A Family Trip to Nebraska

Todd had a preaching gig in Omaha this past weekend, and since the girls and I were going along, we decided we'd stay Friday and Saturday in Lincoln as a sort of mini-vacation and to introduce the girls to their future home.

It was a busy few days! We visited the Sunken Gardens and had supper with my parents on Friday night, on Saturday we took in the Children's Museum and had lunch with an old friend, and then Todd took advantage of our being in Lincoln to host (thanks to our friend and his fabulous downtown condo) a 2 Pillars Vision Meeting Saturday night. It was nice to put some faces with the names I've been hearing so much about! Sunday, it was back up to Omaha so that Todd could preach. He did a great job. Every time I hear him speak, I feel assured that this is really where God wants him to be - which is good, I think, considering the direction we're headed in! Sunday afternoon, we got to hang out with some fun people from the church Todd preached at while Lydia napped, and then it was off to the airport for our flight home. Can you believe we almost missed our flight again? Yes, we apparently didn't learn from our experience in Denver and cut it too close getting to the airport. I think we would have been fine except that there just happened, for whatever reason, to be an unusually long line at the check-in for Southwest. Go figure!

Here are a few pics from some of our excursions:

The Fam at the Sunken Gardens. The girls were fascinated by the ginormous fishies in the little ponds. I used to live in an apartment in the yellow house right across the street, so there was some major nostalgia going on for me while we were there!

The highlight of the trip for the girlies, by far, was our little outing to the Children's Museum. Oh. My. Goodness. This place is amazing - and completely different than I remember it from back in the day when I was taking my niece and nephew. There's obviously been some renovation that's happened, and it is awesome! Three entire floors jampacked with super cool stuff for kids to do. I can see already that we will be spending a lot of time here when we move back. We only had two hours to spend, and it wasn't nearly enough!

Iris got a taste for the stage in the dress-up area.

Lydia's favorite spot was the "hospital". She couldn't get enough of the babies! And obviously I don't have quite the skill with taking pictures using the iPhone that Todd does - I see this one's a little blurry!

Oh! I almost forgot. We overheard Lydia speaking a new phrase while we were at the Museum. She wanted to know, "Where my sissie at?" How cute is that? She's really beginning to repeat a lot of little sentences these days. It's so much fun!

Our Little Dancerella

Is she not the cutest little ballerina you've ever seen?

A friend and I signed our girlies up for a four week summer session at the dance studio just down the street. They'll be introduced to the basics of ballet and possibly tap, I think, over the course of the class, and can you believe that Iris goes in and does her thing all by herself with nary a backward glance at me? Yup, no parents allowed inside during the class. We have to be content with sneaking furtive peaks underneath the blinds instead, and let me tell you, I've decided that the most adorable thing I've ever seen is six little girls in full ballet get-up dancing. Oh my goodness, they are so sweet it's heart breaking! And Iris, of course, in my opinion, is the sweetest. And she seems to be doing pretty well so far. She's paying attention and following directions and trying hard to learn the steps - she's quite precise and graceful! It's pretty amazing to watch, actually. I think it would be so much fun if dancing turned out to be her thing!

Stay tuned because on the last day they have a mini-recital, and I'm hoping I'll be able to get some good footage of her performing to share on our blog!

Lunch With Daddy

Our 4th of July Weekend (Warning: Super Long Post Ahead)

I hate to do this, but we did a lot of fun things this past weekend that I wanted to share! Can you believe that Todd took most of these pictures with his new iPhone?

Friday:

We had planned on spending the morning at the river, but as we were getting ready to leave, a quick check of the weather deemed it a little too chilly to be around any water. Despite some initial disappointment, we rallied quickly and decided as an alternative to take in a local attraction about an hour away from our house: Mastodon State Park. Sounds interesting, right? Who doesn't want to learn about Mastodons! Iris was totally pumped. And just to throw out some quick trivia: did you know that Woolly Mammoths and Mastodons are completely different? Who knew?

Lydia was not quite as thrilled as the rest of the family about seeing the Mastodons, as you can tell by her grumpy demeanor in the first picture and her complete absence in the second. I believe her exact words were: "Mastodons are for punks!" I think she might have been holding a grudge about the change of plans...

Our little nature girls. This was on the way to see the bone beds where you can actually view the dig site. How cool is that?

This is a view of one of the flights of steps leading down to the bone beds. We found it hilarious that the sign said that there would be only "three flights of steps." We are pretty sure that must have been a typo as there were actually about ten flights. The girls did fine going down by themselves, but Todd and I got quite the workout carrying them back up!

The end of a busy morning. Don't you love the look of black and white photographs?

Later that afternoon, we headed down to O'Fallon's Heritage Freedom Fest to participate with our small group in helping out in the Kids Area. The highlight of this area for Iris was the series of huge inflatables:

She spent literally a solid hour straight jumping around in this huge pirate ship! I was surprised, actually, that she was even interested considering the amount of crazy kiddos that were running all over these things. She's getting brave in her old age! Lydia was completely devastated, though, because she was too little to participate. Poor girlie!

Saturday:

We awoke to pouring rain and were worried that it really WAS going to rain on our parade! We've been attending the 4th of July parade down in Old Town St. Charles since the first summer we lived here. It's become one of our most treasured family traditions. Iris looks forward to it all year - little 4th of July lover that she is.

We decided to head down anyways, despite the fact that it was still raining when we left, just in case the parade was still being held. We would have been devastated to miss it considering this is our last summer here. To our great happiness, the parade was still on! And God, in all his infinite wisdom and power, even caused there to be a lull between the downpours just as the parade was beginning. The girls had a complete blast!

Lydia: Iris! A pop-pop! (lolly pop)

Iris: Oooo, yeah! That's good, Lydia!

Because of the rain, not a lot of people turned out for the parade - which meant more candy for us!

Later on, We hung out with some of our fantastic neighbors for supper and fireworks. This was the first year that we actually bought fireworks of our own, so we were pretty excited for the evening to arrive!

Iris was not a huge fan of the smoke balls - thank goodness for blankie-blankie to help fend off the smell!

Even Lydia got in on some firework action lighting sparklers with daddy.

One of the perks of our neighborhood is that we never have to go farther than our cul-de-sac to see spectacular fireworks displays. A couple of the neighborhoods behind and around us shoot off amazing extravaganzas for hours on the 4th of July. This year they had to start before it got dark because another storm front was moving in. Iris was in heaven!

Our own meager fireworks display. Towards the end of the night, the boys set all the leftover fireworks in the street and lit them up. Nice!

So I hope you enjoyed our little weekend re-cap. The rain tried it's hardest on Saturday to put a damper on our fun, but we had good times anyways. I like the way Iris summed things up: "Mommy, this is my best day ever!"

Happy Fourth of July!

Music in the Park

The city of O'Fallon hosts live music at their Civic Park every Tuesday evening starting in June, and last night we were finally able to go. So far this summer we've been prevented from attending by various extremes of weather (ie: torrential rain or death defying heat) and one trip to the Emergency room.

Last night, however, was perfect. The weather was cool, slightly breezy and thankfully, there were no freak accidents at the last minute. Iris was so stinkin' excited all day waiting for daddy to get home so we could go. Lydia was excited just because Iris was. Little did she know the fun that awaited her!

This is by far one of our favorite summer night activities. There are few things better, we think, than hanging out on a big blanket in a great park with good friends, munching on snacks and listening to some fantastic music!