Phew!

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief last night as the San Jose Sharks advanced to the Western Conference Semi-finals.

It was a great game and I love the fact that the 38-year-old Jeremy Roenick was the star player last night with two goals and two assists. The Sharks now go onto battle with the Dallas Stars and Nathan is happy to have more Shark hockey to watch!

Dylan leaves Sunday for New York, and we are busy with preparations for his trip. Yesterday I took him out of school (gasp!) to get his hair cut and his banking done. Thanks to very generous grandparents, he now has a respectable amount of US spending money to take with him. He'll be able to eat when his meals aren't provided for him, and he'll be able to bring home a souvenir or two. This evening after supper we're going shopping to get him some new dress shoes. He's been wearing Don's everytime he's had a band or choir performance, but we can't have him taking Don's shoes for an entire week! Hopefully Dylan's feet are done growing and he can wear the new shoes for quite some time. He also needs swim trunks and maybe some dress clothes.

Nathan is presenting his portfolio at school right now. It's his final graduation requirement. He got his hair cut yesterday as well in preparation for his senior portraits that we're having done this Friday. We're going to do some shopping in Bellingham while we're down there as Nathan thinks it's about time that he have a suit to wear to formal events. He's hoping that Kelsey will meet us and help him choose one.

Sean is still mad about paintball. It's nice that he has a hobby, and I really don't mind the whole paintball scene. He bought himself a gun, some paintballs, and some o-rings with his portion of the trailer money (each of the boys got a pay-out), so now he's raring to go to paintball battle.

Patience and Jordyn are both doing well. I'm letting their hair grow and so they've been sporting ponytails, pigtails, and french braids lately. It's fun!

Don did sell the trailer last weekend. He was so happy to see it go. We took the family out to Pizza Hut to celebrate and then took the kids shopping so they could spend their portion of the proceeds. Dylan chose to go to Michelle's house instead, since he was using his money for his New York trip.

We've been having cold, clear weather here the past few days so Don has taken advantage of it and gotten the spraying done on our trees. Just in the nick of time, as today it's raining again.

On Saturday I spent about 6 hours at cadets making lunch for 80 cadets plus officers. There were 4 of us in the morning, making soup, sandwiches, and veggie platters. After lunch, only two of us hung around to clean up. There were so many leftovers that we were able to make sack lunches for 24 cadets who ran in the Vancouver Sun Run the next day, and 10 more sack lunches for cadets who were going to the range. After those lunches were all made, the two of us split up the leftovers. I brought home so much food that we've not had to shop for anything except milk since!

Here are the kids after the Sun Run. Nathan's in the front row, and you can see Sean's head about 4 or 5 rows back:

While Don and Waneta were here last week, Don Sr. built me a new planter box for strawberries! Waneta bought us three different varieties of plants: two of June-bearing, and one everbearing, so we should be rich in strawberries this summer. Yeah!

I think that's about all the news and non-news from our neck of the woods.