Easter Egg Hunt

Well going back to a childhood tradition for most of us, we decided to have an Easter Egg hunt with a few of our friends. So on our wednesday night "LOST NIGHT" where Josh Dyke, Rachel DeMaggio and us get together, eat dinner and watch ABC's LOST. So before we ate dinner and watched LOST, Sheila went outside our apartment and hid 44 easter eggs(of which we only found 42, so some lucky squirrel is gonna have some chocolate and peanut butter candy for the spring. So here are some of our pictures...

Here is Josh who incurred a 10 second penalty for going outside while Sheila was hiding the eggs...

Riding in Style...

One of our weekends we decided to get away, and head up to Sheila's home in Livonia,NY(up by Rochester). Sheila was part of one of her friend Sara's bridal Shower, and David got some time with the four wheelers and the backhoe. It was a fun weekend overall, playing games with the family, riding around on the wheelers and workin' in the field, pulling scrap metal, junk and cleaning out the property... We cleared a pathway at one end of the field, where we were cleaning all the scrap metal and made a tiny, tiny jump... maybe in the future Mr. McCaffrey will create a big jump that we can use. So above is the video of me riding through the path... One of the our favorite video games on the Nintendo Wii is Raving Rabbids, has a bunch of different mini games but our favorite is the dancing mini-game so here is Ashley, Andy and Sheila playing the game in the basement, late at night after everyone went to bed. That was fun short weekend upstate with the McCaffrey's.( it doesn't seem to work, so check back later this week and I'll have it fixed.)

Extreme Porch Makeover Edition

We use to have a small empty porch, that we were hardly ever able to enjoy last summer when we first moved in, so this weekend we kicked it into high gear and decided to make it a little more inviting. This is our porch before... Then we decided to take a trip to one of our favorite stores... IKEA! and along with the visit comes new furniture and a start at decorations for our new "mood" porch. Unfortunately due to our condo regulations, no gas or charcoal grills of any kind...Only electric... yuck!

So piece by piece we started putting the furniture set together... Came together pretty quickly, a couple few issues with those pesky IKEA screws but all in all we are happy.... So now feel free to look down and view our new porch... a little crammed...but we like being close to our friends!

This is our night set up... a little more space, a little more conversation room.

Lucky The Wonder Dog

Well with Little Sophie growing up and getting all the attention, I thought I would share the love of my other little spiegel... Lucky, the jack russell terrier. It's hard to keep her still...

Normally when we've been in Florida i've been taking Lucky out for walks every day, or just about depending on our schedule... and she likes running too... so much i had to take the bike out one day since I couldn't even keep up with her...

This is lucky's favorite toy, other than her bones. She will bite onto this rope and not let go... she has a strong bite, most of the time you can even pick her up along with the rope... then she will run off with the rope and protect it at all costs... or at least until she is bored again and she brings the rope back to you to play..

And that's Lucky, Justin and Crystal's Wonder Dog...

Florida Vacation Part 2: Ben's Wedding

Ben's wedding took place on Thursday March 26th at 4pm at the First Christian Church of Kissimmee. It was a beautiful ceremony, with Sheila and I as the Matron of Honor and Best Man. Ethan was the ring bearer and did an excellent job walking down the isle with ring pillow. After a beautiful ceremony and some family pictures we headed to the reception hall in st.cloud, FL. It was a beautiful ballroom looking out over a marina and rather large lake. The happy couple went out and took a bunch of pictures by the lake with the florida sunset in the background. Meanwhile Ethan, Sheila and I... and the rest of the families... partied it up in the reception hall to some groovy tunes.

We also decorated the awesome Cadillac STS, Ben rented as their getaway car. We stitched some extra large undies and stuffed them with some pillow stuffing and strapped them to the back of the car... wrote some stuff on the car windows and filled it up with yellow and blue balloons(their colors). All in all it was a beautiful wedding on a perfect sunny day. Unfortunately sheila and I forgot to charge the battery to our camera.... but don't worry, i stole some pictures from Dad and Uncle Steve before we left....so here are some of them. Click on the picture below to be taken to a few of the pictures i uploaded.

I promise once I receive the pictures from the photographer I will post a few family ones that everyone can download for those of you who had requested a family picture.

Part 1 of our Florida Vacation

Thanks to our friends Billy and Muffin we were able to switch our flight and come down a weekend before to spend some time with them and our niece Sophia, who is a lot more alert and smiley than when we first saw... the first two days of her life... We've spent a couple days with Sophie now and are enjoying every minute of it.

We decided one night to give Justin and Crystal a break and were able to experience parent hood first hand... and we quickly decided we were not ready... we'd rather spoil our niece(Sophie) and nephew(Ethan). We stayed up till about 1am feeding her and rocking her till she fell asleep, then about 3 hours later in the middle of the night, Sheila heard Sophie crying through the monitor and told me to go check on her.... so I said yes... but never got up...(I'm too used to the snooze alarm).. 10 minutes later, sheila said "David, get up! go change Sophia's diaper". So in the middle of the night, without my glasses on or contacts in I changed my first diaper... couldn't really tell what i was doing... but it seemed to work out, and I didn't even put the diaper on backwards. Sheila prepared a bottle and fed her and rocked her to sleep again... then we both crashed the rest of the night and Crystal was kind enough to do the early morning shift(my guess, because neither one of us was waking to Sophie's crying.) This is when we usually like holding sophie, she's just in her own tiny bubble...

The next day we went to the mall to do some shopping and brought little sophie along, she really seems to enjoy car rides, especially if she has a clean diaper and full tummy... I got to sit in the back seat with her and snap some pretty funny pictures of her... she is a cutie!

This is Sophie after our shopping spree, already modeling her new hat!

My favorite relative is...

On Sophie's 2 month birthday, (which we all know is when babies come to their senses, they become more alert and start seeing and even thinking clearer, sometimes even given the rare ability to write and make very smart statements) Little adorable Sophie has made a major announcement! I'm sure by looking at the picture you can see she has declared that her Uncle David is her favorite relative. This comes as no surprise to anyone, except to maybe her Aunt Sheila who was shocked and a little perturbed by the bold, yet true declaration. Since this news, Aunt Sheila has been fighting to take over the "favorite relative" title by going on a shopping spree for little Sophie Lola... cute tops, and pants won't buy out little Sophie's pure heart! (besides I've made a few purchases just incase she plans on changing her mind.)

Now I know she is still young and succeptible to temptations and bribes from other relatives(Sheila, Andy, Ash...and of course grandpa and grandma.) but let it be known that I, David, was declared first on Sophie's favorite relative list and therefor will always be at the top of the list.

The Daily Sophie Music Video

> Sometimes its hard to get motivated to do work, especially on a friday afternoon with only an hour until clockout... but its very easy on Mac's to find ways to entertain yourself, so I decided to create our niece Sophie's first music video... We heard this song on new years eve this year while in Tampa, never heard of the band and we(spiegels & grames') all thought it was such a weird song but it was stuck in our heads the entire vacation...thus has become Sophie's theme song....so with the daily Sophie pictures we've been receiving from her mommy and daddy I put together a music video to sophie, sophie-lola...sophie-lolooloooolalo? ..... to Sophia.

Sophia Lola!

One of the reasons why we came to Florida for Christmas, besides braving the harsh winter was to hopefully see our new niece Sophie! Justin and Crystal Speigel were expecting their first baby anytime in early Jan 2009. We tried all Christmas long to try and get her to come out, we gave Crystal foot massages, after foot massages, massaged the belly, pushed on the belly... but Sophie just wouldn't leave her mommy...granted she wasn't due for another week and half... we worked the first week of '09 "remotely" from FL so we could hopefully see her... and she made us wait...all the way until the day before we were to leave to come out!... BUT WE WERE HAPPY SHE CAME!

On Jan 9, 2009 around 5pmish Sophie finally arrived. We got to see the proud daddy come downstairs and greet us with a HUGE smile on his face... he even brought the video camera down with some images of her so we could see her while we waited. She is adorable.(as you can see in the pics) I dont remember her weight or height, but then again.. we're just her aunt and uncle, our job is to spoil the kid and then leave for a while, come back...spoil them some more and then leave. It's Fun. Due to inclemate weather back in NY we were able to reschedule our flight and spend a couple days at the house with Sophie and the extremely happy and very sleepy mommy and daddy!

Christmas 08!

For Christmas we decided to come to Florida to see our families since one side of the family lives in Tampa and the other side lives in Orlando...and they are only about an hour away it works out great...since Mom and Dad Grames are down here(while on furlough) and little baby Sophie is due any day now... We've spent most of our days driving around, doing a little shopping, some for us... but mostly Aunt Sheila for baby Sophie...and of course at David's demands we stopped at some of our favorite fast food that we don't have in NY (Sonic & Chic-fil-a) YUM!

But lets go back about a week, when we first got here we came to TAMPA and stayed with Justin and Crystal for Christmas. We went over to Billy and Muffins(Stacey) house(& Hunter) for Christmas Eve dinner which was awesome! Billy cooked up some nice juicy fillets in the green tank while Justin and David played Nintendo Wii all night.

Once we came home it was about 10 min. till Christmas so we decided to open up all our presents then so we could sleep-in in the morning. The First present I opened up was from Sheila(which we agreed to not get each other presents this year since we bought our tv, bought furniture,....paid for a wedding) but Sheila was able, maybe even for the first time ever, to surprise me. So I opened it up and it was a Nintendo WII!!!! HOW FUN!!!! after that I dont remember much else of the night.

On Christmas day we got up and had a yummy breakfast, pancakes, fresh fruits, eggs...all home made by the ladies. It was good, opened up some stocking presents with some very cool gifts. For lunch we went to the Speigels house(Justin's Parents) about half an hour away. Had some delicious turkey and opened some more presents...

We then drove to Orlando to see David's side of the family, had a little Christmas time there, We stayed there until new years ever visiting with family and doing some shopping and celebrating David's 27th Birthday. Later in January we went to the beach! It was warm and sunny, although the water was really cold.

all in all, it was an awesome Christmas, if only Sophie would just come out and play!