Spring Weekend

Finally! After 547 days of snow and rain and then some more rain we had a spectacular weekend here in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was also a weekend jam-packed with activities. The fun stuff started on Friday night when Hannah and Liz (and Rob and I) attended our first family dance at the elementary school. This was the first school dance that Hannah and Liz (and quite possibly Rob) had ever attended and so there was MUCH excitement. Hannah changed her clothes THREE times and finally decided on a combination of several of her outfits. Lizzie combed her hair. Hannah danced from the moment we entered the gym until we dragged her home nearly 2 hours later. Lizzie sat on my lap in the back of the gym saying she might dance "the next one." This didn't faze me though, because I've heard the same line from her father for nearly 20 years. She did actually dance twice when her friend Keira made her. And she did think the dance was fun.
Hannah had a great time and told me the only thing that would have been better would have been if the lights had all gone off and then a single spotlight shown on her and Freddie (from iCarly) as they danced together. Yeah, I'm not worried about her teen years at all.... Here they are just before we left for the dance.On Saturday it was in the low 70s, bright sunshine with a tiny breeze and lots of fresh air. So what did we do? We got ourselves bundled into jackets and long pants and gloves and went ice skating with the Girl Scouts. My troop was coordinating the activity and roughly 175 girls showed up at the rink to skate, including Hannah and Lizzie. This was the first time on skates for both girls and luckily the rink had these trainer things so Rob (and I) didn't have to get on the ice to skate with them. It took Hannah about 10 seconds to start doing tricks:

And a couple more seconds to start making faces at me when I told her to watch out for the other skaters...

Here's Lizzie trying to skate without her trainer. It took her a little while, but she did it. She fell down a few times, but she didn't care. She was determined to skate like the big kids...

Hannah just kept whizzing by doing her tricks with the trainer. She actually would jump up into the air and then land again ...

Here Lizzie does a little work with the trainer. She really only wanted to use it to practice balancing before she did a lap without it. They both had a GREAT time (and we collected nearly 350 items for the food drive) and Rob decided that the next time I dragged him to an event like this he'd bring a book.

No spring weekend would be complete without dinner on the deck. Here we are about to dig into burgers (Hannah obviously wanted chicken...). You can see Cash in the background there. I put a very long chain in the backyard so he can hang out with us when we're out there, without having to be watched every second.

Here are the delicious burgers being made, while the new puppy checks the perimeter:

In between all the fun, of course, was more fun with the new dog. Cash is very well-loved and even had his first bath this weekend. Stay tuned for pictures from that activity taken by Hannah! We also went to our favorite park. Here's Hannah relaxing and probably dreaming of Freddie:

Yup, DEFINITELY thinking of Freddie: :)

And Lizzie, sharing a giggle with her Dad. It was really a great weekend and we were back to pouring rain on Monday, so it was really really really a nice break. We hope you all had a nice weekend, too!

Oh yeah, and I intruded on the Amish again and snapped this picture of a pick-up baseball game at the park: