prep time

My parents are coming to visit us over labor day weekend, and they are bringing my nephew. I finished cleaning last night, and today I will be baking bread. I have a couple meals planned for them while they are here, so I want to do some of the prep beforehand. Friday, we will go to this awesome barbecue place that I think my parents will love. Saturday, lunch will be grilled pork chops and sugar snap peas, then the zoo, and dinner will be spaghetti with our homemade sauce, homemade bread, and a salad with most of the ingredients from our garden.

I'm looking forward to it. Our visits are almost always at my parents' house, so it will be nice to have them see (instead of just hearing about it) all the work/decorating we've done to our house since we got married. We painted pretty much every room the summer after we got married, and now our basement looks really good, and I have my cozy girl room. I guess I kind of want to show off what we've done.

And it will be fun to see my nephew and take him to our zoo. My parents took him to Phoenix to see my sister and her husband over the summer, and they took him to that zoo. He's three and a half, and that was his first visit to the zoo. Which makes me kind of mad at my brother and sister-in-law. The zoo where they live is free, and they've never taken him. Of course, they never done a lot of things they should have done as parents. He barely talks because they rarely interact with him beyond watching TV, and they're not kid shows that would help his language development. They finally got him tested and he now attends a school for kids with learning disabilities, so he's improving. My sister and I often wonder if he would have this learning disability if they had worked with him at an earlier age....you know, like reading to him. Anyway, they now live with my parents (financial issues), and my mom is stepping in to raise my nephew because now that she sees exactly what my brother and sister-in-law do with him, she knows they aren't doing enough. It's sad that she has to basically raise him for them, but it's good for my nephew.