We had a fun weekend!
On Friday, my sister Shannon and her boyfriend Myles came to visit us for the weekend. Before they arrived, though, our summer roommate Katie took Gabriel and I on a special tour of the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL). Even though I’ve been a “NASA wife” for a few years now, I had never been to the NBL before, and I loved it!
The NBL is an enormous indoor pool with mockups of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. The astronauts train at the NBL for each mission. The finals of the ROVER International Robotics Competition were held over the weekend, and Katie was a volunteer and got to bring guests in for tours during the competition.
On Saturday night, Shannon and Myles treated us to a Houston Dynamo game. I loved it! I played soccer through about 8th grade, and all of my brothers and sisters played soccer through high school (with my brother on soccer scholarship in college) so it was nice to actually know what was going on in the game!
Unfortunately, the Columbus Crew stole the show from the Dynamo this weekend, but the Dynamo really did play hard, and I’d definitely go see another game! My dad is actually a big soccer fan, so Michael and I started preliminary scheming to lure him to Houston for a visit by taking him to a game sometime.
For Father’s Day on Sunday, we ended up having a much more busy day than we planned! We went to 9am mass, then to the mall to pick out Michael’s birthday gift, and then to have lunch with our good friends the Perrymans. After a long nap for the entire family that afternoon, we went over to our friend Lucy’s house for the evening. We made homemade grilled pizzas and Italian sausage for dinner, and the little boys (six in all under 4!) played in a kiddie pool and then played their sweaty little boy hearts out all evening. It was a joy to see them all toddling around together. Lucy and I ended up throwing her two oldest and Gabriel in the bathtub together, where we managed to knock off at least the first layer of mud, grass and sweat from them. Rub-a-dub-dub, three boys in the tub…it’s called a circus!
Here are some adorable home videos from that afternoon…
We ended up just letting him run around in a diaper for the rest of the evening after dinner. He didn’t mind. 🙂
Gabriel mowed the lawn and followed 3 1/2 year-old John-Matthew around for 40 minutes while Katie and I cleaned up inside and Michael weeded the driveway for Lucy.
In other news…I gave Gabriel his first clipper haircut today. I’ve been trimming his hair with scissors every once in a while, but this was his first official Little Boy Haircut. Lucy let me borrow a DVD on cutting hair, and I watched it and then I took Gabriel outside, got Michael’s clipper set, and went at it! I don’t have any photos yet, but here’s some video from this afternoon with the new ‘do. 🙂
A lot going on in Houston!!