Putting the family to work

There have been a lot of home improvements taking place at Miller Plantation over the last few weeks! And all by family members....well sort of.

Pictured is Sophia installing the tile back splash in our kitchen. She has also been working hard at holding the cabinets up! The truth is, we are having the back splash installed (finally) with some Obama stimulus tax money. This is all happening 2 years after we started redoing the kitchen. Or has it been 3? I am so happy that we are finally putting an end to the kitchen makeover project! And Justin is so happy that he's not having to do the tile work himself! I'm glad too. I thought we could do it ourselves, but after watching the installer work I'm glad we hired an "expert"! Of course I have to give props to the cabinets Sophia is so happily holding up! They were fauxed by none other than Joyfaux herself!

Speaking of Joy, the other pictures are of Sophia's room. While we were on vacation Joy graciously came in and worked on her mural. It is breathtaking. She still has a few touches to do, like a frog-prince, but it has come a long way since she started in December! Our little princess now has a beautiful castle to call her own!

Happy Father's Day!

The Millers celebrated Father's Day the only way we know how-the crazy chaotic way!

It all started Sunday morning when Chasen woke up Justin so that HE could open his Father's Day gifts. And when I say HE, I mean CHASEN! Justin said the best Father's Day gift that he could have gotten was sleeping in....oh well!

I spent the whole day cleaning up to get ready for our families to come over for dinner. Cleaning up with two kids is like a cat chasing his tail. As soon as I clean one spot, another is dirty. And Sophia doesn't help because she wants to be fed or held every ten minutes! Around noon I started to make my carrot cake dessert right as Justin said "I need the oven for my ribs!". Well, the "1 hour" the recipe swears it will take you to make the cake doesn't account for a 3 year old insisting on helping out. So 2 hours later the cake is done. This puts Justin way behind in cooking the ribs. This setback layered on top of a grill that wasn't cooperating
had us eating at 9:00 at night! Now, to the Millers this is about average. I think Thanksgiving was around 9:45 at one time. But the Thompsons are use to eating at 6:00! But everything was very good and my carrot cake was well worth the wait (in my opinion)!

Florida Vacation

The Millers took a vacation tour of Florida last week. I think we will need a week to recover from our excursions!

Our main intention was to visit our friends Tim and Colette Marshall who live in Orlando. We wanted to see them and also to go to Sea World. The tickets to Sea World had a deal where you buy one ticket and get a free ticket to Busch Gardens in Tampa. We figured we would do that and at the same time visit my relatives who live there. Busch Gardens was a lot of fun, but extremely hot. It was very well put together with the animal exhibits. We kept commenting that it was nicer than the Atlanta zoo! We liked that there were animals and rides so there was always something to do. They even had a Sesame Street area that had Chasen-style fun. We spent a lot of time there.

From Tampa we headed to Orlando to see our friends. We all went to Sea World and again dealt with 100 degree weather. It seemed hotter in Sea World and we didn't get to see the whole park before calling it a day. But we were able to pet stingrays, see dolphins and Shamu, see a few shows (including an Elmo musical), and view dozens of sharks. They also had a Chasen-friendly area and he rode his first roller coaster! He liked it at first but then just closed his eyes and laid his head on my shoulder. When it was over and I asked him if he liked it he shook his head no! At Tim and Colette's we did a lot of swimming in their pool. Chasen hasn't taken swimming lessons yet but he's getting a bit braver every time we swim.

We then left to visit St. Augustine. We figured we could visit the beach and heard that it was a kid friendly town. I believe it's kid friendly because there are several streets in the old town district that cars can't drive on. And even the ones that allowed cars weren't that busy. St. Augustine was really dead while we were there. Many of the shops closed early because of this. We also seemed to be the only customers at the places we ate at! This was good for our active Chasen! They did have a nice children's park and we took Chasen there to play one night. We visited the St. Augustine beach and realized how insane it was to take a baby to the beach! Sophia didn't like it one bit and I ended up getting a horrible sunburn trying to keep her pacified. My legs that were sitting outside the umbrella she was under look like lobster legs! I think we will try the beach again when she is around two and can play in the water.

Overall we had a good time. But I have to say we are glad to be home. When we got home Chasen talked to Nana Joy and she asked him if he had fun on his vacation. He quickly said "NO!" See for yourself, on our Shutterfly site I created a new album with our vacation pictures in it. See if you can catch Chasen smiling@