Weekend Basics

Happy Monday! With spring weather almost here (yep, it's still dragging), we're starting to get back into the swing of chock-filled weekends. This weekend was no exception with the 10k, a little project planning and our youngest niece's first birthday all in the lineup.

Each spring we look forward to the Monument Avenue 10k. It's dubbed one of the friendliest races in America and the course happens to pass right through our neighborhood. This is a great thing since we love getting out to stand on the sidelines and watch everyone pass through — but it also land-locks us in for the majority of that Saturday. We enjoy watching the fast-paced runners breeze through in the first waves, followed by the crowds of participants dressed in costumes. This year we spotted everyone from Pac Man and the wolf to an incredible "skyline" of good old #RVA.

We got a chance to see lots of familiar faces passing through and were keeping a special lookout for family — there's our oldest niece, Caitlin with our sister-in-law Becky!

Stephanie was participating again this year, so we were also given the mission to look for "hot pink" right around the 9:45am mark. Before long, she passed on through and we caught a quick blurry glimpse:

I'm not sure if we've mentioned here on the blog that Stephanie has been apartment hunting and within the last month found an awesome place here in the fan. We'll have to share more details for another post, but ended up walking with Basil up to her place, which has a front porch and we kept a lookout with all her friends from a different location than normal this year.

Oh, and yes — we were drinking Bloody Mary's to help keep warm while watching the action. Later in the day once all the road barriers had been removed we were able to venture out to gather supplies for a few upcoming DIY projects. First on the list — copper pipes:

We'll look forward to sharing more from this project as it comes together, perhaps early next week.

In more family news, we celebrated our youngest niece, Chelsea's, first birthday this weekend:

Teller and Ben invited us over for a family celebration and we were (happily) tasked with bringing a birthday cake — which you know Mary loves a good challenge. Similar to the M&M cake Mary made last year for Benjamin's 4th birthday, she went with a number theme, making different shapes with cookie cutters and sprinkles:

We'll share more on the cake later this week and wanted to share a few pics from the party. Teller had the baby and house decked out with Pinterest style decorations all under the color combo of pink and turquoise. For Chelsea's gift, Mary made a little sequin butterfly stuffed toy. Teller's first word as a baby had been "butterfly" so we thought she might like it and while it kept her interest for a second, the most enticing part of the present was the gift bag and tissue paper:

Can you believe I was able to capture a shot with all four kids (almost) looking at the camera and smiling?

It's always incredible seeing how much they continue to grow — we all joked that if feels like just yesterday we were all there celebrating Virginia's first birthday. Heck, I seemed to have blinked and have an almost 23 year old daughter. We'll celebrate Stephanie's birthday next week.

We hope you had a wonderful weekend wherever you might be and good start to the week ahead. Thanks, as always, for taking the time to stop in and see what we've been up to lately.