Spring Cleaning 1

This is what I found this morning. It's (hopefully) our last snow of the winter. The big one said that she felt like we'd fast-forwarded through Spring, Summer, and Fall and were in Winter again.
But, it's still Spring and we have been doing lots of cleaning. I cleaned out the camera, for one, and here's a few highlights of what I found:

The little one turned two at the end of January. Surprise! She has been acting very 2-like. She likes to dictate the house and demand her way, but she's just so little and cute. She is however, sleeping all night in her bed and is starting to use real words, other then, "EHHH, EHHH!" while pointing.

On our trip to St. Louis we came across this cool tree at the Art Museum.

The girls are such tree-huggers, or at least fake-tree-snugglers.

While on vacation, the little one got a nice shiner. She was in a street fight with some other kid in the line for Ben and Jerry's. The kid loves her ice cream.

The big one hijacked the camera. Again. And took more artistically riveting photos like this one. Again.
The cleaning has spread from the camera to the house, actually from the house to the camera, but I'll (maybe) post more on that later.

Last weekend we went on "vacation." It wasn't a real vacation because it wasn't relaxing, but it was nice to do something different (even if it was more exhausting than real life.)
We went down to the St. Louis area, our old college stomping ground. The whole trip was, in my opinion, an elaborate ploy to revisit all of the delicious food that we loved when we lived down there. We started at the pizza joint in our college town and were sorely disappointed by the lack of cheese. Our next attempt was the Thai restaurant that we have been faithfully returning to since 2000. There we received the harshest blow: the cook had left and apparently taken all of the deliciousness of Thai with her. Thankfully (and I do mean that only God could have provided us this opportunity) there was a waitress that sort of remembered how to make #33 (or #36 according to the new menus) and she wrote it down for us (in English.) It is almost embarrassingly simple, but it's a real treasure. Our last visit was the old 24 hour truck stop that didn't disappoint. The chocolate chip pancakes were as fabulous as ever. Pepper those events with odd encounters with weird people, 5 hours of zoo time, swimming, and bad mattresses and you have one exhausting weekend! But maybe even better than a vacation that you hate to end is one that makes you eager to get home.