Visitors!

Grandma MP and Grandpa B have been in town since Wednesday, checking out our new digs and playing with the kiddos. Hank was so friggin excited for their visit - he loves having people at our house and drove us nuts for days asking "When are they coming? Is it time to go to the airport yet?"

So today MP, Hank, and I went to the mecca of consumerism - the Mall of America in Minneapolis. MP had never been there before. As the mall came into sight, supershopper MP gasped and said, "Oh my! I feel alive! I think I'm home." I nearly drove the car off the road because I was laughing so hard.

In other news, we had Hank's parent-teacher conferences on Thursday. He is doing extremely well at school - we left the conference feeling really proud of him. Of course now we are thrown into a quandry - technically he will be age-eligible for kindergarten next year, but just barely (by 15 days). Right now, our plan is to red-shirt him for kindergarten next year and wait until the fall of 2010 for him to start kindergarten. He'd be one of the oldest kids in the class instead of one of the youngest, and with boys, I've always thought it was better to wait if you have any reservations at all about sending them. I really don't want him to be bored silly in kindergarten though, so we'll see. I feel like the only areas right now that he is significantly ahead of the game with are reading and writing - his math and social skills are fairly typical for a 4-year-old. So we'll see where he's at this spring and make the decision then.

And Mike and I took advantage of the free babysitters to go see a movie - we saw Burn After Reading. It was an okay movie (if you like the Coen brothers' other movies, you'll like it) but Brad Pitt was just hysterical in it. And of course George Clooney is in it, so there you go.