I get so busy seeing people and going places and having a great time that I don’t have a moment to spare for photo editing or blogging and then I fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted without even
checking my email.

Okay, that’s not true, I do check my email eleventy-three times a day regardless of where I am. But I really do tend to run out of time and never get around to posting all the great photos I’m taking or writing about what we’re doing till four days later. Oh well.

In case you were wondering, we’re in Omaha now. Well, at the moment we’re in Kansas City at Joe & Kassie’s house, but this was a quick visit and we’ll be back in Omaha tomorrow. We don’t have any plans for tomorrow night yet, so maybe I’ll have the chance to post something better than this.

In the meantime, here! Look at these cute photos of Annalie I took before we left California!

The other day, Annalie and I stopped for lunch at Subway (support Chuck by supporting the sponsors of Chuck!) at a shopping center where there was an outdoor dining area. It was quite pretty, with a pond surrounded by rocks and filled with water plants. We enjoyed watching the ducks while we ate.

When we’d finished eating and I told Annalie was time to go, she asked if she could go look at the pond for a minute. Eager to get back home, I said we should really get going. Annalie sweetly asked, “But don’t you want to take a picture of me over there on the rocks by the water, Mom? It’s so pretty!” I swear she actually batted her eyelashes at me.

It was clever, though. So I took a photo and rewarded her with a few extra minutes to watch the ducks.

Seriously, I should be doing the last couple of loads of laundry right now. I should also be getting dressed, picking up these toys all over the living room, vacuuming, unloading the dishwasher, cleaning the catboxes, making a list of what to pack for Omaha, getting packages ready to mail, going to the post office, and picking up Troy in a couple of hours.

Yes, I said PICKING UP TROY. He’ll be home today, yay! Then we leave for Omaha tomorrow. That seemed like a good idea when I bought the tickets. Oh well, we will manage…and then we’ll be in Omaha, hanging out with my family and friends and eating at Wheatfields and Spaghetti Works and all that good stuff.

Because of all these things I should be doing, I’m not writing a nice long post about visiting Sonja and Noah with Brenda and Bug earlier this week. I won’t mention how I realized at the last minute that I didn’t have any bread to make sandwiches for the picnic we’d planned, so I made a loaf of chocolate-banana bread which made perfect sense at the time. I won’t go into detail about how the wading pool at the park turned out to not be open yet, so we went back to Sonja’s house where the kids had a blast with big plastic storage tubs and the hose. I’m not explaining how we were bummed that our original plans to have dinner with Jen and her family fell through, and how we ended up spending the night in the Sticks at Sue’s house even though we didn’t have toothbrushes or a change of clothes. I don’t need to go into detail about how we got to see Heather and her girls briefly, and were treated to a demo of the cool new cloth grocery bags Heather’s been making, or how we went to visit Brenda’s grandpa the following morning before we came back home.

Suffice it to say, it was a crazy two days, a whirlwind of driving and coffee and hanging out with some seriously fun people and really cute kids all getting along famously and not having to break up even one fight.

Since I’m not telling you all those things, you should go look at these photos on Flickr instead.