Let the activities commence...

School is back in session...therefore...the activities are back in session. This in turn makes me a busy mom and leaves even less time for blogging. Love it though, and I encourage my girls to be involved and seek to find what it is they really love. Otherwise we would all be sitting at home watching Nick Jr. and staring at the computer...so this is good for us all!

So what is on tap for the Fall???

Sarah: Gymnastics, Girl Scouts, Irish Dancing, Hip/Hop and Soccer
Lauren: Gymnastics, Music, and Ballet/Tap

Luckily for me they have gymnastics on the same day at the same time and when Lauren has ballet/tap, Sarah has hip hop.

Lauren is loving her ballet/tap class. She is in there with her BFF Addison and she really gets so excited to dress up like a ballerina.



Today she took her first gymnastics class at a real gym and she was FANTASTIC. I should have taken my camera. She was so cute in her little leotard with chubby legs, she followed instruction, tried everything, and really loved it. She was even really good at everything. So much so....visions of Mary Lou were dancing in my head and I was thinking "Is it wrong to sign my 2 year-old up for gymnastics twice a week. Do I need to write Bela and starting planning a move to Houston? Does Bela even still have his ranch and still coach? Does Mary Lou coach?" Anyway...I hope she keeps it up!

As for Sarah...She is loving Hip Hop and being in a class with all 4 of her longtime BFF's.

She officially starts Girls Scouts back up next week and Irish Dancing in a couple of days. She took her 1st gymnastics class at a new gym today and loved it. Soccer is in full swing. They played their first game this last weekend. They now get to play goalie which was a highlight for Sarah. It is going to be a busy, but super fun fall!

Go Hurricanes!

Back to School

I cannot believe it! Where did the summer go and where did my baby Sarah go? I know she is only in first grade, but in the blink of an eye we will be dropping her off 2 blocks from the school for junior high and I cannot make time slow down. I so badly want to see her grow and become a beautiful woman, but I think childhood is going just a bit too fast.

So 1st grade...new teacher, new friends. Thankfully she knows a few girls in her class, but for the most part it is all new people. I hope she has a great day. I hope she likes her teacher and I hope she has fun with her new friends. She was so excited last night that she didn't want to read a story, but go right to bed. She looked so super cute this morning in her new dress and her spectacular shoes. They are very sparkly and they light up when she walks. Lauren is very jealous. (No worries Lauren, they will be yours in about 4 years!)

If you look closely, you can see the purple light on the carpet coming from Sarah's shoes!

Lauren, on the other hand, was starting a new class today at her daycare. She is not technically in pre-school, but it is school all the same. She is not wearing uniforms yet, but that is really the only difference. She was a little shy at first, gingerly walking into her class and checking it out. I know once her BFF Addison shows up she will snap out of it and be full of energy. She has missed "her Addison" all summer and is so glad she will be back in her class!

Wanna Go, Gotta Go, A-Chi-O

First off....I finished my post about Where to Eat in Dublin...Because it was a work in progress, when I posted it, it post dated it back to when I started working on it, so it does not show as my last post. Go HERE to read it if you are interested.

Ok...Back to Alpha Chi Omega...

This is Rush week (excuse me...recruitment week) over at TCU. As the FW Alumnae Pres. it is my duty to get the alumnae over there to the campus to help out with parties, and meals, and such. As much as rush is hated in general for its long hours and non-stop singing and smiling, I actually do enjoy going over to the house and being a part of it all. It brings back a lot of memories of all the good times I had at TCU while living in the AXO house. It reminds me of a much simpler time in my life and part of me longs to have that back. However, I wouldn't trade a thing for the life I have now with my husband and kids. Although it might make me feel older to be surrounded by young women just starting their lives, it sort makes me feel younger like I was back in college. I enjoy meeting a lot of the collegians and hanging out with my sisters I may not see very much. It is a fun bonding experience that can be hectic and tiring, but worth it.

Collegians preparing for recruitment

Wonderful Alumnae

3 Little AXO Legacies

I know I will be coming home every night singing all those old songs.
They really do get stuck in your head.

One of these days

One of these days I will get back to posting. I have been so busy this summer, that I can hardly find the time to sit and think for more than a few minutes. Right now I am sitting in the most gorgeous beach house in Manhattan Beach watching the morning surfers ride the waves.
I may never leave.
They are going to have to drag me out of here on Sunday. I thought I would catch up on my blogging while being here, but I have found that the beach has been calling me and my kids everyday. I also found the entire series of Twilight books here in the house, so I could not resist doing a little reading. (and I never read).

SO I have lots to post about. I am working on the what to eat in Dublin post currently....but after this week I may have to post about what to eat in the South Bay. We have been eating at all of our old favorite places this week and I feel about 10 pounds heavier.

Side note: We used to live down here in PV and I used to work in Redondo Beach, so this is our old stomping grounds when we were newlyweds. Who knows...maybe in the near future we will be back. ;)

So I will get back to blogging...I promise...just maybe not this weekend. Only a few more days in beach house heaven and I am going to soak it up!

Dublin: Where to Eat

I think it is pretty safe to say that our favorite thing we did in Dublin, was EAT. We had a few great meals and I am going to share those with you.

The Favorite: Kinara
Type of Food: Indian/Pakistani

If you read my blog at all, you probably know my love of Indian food. So I was very excited when my mother-in-law found this place and suggested we go. It was a little outside of the city center, but so worth the little bit longer taxi ride. They totally accommodated our group of 14 and gave us a private table upstairs in a private room that had its own bar. (This was also prefect because I was able to smuggle in McDonald's for the kids without the whole restaurant being privy to the situation.)

What we ate:
Appetizers:
The brought us an assortment of the best lamb shanks we have ever had. BBQ'd to perfection and little on the spicy side. Also we had prawns, chicken, and aloo-tiki (potato cakes with garlic)! Yum!
I also had the Kinara signature martini to start. It tasted like a grapefruit!

Dinner:
Charlie and I split the chicken tikka masala (always a favorite) and the Nehari Gosht. It is a traditional Pakistani beef dish. Both were excellent. It was all served with an assortment of cheese, sweet, and regular naan.


The Chicken Tikka Masala came in these cute little red pots!


Dessert:
Most people had the assortment of mixed ice creams, but I had the Mississippi Mud Cake. Yes, you heard me right....that is why I had to get it. Do Indian/Pakistani people that live in Dublin know anything about Mississippi Mud?? The answer is NO. It cam out more like a chocolate chess pie. It was not the Mississippi Mud I grew up with. It was still good.

Yeah..not quite what I had envisioned.

My Irish coffee for my dessert with my dessert. Made with Jameson. Too strong for me. It did not get left undrinken (is that a word). With the McDonald family it was sure to find a happy home.

The view outside the restaurant. Gorgeous.

Restaurant #2 was called Millstone. This was a more traditional place that served more traditional items. They also had an early bird menu that was a great deal. You basically got 2-3 courses at a set price, so that was nice.

Starters:
We started with the garlic cheese bread...very good. Some people had salads which looked awesome. They were very much a traditional garden salad, which in Europe is sometimes hard to come by.
Main course:
Most people go the Chicken breast or the Beef with peppercorn sauce. Both looked amazing and I was a little bummed I had not ordered it too. However, I got the vegetable lasagna and it was very good.


Dessert:
We opted out of the dessert because on the way there we saw this place....

Yes, that is what it was. A milkshake bar. You basically select what you want and they whip it up. Sort of like a Blizzard, but better and not as thick.

The other place we ate at for lunch, and made many other stops at every time we walked by, was the Queen of Tarts. You know it has to be good just by the name alone. There were actually 2 locations, so either way we were walking we were sure to walk past. We stopped in mostly for the desserts. Macaroons, cheesecake, cupcakes, cookies, and of course tarts. The lemon meringue was a crowd favorite. We actually did eat here for lunch too one day. They had great sandwiches, salads, and soups. I had a potato and onion tart, that was a little dry, but very tasty!

My potato and red onion tart lunch.

Charlie's berry pie...the whipped cream was heavenly.

One last place to mention would be Bewley's. They are well known for their tea, but we stopped in for breakfast the morning we arrived. We got in about 8:30am, so of course our hotel rooms were not ready, so we walked down to Grafton Street and had a little breakfast. This was a great stop. They had regular breakfast items (like pancakes) which made it great for the kids, but they also had small Continental breakfasts with tea/coffee that were perfect for us. A nice place to hang out!

Dublin: Where to Stay

Yeah! I am finally getting around to doing my 1st post about our trip. I am going to start with Dublin, because that is where we started. I am going to break down Dublin into 3 parts. Where to Stay, Where to Eat, and What to Do. I will by no means have all the answers to any of these, but will share with you our experience. As with most places, you can't really see it all and do it all in one trip. I already have a list of things I want to do on my next Dublin visit!

So Where to Stay:

This is where we stayed: The Arlington Hotel



I guess I should probably preface this post and all posts about the vacation a bit by saying that we traveled as a group of 15 the entire 3 weeks. In order to coordinate this madness, my mother-in-law booked all hotels. This was a task that I was very glad to relinquish to her, however, in hindsight, I would have probably made slightly different choices in some cases. Dublin, however, was not really one of those. I feel she did a good job of getting us a nice place to stay, at a good, reasonable rate, great location to the heart of the city, and an overall good choice.

Pros to the Arlington Hotel:

1. Clean and Comfortable (You will see from the photos that our room was quite spacious. We had a corner room with a king sized bed and 2 twins. Aside from the girls having separate rooms, this was quite a nice arrangement.)



2. Staff was very friendly at front desk and breakfast. The breakfast was very nice with lots of options and it was included in the price of the room.

3. The location of the hotel was ideal for walking in Dublin. We were right on the River Liffey next to the O'Connell Bridge. Trinity College, Grafton Street, great restaurants, and a train station were all just short walks from our hotel.

4. There was a pub located within the hotel, so it was easy and convenient to grab a drink before dinner or before heading in for the night. They also advertised Irish Dancing every night (however, to our & Sarah's disappointment, we never actually saw it).

5. The price. Being that we would be traveling for 3.5 weeks, we needed to stay within a certain budget. There would be no Four Seasons every night so to speak. On average, I would say our hotel rooms cost about $100-$120 euros a night. Keep in mind we usually had the bigger rooms b/c we had the kids and sometimes the nanny. Several hotels we stayed at were under 80 Euros, so we did well on the cost for decent places.

6. It had Internet. Period.

Cons to the Arlington Hotel:

1. There is a pub downstairs. This makes for quite a lot of noise at night when you are trying to go to sleep. Especially on the weekends. We had mild weather while we were in Dublin and had the windows open at night (there is no air conditioning) so the music and conversation could be heard into the wee hours of the morning.

2. The bathrooms were tiny. Not always are hotel bathrooms big, but these were pretty small. Also, aside from our corner room, the standard guest rooms were a little on the small side, as well.

3. It did not have very many amenities. If you are like me and are more of a luxury hotel goer, it was lacking in some areas. However...only in big cities would you find a lot luxury in Ireland and there was the budget thing. Still, there was no air conditioning, small elevators, sparse decor, ...well...now that I am naming all the things I think I missed out on, I really didn't need them. It was just an overall feeling of luxury, I guess, that I missed.

So you see...all in all...this was a good place. I would recommend it to friends and family and you get your money's worth.

However...the next time I go...this may be the place I want to stay....The Shelbourne

A family friend was actually in Dublin on business a couple of weeks afterward and this is where he stayed. Now again, I realize that this was on his company's dime, but if you compare the 2 websites, you will be able to see the difference. (Not to mention my friend said that Bono was seen in the lobby on multiple occasions while he was staying there!!!) Now that is my kind of place!

So, I am sure there are tons of great places to stay in Dublin and I have not done a ton of research on this topic. Dublin is a great city and I recommend it highly and both the places I mention above.