Wednesday and Thursday felt like spring. Friday and Saturday felt like winter. Sunday was spring again. This is truly my least favorite time of year. While I am happy to occasionally have a bit of sunshine and warm temperatures, this back and forth garbage is for the birds! Mike's parents visited on Saturday while the weather was at its worst, unfortunately. So they took Benjamin and enjoyed some indoor activities with him. When the weather was better on Sunday, the three of us tried to take advantage of it as much as we could. The photo above was taken while Benjamin sang about baseball and did some kind of crazy dance on the driveway, go figure.

As I said in my previous post, we've been working on some small home improvement projects here and there. Mike installed these new overhead lights in the basement, which I thought went well with our movie-theme down there. They kind of remind me of an old art deco movie theater.

I spent a couple of days freshening up the 3 doors in the front of the house with a new coat of paint. I went with a dark blue color, which seemed classier to me than the lighter blue that had been there since we moved in almost 7 years ago (yikes)!

There is more work to be done! I just hope my new inspired outlook on my list of to-do's sticks around. We have a huge amount of work to do before Benjamin moves into his new room. I am not looking forward to that. I'm also trying to delay that process as long as I can because I'm not sure that I am ready to move my baby downstairs!

Here's a photo of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin from our 2003 trip to Ireland.

The last of the snow around our house has finally melted and signs of spring are beginning to appear. Benjamin and I grabbed the chance to enjoy some outside time Friday afternoon while I cleaned the garage and he rode up and down the block in his electric jeep. Saturday morning, while Mike was away on his run, his brother Dan called and asked if he and Katie could come down for the afternoon. We had a fun visit with them and Katie and I were even able to get some shopping in at Hobby Lobby. I bought our first item for the baby's nursery and am pretty excited about it. I won't share what it is until we're ready to reveal my plans for the room sometime after we find out the baby's gender.

On Sunday we helped our friends Jen and Nate celebrate the first birthday of their daughter Julia. It is hard to believe that she is already a year old!

The weather was so beautiful, but for some reason we found ourselves inside installing new overhead lights in our basement family room Sunday afternoon. The lights look great and certainly make the room brighter at night, but Mike's neck may never be the same! I'll take a photo of the new lights and post it sometime soon. Either my nesting instinct is kicking in or maybe it is just the coming of spring or it could be the countless hours of HGTV in HD that I've been watching, but I've been very inspired to do some small projects around the house. I'll show them off here when I can.

Mike and I were able to see another one of our favorite bands, The Avett Brothers, in concert this weekend at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Before the show we enjoyed some Thai food at Chiang Mai Thai, which was our first "date night" in a very long time. The concert was fantastic! We only very recent came across their music and are most familiar with their most recent release, so we were very happy that much of the set list was familiar to us. I was very nervous about staying awake, since pregnancy has made me impossibly tired lately, but to my surprise I was able to stay awake until almost 1am without any problems.

From our vantage point at the concert:

Benjamin spent the night with Grandma and Grandpa Schmitt who also took him to see Great Aunt Alice Saturday afternoon while Mike and I grabbed the chance to have even more alone time.

On Sunday we prepared for our annual Oscars party, which was a success! We really aimed to make it a low stress party with simple foods and more time spent with our friends vs. cooking, etc. I think we met our goal. We had about 10 adults and 4 kids and it was a lot of fun. Now we just need to catch up on our movie watching!

Benjamin has been taking swimming lessons for a couple of weeks now. Mike takes him and has been able to snap a few pictures of him swimming.
He really enjoys the class but is still quite hesitant to fully jump in the water, which all of the kids do at the end of the class. I think after another few classes he'll be a pro at it!