Memrorial Day Weekend (part 2)

The second part of our weekend started with my cousin Jeff's wedding reception, but there are no pictures of that. We headed to Wausau to celebrate two birthdays.

Janet turned 21 and shared all her awesomeness with us.  She really enjoyed the birdie shirt I made.  We all agreed it isn't as horrible as the idea could be.

 

Janet continued to amaze us with her magnificent photo skills.  Who knew you could wear a boppy and balance little people animals on it all at the same time. Words can not capture the other picture, but it is happily added to the file of awkward Janet pictures :)

We also got to meet little Sadie Lynn!  She is such a sweetie!

And, then we just had fun with everyone.  Macey seemed a little out of it, but still had fun playing with us.

Looks like Lauren is ready for a little sister!

All the little girlies!

Memorial Day Weekend (part 1)

 Thanks to the long weekend, Ben and I finally had a Saturday with nothing we had to do.  We decided to take the bikes out and check out some of the trails around St. Paul starting at the Lilydale Regional Park where we first met almost two years ago!  We had awesome weather Saturday morning and were happy to take the time for the ride.

Part of our ride was along a railroad line that went under some of the major highways that we drive on all the time.  Ben enjoyed seeing the big bridges (but also said he hoped they wouldn't collapse on him).  Most of it also went along the Mississippi River.  We were lucky that most of it wasn't flooded with all the rain and snow melt from this year, but we did have to ride on the rode for a little part. 

 

Th only bad part of the ride is that the whole way out it was completely uphill, but that just meant the whole ride back was downhill!  And, I ran over a poor little turtle who was on the bike path.  Luckily, my front tire missed him and scared him so he pulled his legs and head and tail into his shell so when my back tire hit him he was safe.  Ben put him off the trail so no one else would hit him.

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Ben's Birthday

Ben wasn't too excited to celebrate his birthday this year, but I think he had lots of fun with all the birthday wishes he got from family and friends.

 

 And who wouldn't be excited about the awesome presents he got this year-moon landing socks, the Easter Sing-a-ma-jig, and Twins tickets and a Twins shirt.

 We went to the Mall of America for the evening and enjoyed eating at one of the three America's Next Great Restaurants--Soul Daddy.  The food was good, but nothing special.  The sauces were amazing, though!  We also wandered around, and Ben enjoyed visiting the Lego store and really liked the Lego Robot.

Lastly, we walked past Harmon Killebrew's seat where he hit his longest home run.  And, I think Ben would agree that being 32 isn't too bad after all.

 

The latest niece pictures

 

Easter

 More Easter

 

Going down the slide.

Keeping her eyes on the birthday cake.

Hugs

I'm not sure how we managed to get another great photo of Janet, but I couldn't help putting it in!

spring is sprung

the grass is riz

I wonder where the birdies is

It's about dang time the weather decided to be spring.  We rode our bikes over to Como Lake today because it was so nice, and Ben needed to take a break from studying.  The weather was wonderful and it was nice to finally get some time outside in the sun!  This was our first long bike ride measuring 8.4 miles and my little seven speed bike did great on the hills.  Hopefully, we get many more of these opportunities!

Seriously?

I didn't know anyone wanted help.

The Royal Wedding

Being the wedding aficionado that I am, I proudly admit that I got up and watched the Royal Wedding this morning.  It was early, and it has been a long day, but I think it was well worth it.  Ben was working on a paper, so he was up, so I decided it wouldn't be any problem to watch such a historic occasion.

It was the perfect fairytale!

Lots of people were wondering why all the hype with the royal wedding.  I spent some time at work thinking about this very thing (there was quite a bit of down time).  Two thoughts struck me as to why this wedding was so popular.

1. Marriage is such an important part of Heavenly Father's plan that deep within ourselves, our spirits long to embrace that which is good and helps promotes this plan.  Naturally, weddings are the outwards celebration of a lifelong, eternal covenant between two people. 

2. Being children of our Heavenly Father, we all have royalty within our divine nature.  Seeing it here in this life reminds us of our own divine potential and what each one of us have the capability to become one day.

I guess all those lessons in YW about being a princess really did make an impact.