An Eventful Weekend

Finally...we signed Sydney up for swim lessons at Goldfish swim school.  She is so petrified of the water...it was just time.  She looked really cute with the goggles and everything and kept giving me a thumbs up (all of the parents stand behind a glass wall and can come into the swim area for the last five minutes of the lesson).  It was Sydney and two little boys and they sat on the ledge, each taking turns with the intructor.  Sydney was always last, so I knew what was going to come by watching the other two first.  This was the most basic lessons...for total beginners, so they did things like floating on their backs while being held, kicking, and pretending they were monkeys as they moved along the pool holding onto the edge.  It was going just great, until I saw the instructor dip the first boy under water.  I was thinking...."oh no", Sydney is going to freak out!  She HATED going under, but she never would have done it for us!  You'll be able to tell which picture was taken after she went under.  She was all proud of herself in the end.  She said she had fun but she doesn't want to come back (which means she was pretending she had fun).  She IS going back though, she needs to learn to not give us the death grip every time we enter a pool!  We'll see how she does next week!

Now for the fun stuff..(but not according to anyone else).  We are getting granite countertops...yayyyyyy!  I've been wanting them so badly!  We can't afford new cabinets, but they aren't awful, so everything should flow.  We also had to pick out tiles for the new backsplash!  It was actually kind of hard...I know what I like, but it's hard to figure out what really goes together.  We have to live with it and love it and it's tough to know if you're making the right decision.  Hopefully we did...I can't wait to see the final product!

In the midst of all of this, I went out with some girlfriends that I went to elementary school with.  Although some people are against Facebook, I can only thank Facebook for connecting me with people that I would never have spoken to otherwise.  It was so awesome to see how everyone has grown up and matured and in another sense has never really changed at all.  It was great to catch up and I can only hope that my kids meet some amazing friends when they are young and maintain those friendships into adulthood.  I moved out of Southfield at the beginning of 4th grade to West Bloomfield.  And although I spent most of my years going to WB schools, the people that I met and the friends that I made in Southfield made a bigger impact on my life than WB.  Of course I met some great people at WB that I am still friends with, but I am thankful for my great childhood and the great people that I met. I think what I liked about Southfield was that everyone just seemed to be friends.  There weren't any "groups" or "cliques".  That wasn't the case at West Bloomfield. I hope to see these people more often, it was a great mini reunion!

And last but not least, I received a recipe for Jason's Grandma's famous challah and I was determined to make it.  It's quite the process and it took up most of the morning, but it was kind of fun.  I make banana bread and stuff like that all of the time, but this was the real deal...yeast and all...I even had to roll it out and braid it.  I didn't have bread flour (to be perfectly honest, I thought flour was flour and didin't know there were different kinds...but there are!) so I used all purpose flour and I think it turned out pretty darn good.  Now, I'm curious how different it would taste if I actually used bread flour, so I might have to give it a try again sometime soon...afterall, I've already eaten half of the loaf...so it's not going to last very long...that's my biggest downfall...bread...can never turn it down!