Moran Family Fun

I'm going to wrap up our Philadelphia adventures, and only a month behind schedule! Our first full day in Philly started off with snacks at Reading Terminal Market before we struck out for the day. When we were planning our trip we had the girls all do some research on things to do in Philadelphia and pick the things they most wanted to see or do. Almost everyone mentioned the Franklin Institute so we made that the first order of business on our one full day in the city. As we were walking there we stopped to check out anything that looked interesting!  Here's our day of fun in photo format: Abigail, Natalie, and Samantha with the Philadelphia City Hall in the background. Jared, Abigail, Natalie, Samantha, and Emily in the courtyard of the city hall. I have a love for beautiful old buildings and this one is definitely beautiful even if it's not so old. The square across the street from the city hall was filled with statues of board game pieces - dominoes, ch...

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming (Philly travelogue) to bring you a tale of woe. Tuesday nights are MY night. Jared works at the Washington DC Temple that night and instead of coming home he sleeps his office. The long drive home combined with an early Wednesday meeting means that sleeping at work gives him two or more extra hours of sleep. As much as I love hanging with Jared, it's kind of nice to have an evening all to myself. I can watch whatever I want on television, or shut out the world and read, or spend my evening sewing, and I typically stay up much, much later than I do when Jared's home. This week I finally stumbled to bed around quarter to one after watching Dancing With the Stars, eating some Ritter Sport, and reading a few (okay, seven) chapters of The Way of Kings . I was just drifting off when Samantha came into my room with the news. Natalie had thrown up in their bed. Ugh. I told Samantha to just climb into my bed to sleep and went upsta...

Oh food, our favorite part of every trip! Before we left for Philadelphia a couple of different people recommend that we check out Reading Terminal Market. It's kind of a cross between an indoor farmer's market and a food court. Anything you wanted to eat was probably somewhere in there among the eighty-four different vendors selling everything from cheesesteaks (of course) to whoopie pies. When I booked our hotel I could tell from the map that it was close to the Market. What I didn't realize until we arrived was that the Market was right across the street from the main entrance to the hotel! During our three days in Philly we ate there five different times and were never disappointed.  This delectable display was at a pretty amazing Italian bakery, which was next to an equally amazing Italian deli and pizza place. We brought one of the heavenly chocolate mousse cakes back to our hotel and all enjoyed a bite or two. I may have eaten pizza from the place next doo...

Our plans for Spring Break 2016 kept changing and at one point it didn't look as if we were going to be doing anything more exciting than staying at home and working in the yard this year, but we finally nailed things down and spent a few fun days in Philadelphia. After our three days there, I can now say that the City of Brotherly Love is a new favorite of mine. Beautiful buildings, tons to see and do, and delicious food almost make me want to trade in our quiet rural life for the city. For me, the best part about driving to a vacation destination is stopping anywhere that looks interesting along the way. The only trouble with that philosophy is that what should be a three hour drive takes over six hours. On this particular drive we mostly stopped for food, first we backtracked to find the Krispy Kreme we didn't see soon enough to stop when we drove by it initially then we visited a Swiss Chocolate Factory in the Pennsylvania countryside. The chocolate factory was a let d...

Sometimes it seems as if there isn't much to share here because our life is simple and not that exciting most of the time. While gathering pictures for this post I realized that we actually have a lot of fun things going on and there are so many small moments in our days that I haven't been recognizing. As much as we may want it to, life doesn't slow down it just gets busier. I decided that we need to learn how to recognize those lovely moments and just see how much living we're really doing in the Moran house!   Abigail participated in the county spelling bee! Since she's an eighth grader this was her last chance for spelling bee glory. By some divine stroke of luck Jared and I were both able to be there to watch her compete that night. She made it through the first three rounds and was in the top 10 of all the spellers before getting out on percolate - I wan't surprised that she hadn't heard of and didn't know this often coffee related word. ...

Everyone knows that sleeping in church isn't exactly right, but at one point or another we've probably all been guilty of doing just that.  I'll share later how Samantha learned for herself why falling asleep in church isn't such a good idea. First though, a quick recap of February and the many fun happenings the shortest month of the year brought to our family. Why yes, that is a big square of missing carpet in our family room! Due to an unfortunate incident involving spilled milk (but no crying) and the resulting odor of said milk, I became desperate enough to actually take a box cutter and remove a six foot square portion of our carpet and the pad underneath. The smell was finally gone but the only solution for the missing carpet was to replace the carpet in the entire downstairs! Since that was a project we had planned on doing at some point anyway, it wasn't such a big deal. The hardest part was finding a carpet place we liked and choosing the right c...