We have definitely kept ourselves busy in the past week.  Heidi was still on driving restriction, so I got my fill of driving and another glimpse into motherhood helping them get around to all their various destinations, this week.  This is why, after Colton's soccer game last Saturday, we took the rest of the day to be as conventionally unproductive as we could...especially since Sunday was also quite eventful, what with church, chili-making, and our church's Golden Ladle Chili Cook-off.  It was great to get to hang out with some of the people from The Well (our church.)  A lot of them live in Lancaster or Palmdale, so it's not as easy to get together with them...and the spirit of competition made for some good entertainment, as well...both with the chili recipes and tasting AND the coincidentally unscored game of Taboo.

Through out the rest of the week, I spent a lot of time with Heidi and the boys doing various things: taking Colton to and from preschool, getting the boys their H1N1 flu mists, going to the Commissary, desert at Foster's Freeze, story time at the library, going to the grocery store, taking molly to the groomers, and going to Thanksgiving dinner on base for families of deployed military.  In between all that frenzy, I somehow found time to make a dent in our two week (or so) overdue laundry, Adam and I made it to the dentist for fillings and gum cleaning, we caught up on our TV shows, played some Wii Resort, and found time to go to bed pretty early on a couple of those days.  

Heidi's family is now in town for the next week...so she won't need me to play taxi-driver.  While I will have a lot more time on my hands, I don't really think I'll have too much trouble filling it.  For one, I decided that...in order to make the house homier and easier for me to spend my days in it, I'm going to try to add some color by trying to churn out some paintings to brighten the walls.  We were going to go to Michael's tomorrow, in fact, to check out the canvas selection.  I also thought about removable decals...but those are pretty expensive, so I am going to look into colored contact paper that I could cut into my own designs and see if that might be comparable.  There's also the violin that needs to be learned, the guitar that also needs some work, and the piano that hasn't been played much.  We have a book that we've been reading from and discussing at our Sunday school at church that we haven't dug into other than the 45 minutes of Sunday school each week.  Adam bought me a book for my birthday...and there's plenty of other books here that I haven't read, either.  Lacy undoubtedly would love more of my attention (and George, too, for that matter) after the lack of it in the past few weeks.  The wedding album is inching closer to completion, as well...all the photos are uploaded, so now it's down to editing, ordering, and mounting them.  And somehow, there's there's still a few more loads of laundry to be done...and will probably be a few more by the time I'm done with those.  The house could use a little t.l.c., too, after being somewhat neglected for longer than it should have.  Now all I need is eternal motivation to accomplish all that.

Today, however, we tried to escape our to-do lists and the overwhelming nature of such and heading out into nature.  Adam actually made an appearance at Colton's last soccer game of the season, first...then we had lunch and drove to Devil's Punchbowl County Park in Pearblossom, California.  It's actually less than an hour away and amazingly quiet, peaceful, and great hiking.  We brought Lacy with us and spent the afternoon enjoying our surroundings.  Here is a link to the pictures from our trip:

The Kuesters Go to Devil's Punchbowl

We are definitely looking forward to going back in the future.  Lacy loved it and it's always nice to have somewhere were we can enjoy taking her with us.  We are all pretty exhausted, but hopefully we'll be better prepared next time and can make it a bit of a longer trip.  It was definitely a nice note to end our week on (especially since tomorrow's excitement includes taking the car to Sears to get some tires replaced :)).  For now, it's time to further wrap up the week with a good night's sleep.