The Week At Shem Palace

We're home (again). Boy it feels like we have been gone a lot lately!! We had a really rough start to our week at the lake. The water was so far down that the dock was halfway out of the water. That meant we had to pull our ski boat off the boat lift with the pontoon boat. It took forever and ended up coming off sideways and getting a huge black mark down the side. Then B and I spent 2 whole days pushing the dock out further into the lake. Remember- it is a 2-story dock with 2 boats attached to it and a 30 foot walkway.... I have bruises everywhere and am so sore!! The bright side is - I don't need to go to the gym anytime soon and I probably worked off the BlueBell Chocolate Extreme ice cream I may have eaten several nights after the girls went to bed... We tried to hook up both boats to the dock and pull it out with them, but that just resulted in breaking some expensive ropes and also mangling our ski pole on the pontoon... Then it rained really hard for a couple days and we neglected to move my Sequoia to the upper driveway. We had to go to a nearby town one day to meet with the builder for our lakehouse and we were going to go antiquing in a little tiny town on the way there. B tried to get my car out of the muck and ended up sliding halfway down to the lake. Took a couple hours (and $110.00) to find a tow truck that could come out and tow us back to the top of the driveway. Needless to say we forgot about going antiquing and just barely made it to our meeting with the builder. After those few stressful days, things got much better. We had a great meeting with the builder (lasted almost 2 hours and the girls were perfect) and decided to go forward with building the new lakehouse in October. We had dinner that night with Brian's cousin and her husband and enjoyed that very much. We went antiquing the next day in the little town (seriously, it looks like Mayberry) and had a great time. Had a couple of good days playing on the lake and swimming and then our friends" shem-lover" and his wife came down with their 2 boys and we had a total blast with them. BTW- the girls beat the guys 2 nights in a row- once at Mexican Train Dominoes and once at Spades. Handed their hineys to them on a platter. That's right. Girls rule. So, it was overall a great trip. We are going again in August for another week and we will start trying to get organized so the packing up can begin to get ready to build the new house.... So excited about that. Got a lot of thinking done on the front porch of the lake in the mornings- I'll have to talk about that later. It's late and I am tired. Tired and happy and have lots to do this week! I'll post lake pictures soon. Oh- Emmaline got up on skis this week and went a good little distance before she fell. She tried many times and we were so proud of her!! She is being rewarded with a Pancake Puffs pan (she is obsessed with infomercials) as was promised. I do have some pics of her before she fell, so those will be there, too. ; ) Summer has been a lot of fun so far- school starts next month, so we are going to savor the next few weeks......