auxiliary bishop to Atlanta. If you have no idea how a bishop is named (like me a few months ago), watch this , its a super cute video on how to become pope, but since being a bishop one of the steps you'll learn all about that in the video. I found out the news on a Vatican news Twitter account around 6:30am and it was immediately confirmed by Monsignor David via email to the staff.  He is the most humble, pastoral, and no-nonsense guy you've ever met.  He's the perfect choice and exactly what our Archdiocese needs. Our three bishops are so different yet they round each other out beautifully. The Ordination Mass begins with a clergy procession.  I wish I had the final count but there were something like 50 seminarians, 80 deacons, 150 priests, and 13 bishops.  Check out this bishop from Florida, he's like 7 feet tall before the mitre.  And...

First of all, thanks for enduring the overzealous high chair post .  And my week long sabbatical between Easter weekend posts . Picking up where we left off.  Holy Saturday morning we finished at the Savannah Farmers market and armed with a really good cup of locally roasted coffee, we crossed the bridge from Savannah into South Carolina.  The whole drive is like the scenery of Dawson's Creek. We arrived to Aunt Jo and Uncle Jim's just in time for lunch. We took a long walk into town and ate at a water front restaurant. After lunch we walked through town. The boys took Evie to the park, then back to the house while the ladies shopped. Beaufort has such fun little shops!  It's like Highlands, NC where our cabin is, but on the water. I was very much looking forward to the evening of a Low Country Boil or as they call it there, Frogmore Stew and a card game challenge, but Miss Evie had had her fill of fun and desperately need...

***As I finished this I realized it sounds sales-pitchy. It's not. I'm just so excited about it! And since I love reading friends reviews of baby products I figure, HECK, I'll still publish it.  Enjoy*** We were blessed with an awesome hand-me-down high chair. It was from 1996.  The boy it belonged to is a junior in our youth group.  Seriously, the high chair looked like it belong on the set for The Max on Saved By The Bell, but we LOVED IT. Alas, the latch on the poor thing broke rendering it unsafe to use. It was time for an upgrade. Unfortunately, our IKEA table and chairs are not conducive to a high chair / booster that straps to the chair. The chairs are so light weight Evie can pull them over so we don't want to risk her wiggling the booster seat over. The table also wouldn't be able to support a clip on seat like we use on the granite counters at my parents and Eric's parents.  It would tip over if she was in the seat. So instead of...

 Eric and I have been trying to get to Stateboro, GA to visit my siblings at least once a year. All three of them went to Georgia Southern.  After Katie (the last one) graduated two years ago we changed that "tradition" to Savannah, GA, where my brother, his wife, and our nephew/Godson Zachary live. Last year we went in early April .  This year we went down for Easter weekend. The whole trip came about because Eric's great aunt and uncle live in Beaufort, SC (about an hour away) and his family was meeting up to celebrate Easter there this year.  We took off Friday, left the house by 6 am to beat Spring Break traffic and were in Savannah by lunch. We had a pretty funny hiccup on the way down.  Just as we got to 75S/285 my GPS app was exploding with notifications about several miles of stopped traffic. I pulled up Atlanta traffic twitter feed and sure enough there was an accident.  And by accident I mean a tuna truck caught on fire! For...