Lots of news!!!

Dan was away on business for two days and is now happily back in the fold... I tagged him and told him "You're it!" so he can be with the girls for a bit while I blog to my heart's content. Such luxury.

I'll start with the exciting news first... we bought a new car this weekend! Dan has been shopping for a new car for about two years now and has been incredibly patient and deliberate in his choosing. We went for a test drive this weekend and found out that 1) they are not making the car anymore (it is being redesigned for 2009); 2) the dealership has 11 left; 3) only one was the color Dan wanted; 4) about 7 of the 11 left had navigation systems which we didn't need and would have to pay an additional three grand for. So we test-drove it, Dan loved it, and we decided to buy it before it slipped out of our fingers. We are picking it up on Thursday or Friday and I am so happy for Dan. He has been tooling around in our 1996 Subaru with 160,000 miles on it that we bought the week after we returned from our honeymoon... 11 and a half years ago. We bought an Acura TSX, which is a sporty little sedan; it is charcoal gray with a black leather interior and has a sunroof, heated seats, XM satellite radio, etc. It's a great looking little car. Hooray!

Our second exciting news was that we booked our vacation for the summer this weekend. We decided to go with renting a house on the Cape this year, which goes from Saturday to Saturday, making it the longest vacation we've taken since the girls were born. We are staying in a 3 br ranch in Eastham that is a mile from the ocean and a few houses down from a bike trail. The house has a beautiful big deck and nice open living room and dining room. I am really looking forward to getting there, even though we're not going to the end of August. It was fun comparing a few different places online and looking at all the pictures of the houses and weighing the pros and cons of each. We were close to booking a place in Harwichport but then found out it doesn't have air conditioning, so that was a deal breaker. I can live without a/c but cannot live with Dan living without a/c.

In other news... my dad and I saw The Roches in concert on Friday night and they were awesome as always. We went to see a basketball game on Saturday night between the Middle School teachers and the Elementary school teachers and it was adorable. It was such a "I have school age kids" thing to do on a Saturday night and I got a real charge out of that. By the way, the Elementary team blasted the Middle school team. Victory!

I watched quite possibly the worst tv movie I've ever seen on Monday afternoon... Tori Spelling and her new husband Dean What's His Name in "Houseguest" on Lifetime. (Plot synopsis: House sitter in rural VT tudor home finds her life in danger... who is the bad guy? The house owner... or his brother, who happens to be a plumber and was called unwittingly to the house by said housesitter and promptly goes to bed with her?) Painfully bad and about 90 minutes longer than it had to be. Do you see why I worry about my brain rotting to mush???

I leave you with four funny Libutti girl stories:
1. Jenna has refused to wear anything but her 2006 Christmas dress to church for the last three weeks. This includes Sunday school, church, Lent services AND playgroup.
2. Michaela made a stuffed bear in her vacation Bible school program a few weeks ago. The idea was to donate the bears en masse to African children as a mission project. Michaela's comment:"I don't KNOW anyone in Africa! I'd rather give it to one of my friends here." So concrete. I love it.
3. Jenna took a baby wipe and was wiping the walls of my parents' house. Let me interject here that their house is immaculate and always company-ready and I would without hesitation eat off of any of their floors. Jenna's comment: "I haveta clean this be-tause your house is berry dirty, Gammie."
4. My mom is giving Michaela some kind of cautionary tale which ends with... "you don't want to be a spoiled girl." Michaela asks, "What's spoiled mean?" My mom says, "It means you get everything you want." Michaela says, "I think I WANT to be a spoiled girl!"