Thursday, July 14, 2011

July 4, 2011 and other happenings

I'm enjoying what I expect to be the last of a few quiet moments before the other inhabitants of the house wake up.  Getting up at 5 am may sound crazy, but there is something about that quiet morning time.  Oh, I just heard a door creak open.

We spent the July 4th weekend down in Iowa City.  We started the weekend out Thursday evening with losing the air conditioning in my car about 2 hours into the drive.  And yes, it just happened to be one of the days that the heat advisory was in effect.  It reminded me of the summers of my childhood when my parents would pile my sisters and I into our 1977 Scout to drive from Colorado to Minnesota, sans air conditioning.  Thankfully the drive home on the 4th was cooler.

Oh my, just to show how quickly time goes by, those first two paragraphs were typed on Wednesday, July 6th at 5:30 or so AM.  It is now, Sunday July, 10th at 7 am.   I need a special thingamajig that can pause the rest of the world while I catch up on stuff.  I promise I wouldn't abuse it and would only use it for good things.

Anyway, Bill just put up a nice post about the Victory Drive Memorial re-dedication, one of "other happenings" we enjoyed in the past few weeks.  The Minneapolis Park service received federal funding to install lighting, a new memorial, and gates at each end of Victory Memorial Drive, honoring the 568 men and women from Hennepin County who died in WWI.  It was fun and you can see pictures and a video of Anders riding his bike on Bill's blog right here.

The following weekend we were off to Burlington, IA for Will's cousin, Katie's wedding.   We took some pictures, but kind of forgot we had the camera midway through the reception.   We stayed at Fun City in Burlington - it has a wading pool for kids and lots and lots of slides, including some for adults.


Anders enjoyed the wading pool, he was not very interested in the kid-sized slides though.  


He did enjoy the really small slides, but I saw both Anders and Eleanor bonk their heads on the top of this whale's mouth on the way down the slide. 


That is Henry in the red swimsuit with his back to the big bucket.  Pete is in the orange showing Anders the bucket, you can just see Anders' head to the right of Pete.  Unfortunately I couldn't time the camera correctly to get a shot of Henry getting drenched by the water.


After all that swimming and no nap, this is what Anders did during the ceremony.  He was asleep within a few minutes of us taking our seats.  It was really quite a relief as we weren't sure how he would do during the ceremony.


A sweet dad-daughter dance. 


Katie and Justin having their dance.  


Anders really was enamored with Katie. 


Clara was one of the flower girls and looked pretty darn cute. 

On to the July 4th weekend.  We headed down to Iowa City Thursday afternoon on one of the hottest days of the year.  And wouldn't you know it?  The AC in my car died about 1.5 hours into the drive.  It brought me back to the years when my parents would pile all of us (plus a dog or two once in a while) into our 1977 Scout to drive from Colorado to Minnesota for a summer visit, also without AC.   Ah, good times...

The heat continued on into Friday, so Anders and Eleanor took to her pool.  Earlier in the week we had discovered that Anders is a bit of an exhibitionist, but Eleanor didn't seem to mind.  Just a few days before heading to Iowa, one could overhear Anders having the following conversation with our neighbor, "Steve, I'm naked!" Steve, "Anders, you're a lucky guy." 



Later that afternoon we were off to Grandpa Bill and Grandma Kathie's for some more fun.  They had a new slip and slide that seemed to be a big hit.


Anders needed some help.  Please note that this is also Will's bowling pose.


Henry was especially good at it.  


Henry danced a little jig. 


Monkey see, monkey do. 

Ok, I have to do this another one of those series - the attempts to get all the cousins to smile at the same time and look at the same camera.  It seems like by now, we adults would have figured out a way to make this work.  











Ok, I have to give up.  This is the longest post in terms of how long it has taken me to do it.  I started on July 6th at 6 am and it is now July 14th at 10:40 pm.  I've been too busy this week getting ready for our trip up north to work on the sauna, plus I rode my bike to work Mon-Wed (29 miles round trip each day) and that cut into my free time, plus Anders has been stubborn about going to sleep lately.   Oh well, I guess an incomplete post is better than nothing!  I'm not even going to proof-read it, so those of you who, like me, catch typos like crazy, enjoy!