Weekend warriors

It was another harried weekend for the Wallheimer household. Ellie and I hit the road on Friday to visit Rockford for a funeral. It was important to me to attend this one, which was for my mom's neighbor (who was my neighbor, too, for almost my entire childhood). Hank Elling — always Mr. Elling, to me — was such a sweet, talented and generous man. He raised four wonderful children, and somehow he and his wife survived the death of one son from brain cancer many years ago. Mr. Elling was a very accomplished organist, and his son, Kurt, is a Grammy-winning jazz singer/musician. It's still weird for me to think that I won't ever see Mr. and Mrs. Elling walking down the block by my mom's house when we visit, because those daily walks were part of their ritual for so many years — even while Mr. Elling was battling Parkinsons. He will be greatly missed by so many.
On a lighter note, I had to stop and give Ellie a break from the car ride in each direction. The random exit I took on the trip up ended up going into a mostly residential neighborhood... which meant no good places for Ellie and I to hang for a few minutes. But I did find a Dollar General store where we could walk the aisles for a while. Ellie found this package of tupperware (below) and proceeded to carry it around the store almost the whole time we were there. Too funny.

Meanwhile, on the home front... Brian was a tiling machine! He stayed behind on the Rockford trip to take advantage of the baby-less house and work hard on tiling our kitchen floor. It's a project we've really wanted to get done, but not something that's very feasible with Ellie under-foot. (It's especially hard because the kitchen is the only access between the front of the house and the upstairs... so we'd either end up trapped in the bedroom area or trapped in a section of the house with no bathroom... neither idea with a baby.) Anyhow, Brian worked so hard all weekend and got some major help from our friend, Abby. We are so grateful to have a huge chunk of the project done! We've got some grouting and lots of cleanup scheduled for every night this week... but YAY for the kitchen starting to come together. I'll post pictures soon!