Nashville

Finley's class has been learning about authors, they recently wrote letters to their favorites. Finley chose Mary Pope Osborne, the author of the Magic Tree House series (which surprised me a little, his latest obsession has been the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books). Finley was excited to learn that we have an international best-selling author in our family - it's my third cousin's husband, so the relation is a stretch, but we'll claim him as "ours" 😉

Finley brought three of Nickolas Butler's books to class and Finley's (very nice) teacher honored my request of a taking a couple of pictures during sharing time. I shared the pictures w/ Nickolas and he offered to visit their class. We'll see if schedules can align, but it'll be pretty cool if a visit can happen!

Auntie & Nolan surprised the kids w/ lunch at school. They knew someone was coming, but didn't know who. They were excited to see their faces!

Hadley and her clothes, so much going on w/ this outfit. And happily (for me!), the Kalahari braids have (finally) been taken out!

We were fortunate to attend the school district's Golden Apple Awards dinner. My dad was part of the ECASD Foundation that began the Golden Apple Awards and M&J sponsors the Sherman table. It was fun to catch up w/ my former principal and two former colleagues as we celebrated Tim's award, his mom and Grandma were w/ us too.

Finley's Cub Scout Pack picked up food donations in our neighborhood for a local food pantry - 398 pounds of food! Good job boys!

Grandma Kathleen spent the weekend w/ the kids. It sounds like they were busy and had a lot of fun! They sang in church for Palm Sunday.

Kathleen was here, because we were not. We flew to Chicago w/ a final destination of Nashville!

We literally dropped our luggage off and met up w/ this crew for lunch... 

...which quickly turned into an afternoon and evening full of many, many Captain-Diets on Broadway St.

We were in Nashville to celebrate Jason's 40th Birthday w/ a group of college friends and spouses.

Thankfully social media did not exist in college, but we thought we were hilarious w/ it 17 years later...

...passing the selfie stick around the table.

Broadway St in Nashville is like Homecoming on Water St x100. Bars, restaurants, live music (everywhere), day-drinking, roof top bars, peddle bars, so much fun.

We hopped around all day. 

 

Patrick found his shirt-twin. Not that funny, but w/ 16 drinks in our systems it was hilarious.

This guy was the exact opposite of Patrick's twin, he was sooo big.

More drinks, more selfies. Having only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before we left (super early flight and too much caffeine), I made it to the rock star time of 10:30 😛

The Birthday Boy!

We stayed at the Westin, a short walk from Broadway St. It was a totally fancy and incredibly nice hotel, the views were great from the Roof Top Bar on the 28th floor.

Day 2 (our only full day in Nashville, it was a quick trip), was more walking around and more day drinking (we really did pretend we were in our early 20's again).

Saturday night we had an incredible dinner. Before we left, I looked up the restaurant online and was slightly nervous when I saw "roasted bone marrow" on the appetizer menu. No worries necessary, it might have been the best meal I've ever eaten. We did not try bone marrow (puke), but everything else we had was so so so good.

The Simek brothers. 

And before we knew it, our 36 hour trip was over. Nashville is easily my new favorite city, I would go back in a heartbeat.

College was over (again) and back to "mom-ing" w/ 84 games of Candy Land & Mancala.