Friday, July 7 Riley at the O'Connors' pool Elisabeth and Riley

Riley with 2 really nice guys, Jim and Nick

Relaxing at the pool... How beautiful life can be : ) The last 2 days were quite busy here again. Well, actually yesterday morning was not so busy. I spent it in the house with Sharon and the kids, since Conor was sick and also had a bit of a fever. (Fortunately, he is feeling better by now). I just did some laundry, folded kids’ clothes and organized Finn’s bibs. He has so many and doesn’t need all of them anymore, so we will donate lots of them. In the afternoon, after lunch, I went to Elisabeth with Riley (did I mention that she lives just 4 or 5 houses from my house??), since she was alone at home with Brady, the baby. The O’Connors, Elisabeth’s family, also have a really nice house and a great pool, and the 3 kids (aged between 8 months and 3 years) are also just cute! I have to take pictures of them some day and put them on the blog, so that you can see them as well. While Brady was sleeping, Riley had 2 nannies who cared for him ; ) I think he really enjoyed that. We also had a good laugh with 2 really nice guys -- Jim, the policeman, and Nick, the rock climber. (or was it Nick, the policeman, and Jim, the rock climber?? Riley would be outraged that I don’t know that anymore… Elisabeth, could you maybe help me with these names? ; ) ) The pool was just great… It’s always nice to jump into the water, when it’s so hot that you are almost melting. Unfortunately, the O’Shaughnessys don’t have a pool in the backyard (we only have sprinklers : ) ). I think I already mentioned that they have a beach house, didn’t I? However, at the moment the first floor of the beach house and the smaller beach house are rented out and the 2nd floor is under construction, so we can’t frequent there. But the 2nd floor should be habitable in August, so I really hope we can stay for a couple of days there then. Many thanks again to Elisabeth for the nice afternoon at the pool. I hope we can repeat that soon, maybe with all of the kids : ) What else did I do yesterday… Well, after our afternoon at the pool, I played with Riley and Finn outside and then, when Kevin came back from work, we had dinner. Sharon had made some Mexican food, fajitas -- it was really good, just the sauce that we had got from one of our neighbors was a bit spicy. Oh yeah, and we also had spring rolls as appetizers. After dinner, Elisabeth and I dared another trip with the Ford Mustang, as we are very adventurous people ; ) We went to the mall and got some really nice stuff from Aeropostale. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time to shop since all the stores closed at 9:30 (which is actually much better than the Austrian closing times, but it was still too early for us). Then we tried to get something to eat at the mall, but all the restaurants were closed as well. So we decided to get back and ended up in the convertible. It was a bit hard to find our way back, since we noticed that the convertible didn’t have any lights inside (this car is full of surprises…) and I didn‘t see how fast I was going. In spite of that, we did quite well and had a funny, adventurous drive again back to the O’Connors’ house where we had donuts and watched “Sam”. (Well, actually we wanted to watch it, but since there were so many commercials, we ended up chatting and completely forgot about the movie…) Then, I had to drive back to my place again… (it’s good that it’s not so far -- it was really a very, very short drive -- just a 30-second-drive ; ) ) Kevin and Sharon were still awake, so I could ask them about the lights, and Kevin told me that the lights in the car actually exist. However, he said that I don’t have to know everything about the car right from the beginning, since “it’s more fun if you don’t know everything” ; )