Life in Indiana

The weather has been relatively nice since we arrived here last month.  Which has softened the blow of moving away from our family and friends in Lexington.

We have been spending a lot of time outdoors exploring our neighborhood and playground.  Owen loves that we can ride our bikes around the corner and be at the playground.  He will especially like that this summer we can ride our bikes to the pool.

This is our neighborhood playground (I took these photos over a month ago so it is much more green now)...

 The neighborhood clubhouse and pool - which also has a baby pool...  (Owen asks almost every morning if the pool is open yet).

We have been exploring Indianapolis by making many visits to the Children's Museum...

And Urban Chalkboard, the greatest children's place I have ever been to.  It is a modern cafe for parents and a play place for kids.  There are magazines that interest a young mom like myself (and I specifically am talking about US Weekly and People Magazine), and yes I actually got to read while my kids played happily.  Urban Chalkboard has a studio where they have music class, book club, story hour, etc.  It is so much fun and the boys absolutely LOVE it!!

We have also been exploring the city by bike.  We bought a bike trailer and a couple of new bikes for Brad and I.  It takes us about 10 minutes by bike to get to downtown Carmel from our house.  We ride through a couple of neighborhoods to get on the Monon trail - which runs from downtown Indy straight north through a few different suburbs up to Carmel and even further north beyond Carmel.  This summer we will look forward to riding bikes to breakfast, the farmer's market, and we could even hit up some breweries on the trail if the kids cooperate.  

We stopped along the trail for some coffee and smoothies...

And found a train museum that we had to stop and see...

During our bike ride last weekend the Carmel marathon was going on.  The boys loved being in the middle of all the action and cheering on the runners while listening to music along the way....

Here are some pictures of the Monon trail in Carmel - it is such a beautiful ride, I can't wait to go further on the trail and do some more exploring...

We have been spending a lot of time with our friends from Martinsville....

And spending time with Pop Pop in Martinsville...

Grayson even got to ride...

We have been to Lowe's more times than I can count - the boys don't mind at all...

 We also received a pretty awesome hand-me-down from the Majors family - our new bounce house.  We are actually using this as a ploy to make friends with the neighbors.....

And we have been playing a lot in our nice, big, flat driveway...

The boys have been adjusting well to the move.  It took Owen a few weeks and he still tells me that he does not live in Indiana, he lives in Kentucky.  But finally he is no longer screaming at bedtime or throwing major fits.  He usually chooses one (or 5) of favorite toys and plays in his room for a while before falling asleep.  Whatever works.

We are excited for the weather to warm and to spend more time exploring this new city of ours.

Easter 2015

We had a week long Easter celebration.  It started with Max, Luke and Kristin coming to visit us for a few days.  The boys were on spring break and we are so thankful they decided to spend their week with us.  Owen was waiting at the door for their arrival...

 And when they finally got here this is what happened....

It was wrestle mania for three straight days and everyone was in pure heaven.  The boys had movie nights in the basement...

 And slumber parties in Owen's room each night...

 They went fishing at the pond across the street....

 And we explored the Children's Museum... 

Owen took some guitar lessons from Max...

 Grayson enjoyed reading with Auntie Nene...

And we even got to spend some time with this special lady - our GG....

 We had so much fun and my boys were devastated when it was time to say goodbye.

After Max and Luke left it was time to get ready for the UK game.  UK played Wisconsin in the final four game of March Madness the night before Easter.  Our friend Christian came in town from California and Brian and Lauren came to watch the CATS continue through the tournament with an undefeated record - or so we thought.  The boys were into the games and they cheered for the CATs at home...

While we went out on the town and left them with a new babysitter.

I did not get any pictures from this night but it went like this - we were very excited to see fellow UK fans and cheer for the CATS, we had high expectations that they would win.  Actually none of us really questioned that it was even possible they would lose in the final four.  UK was pretty much down the entire game, and we were watching with a ton of Wisconsin fans (which I really don't understand), whom were loud and obnoxious.  We were pretty disappointed to see them lose - but no one was more displeased than Christian who spent a lot of money to come for the experience.

Anyways, we were out super late and the next morning was Easter.  I knew the boys would be excited that the Easter bunny had come.  So I drug myself out of bed at 6AM after about 4 1/2 hours of sleep to prepare for this special day.

I made myself a strong cup of this...

And I might of even added a bit of this...

Just so I could be up to see these happy faces..

Then the Drapp family came in town and we all went to church...

 We pretty much didn't hear one bit of the homily because we were busy keep up with these busy boys...

Once we got home they were ready for their Easter egg hunt...

Grayson had to see what big brother got...

 And take what big brother got....

 Overall we had a great Easter week and we were all exhausted after everyone left.  Our small family including Christian took a long nap before we said our goodbyes to Christian at the airport.  I hope you all are enjoying this nice spring weather and had a great Easter week just like we did.