Today, our sweet Miss Elise officially becomes a teenager! I feel like I’m obligated to say that it feels like she was born just yesterday, but it truly makes my head spin when I see how fast she and her siblings are growing up. She’s about to enter her final year of middle school and has grown into a young lady that Jessica and I are so proud of! She’s a perfect combination of brains, humor, talent, and beauty.
While today is her actual birthday, the main celebration will be tomorrow evening when she and I, along with four of her best friends, go to Escape It Las Vegas, an escape room themed after the Stephen King book and movie It. Her friends are coming over to the house during the day to watch the movie, then we’ll head out that evening to Area15 and get prepared to be scared.
Elise and I recently watched the movie together for the first time, and I honestly didn’t find it that scary, but I’m guessing the experience we’re attending will be a lot of fun. She initially asked Jessica to go, and the kids are required to have an adult chaperone, but there was no way that was happening, so I was happy to step in.
It’s been a busy summer for Elise and her siblings. The trip to Washington in June was a big one, plus there have been a few out-of-state softball tournaments. We’ve got one more big family trip planned, which actually begins this Thursday night when we fly to Toronto. It’s a red-eye flight, so I’m sure we will all be exhausted by the time we arrive at the cabin on Friday morning, but we’re excited.
We’ll get home from Canada on Friday, July 24, but just a few days later, on Monday the 27th, Jessica and I will be flying back to the East Coast for a work trip to New York City! We’ve never been there together, and I haven’t been there since the summer of 1994, so it should be a lot of fun. Enzo and I also recently made plans to drive down to Yuma, Arizona, in mid-August to attend the first inaugural Arizona Open Pool Championship. Most of our favorite players will be there, and we’re excited to see them play in person.
In addition to all these trips, our house has undergone some major changes lately. Along with building out “The Pool Stall,” our pool hall game room in the garage, we recently got all new windows, and this week the house is being painted! Two things we didn’t like about the house when we purchased it five years ago were the color and the windows. There was no contrast to the color scheme, and Jessica phrased it well by saying it “looked like a big blob of butter.” The old windows weren’t energy efficient, so they had screens on the outside to block the sun from getting in. They worked, but they were ugly and didn’t allow a lot of light into the house.
We upgraded to new windows with black frames, which, along with the new color scheme, adds much more contrast. Plus, we get so much more light in the house now that the screens are gone. We have made a ton of changes to the house over the past five years, so I’m planning to make a new walkthrough video sometime soon to show how it has evolved. I don’t have photos to share quite yet, but I will once everything is done.
I also just realized that this month is the 15th anniversary of the Pellegrini Page blog! I wrote my first post way back in July 2011 and haven’t missed a month since then. It’s crazy to think how much our lives have changed during that time, but I enjoy documenting the journey.
I look forward to giving an update next month on our trips to Canada and NYC, but for now, it’s all about Elise. Happy 13th birthday, sweetheart. We love you so much!
