Visit from Grandpa "Poke nose" and Grandma "Mamu"

We were SO lucky to have my parents come up for a few days and spend time with us and my sisters family. It was so fun to watch Mikey play with his Grandpa and Grandma. These moments are and will always be priceless to me.
My dad loves to arm wrestle his grand kids. He had asked my nephew who is 6 to arm wrestle but when Mikey saw what they were doing he wanted in on the action and wasn't about to let Grandpa get out of it! I will let you decide by the picture who was winning. :)

My dad is quite the handy man so I always have him help reduce our to do list. While he is visiting we generally go to home depot 2 or more times. When we went they had just restocked their mowers for spring. Mikey b-lined right to them before I even realized what he had seen. Lets just say I had to pry his hands off this sweet riding mower and carried him screaming away. We had many odd possibly concerned looks. This kid loves his vehicles!






My dad is an amazing craftsman. And when he heard of my plight for lack of storage in my laundry room he came to me with a solution. He custom built cabinets for the space. (I know I'm spoiled.) That was one of the main reasons for their visit they had to drive them up here since the airlines wouldn't let him check the cabinet as a carry on, I have no idea why they wouldn't hehehe!
I want to show you a before and after so you know what an amazing difference it made.





The before. Small tiny cabinet. I know I know I was not to smart to put that up there. But when we moved in the house we had NO KIDS and we had only lived in an apartment so I felt like the house was huge and I wasn't worried about storage. Fast forward three years our needs and life have changed drastically.



Now the After. Drum Roll PLEASE! Oh and you can't tell in the before but you can in the after that My dad also replaced the light in the laundry room. It was a very dim dome light and now I have gorgeous track lighting. And take a look at the cabinet can you say GORGEOUS! What an amazing job right? And let me tell you my storage space has grown by at least 5X what is was. This laundry room makes me want to do laundry. (Or at least spend time out there hahaha!)





















My parents brought us some apples from their garden (that they had picked last Sept/Oct. Evan and I really miss having my parents huge garden close.) So of course Mamu and I had to make apple pie!













We took my parents to a huge Asian Market in Downtown Seattle called Uwajimaya it was fun to find different food items to try! One fruit I had to buy and try was called an Carribean Ugli fruit. Things that make me laugh are worth trying once.













We also went out to an authentic Italian Restaurant Tropea that an old Italian employee of mine refereed me too. The food is really good. I have to admit pasta is not my favorite thing so Italian can be iffy for me but this place is AWESOME! They had the MOST AMAZING Seafood Risotto (I'm totally a rice fan so risotto speaks to me) and their mushroom raviolis were the best I have had yet!
And as if all the handy work my dad was doing wasn't enough. (Did I mention that he also fixed the mis-routed heating duct in our kitchen and while checking out our weird cold air return found a space that we can build not one but TWO more cabinet/closets in our house?) Well because we really like to stretch his skills we also made him make us a 2 gallon batch of homemade tapioca! Nothing screams comfort food to me more than his home made tapioca. Of course we made sure Mamu supervised everything he did because they work so well as a team. We sure wish we could get together more often. We love you Dad (Grandpa Poke Nose) and Mamu (Grandma Mamu) we appreciate all you do for us and hope to see you again very soon!