Joel and Kate Come to Visit

I spent all weekend cleaning in preparation for Joel and Kate's visit to Ohio.  I cleaned spiderwebs from the walls and ceilings, washed sheets, dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed floors, cleaned 2 microwaves, washed mirrors and windows and scrubbed clean and caulked my tub.

Have you ever caulked before?  The first hurdle was realizing I needed a caulking gun.  Thank goodness Michelle and Dom had one (actually 3) that they could lend to me.  

I cut off the end of my caulk, and put it in the gun, ready to caulk the tub.  A start pushing on the trigger, but nothing comes out.  I push harder and harder and feel something give, but still no caulk.  After a minute, I decided to read the instructions.  Turns out there is a foil inside that needs to be punctured.  When I pulled the caulk out of the gun, this is about what it looked like:

Caulk was all over the gun and the bottom of caulking tube was no where to be seen. I ran out to target and got some more caulk, and finally was able to finish caulking!

Joel and his new fiance Kate arrived on Wednesday afternoon.

After a quick shower, we headed out to the Cleveland Horseshoe Casino to try out the buffet.  Kate managed to double her money on slots (although she only put in 1 dollar).

When we got home, everyone was pretty tuckered out so we watched elf for an hour or so, then gave up and found ourselves in bed before 10pm.

The next day we woke up, Joel got some high scores on CoD Black Ops.

Then we headed out to CiCi's Pizza buffet.  Since they don't have cici's in philly, Joel and Kate were rather excited to try it out.

It was pretty good.  It wasn't the best pizza I had ever had, but still pretty good.  After CiCi's, we headed to the outlets in Aurora.  Joel was full of pizza, so he took a nap in the car while Kate and I did some shopping and got up to shenanigans:

We picked up some chocolates from Malley's

Then drove over to the Christmas Story house.  We started in the giftstore where Joel bought us all tickets for the tour.  There was tons of awesome merch, of which we took lots of pictures:

Finally it was tour time.

We learned about the history of the movie and how the house was bought and sold until it became the landmark that it is today..  Then it was picture time!

Joel got under the sink and was making a sad face saying "Daddy's gonna kill Ralphie!!"  That had to be one of my favorite parts of the trip!!

Although it was also pretty funny when he was pretending to be the mom on the phone after Ralphie said "Oh Fudge"

We then went across the street to the Museum.  It was pretty small and the only thing of note was this scary doll:

After we were all A Christmas Storied out, we drove around looking for a bowling alley, but, alas it was league night at the 2 alleys we tried.  We finally gave up and drove to the North Olmsted library to get some movies to watch.  As we were driving there we saw a Donato's pizza place.

Joel was SO happy.  I guess he had some fond memories of Donatos, but they closed the only one near him years and years ago.  So we had pizza and watched parks and recreations until about 10pm, after which we all promptly fell asleep.

I was SO sad to seem them go this morning, but beyond thankful that they made the trip to cleveland, even if it was only for a couple of days.  I'm so lucky to have such a great brother and soon to be sister-in-law!!!  Best.  Weekend.  Ever!!