More Grandparent fun

While Scott was busy riding his bike across the state, Michael and I had some fun visiting my parents for a few days.

While I was home, I met up with my friend Brianne and her daughter who is just a few weeks older than Michael.



They had lots of fun playing! She is so adorable!

We also stopped by the nursing home and visited my grandma. She looked great and I think she enjoyed seeing Michael. He was happy to put on a little show for her and was yelling so loud that grandma's roommate thought someone was hurt! I agree, sometimes babies and elderly people yelling sound pretty similar.

Michael also got to eat his meals in his great-grandpa's high chair! He loved eating at grandma's house because she had lots of his favorite foods for him to eat: cheese, oranges, strawberries, grapes, yogurt, and cheerios! What a good grandma!

Michael's favorite activity when visiting grandma and grandpa is looking out the window at the farm kitties.

He loves them!

My husband is crazy

My husband has been riding his bike across the state of Iowa for the past five days.

He's crazy!

This is the second year he has done the whole week of RAGBRAI (here's the link to last year's post) and from his daily texts and phone calls, I think he is having a great time. What could be more fun? It is pretty much a party on wheels.

I dropped him off at the start of the ride and then my dad and I met up with him in one of the stop through towns the next morning for breakfast. It was awesome! I was having so much I almost wanted to hop on a bike myself. Then I remembered I haven't trained or even rode a bike since two years ago when I rode a few days on RAGBRAI.



We got into town at 7:30 to meet Scott and crew after about 20 miles in. Lots of people were already arriving.





Scott's friend Adam, his brother Steve, sister in law Julie, and Scott all rode together.



Michael wants some of the action!



We had belgian waffles for breakfast. Michael was a fan. They even had whipped cream to put on top. Yum.

4 Years!

Happy Anniversary to us!

Time has flown-has it really been four years already?

We have been through a lot in just a short time: building our house, finishing our house (just four short years later-actually, scratch that-we are still working on it!), attending lots of fun things together, spending time with family and our friends, and of course adding our awesome son to our family.

If you would have asked me four years ago where I thought we would be right now, I would have hoped we would be right where we are.



Life is good.

On a side note, thanks to my lovely husband for booking me a very relaxing massage appointment at the spa! It was awesome! It makes up for the fact that he is riding his bike across the state all week and didn't get to spend our anniversary with me. :o( More about that later, I promise.

Here is my post from last year's anniversary with wedding pictures, just in case you were wondering what I looked like before four years of aging hit me!

Swimming!

Michael has been having such a great time every trip we take to the little wading pool in town!

He gets so busy and excited and is moving everywhere. The best part of the whole adventure is usually the nice long nap he takes on the way home. It's lovely!

As tall as the grass grows...

My green and white grass is so beautiful right now. It is also the tallest and biggest it has ever been! This is not really a very good reference picture, but here it is after I planted it in 2008:

If you can get past my monster sweet potato vines (that was during my "plant anything and see how it grows" phase), you can see how teeny tiny that grass was. I thought it wouldn't even make it past that first summer and now it is one of my favorite plants!

Gosh, I can NOT get over that huge sweet potato vine!

That summer I bought a flat of probably 20 plants and just planted them all around my yard. It was borderline ridiculous, but I really did get lots of comments on how beautiful it was. I only planted a few this year, mostly because I haven't been able to find it! :o( They are not doing well, mostly because I think something is eating them!

Summer fun

It's been super hot here lately and so we've been trying to think of ways to cool off.

I got this big ball you can hook a hose up to and it sprays water everywhere. I figured since Michael loved the water splash park so much he would love this also. I was wrong. He hated it.

So we just played with the ball and the hose a bit. It was fun!

Michael is also battling a pesky diaper rash so we took the time outside to be diaper free! Yay!

My coneflowers are so pretty this time of the summer. I wish I had them all over my yard!

I liked this view of my backyard from where we were sitting besides the obvious grass in need of a good trimming. My hostas are growing so well underneath my stairs. I've still got a lot of planting to do before it all seems filled in!

South Dakota Vacation Day 6

First of all, thank you so much for your nice comments on my vacation posts and photos! You are all too sweet!

This is the last post for our vacation so I tried to squeeze in everything. There are a ton of photos, so brace yourselves!

We spent the last few days of our vacation at Custer State Park which is known for its buffalo that roam around the park. We saw this big bull just driving around!

I also really loved the State Game Lodge. Props to my husband who booked a room for us! I could have easily stayed the entire vacation here. I loved the history and the feel of the lodge. It was the summer whitehouse for president Calvin Coolidge and his family. How fun would that be?

We wanted to take a tour of the park so we got in on one of the buffalo safaris.

We cruised around in these old Jeep Wagoneers. Scott loved it because his first car was a Jeep Wagoneer. Wasn't he crazy to get rid of it? They were so cool. He said they were really popular in South Dakota because they were the first SUV and lots of people used them for hunting, which is also really popular in South Dakota.

We saw tons of bison but my favorite were the calves. They were so cute how they had to follow their mommy everywhere.



At the end of the safari, we stopped for a chuckwagon dinner. It was good food, but the wind had picked up and we were freezing!! We listened to some tunes, but headed out soon after we were done eating.



It was cooler so I put jeans and jacket on Michael before we went out but I forgot his socks. I could just feel all the older adults (from a tour bus) giving me bad looks because my baby didn't have socks on! :o(

The next morning we took a little hike around the park and ran into these two dudes on our path.

We were so close! I was pretty scared!

We also saw this guy walking around:

Nah, just kidding. We saw him at Bear Country USA which we swung through on the way home.

We also saw baby bears and lots of big grizzly bears!

We had a great time on our South Dakota Vacation 2010!

South Dakota Vacation Day 5

Day five of our trip started out with a trip through the Black Hills to one of our nation's greatest: Mouth Rushmore!

It was a beautiful morning and there were tons of people out sight seeing. It was sooo funny to see all the different tourists that came to visit. I could have sat and people-watched for hours. We kept running into these bus loads of older adults and it seemed like they had a little uniform: visor, sensible walking shoes, enormous sunglasses, camera and binoculars. Bonus points awarded to the couples who were dressed alike to boot! :o) It looked like they were having a great time and I can't wait until I can get in on some of those tour groups-they always go on neat trips!





Someone was nice enough to take our photo. I probably should have cropped that lady out, whoops!





The sky was such a beautiful blue with no clouds at all. I love it!

After Mount Rushmore we headed to the Crazy Horse Memorial since we were in that neck of the woods. I actually enjoyed the experience at Crazy Horse much more than Mount Rushmore. We watched a video about the sculptor and how tedious it was carving the mountain and how they have been offered government funds lots of times to finish it but they think it should be a monument for the people, paid for by the people who come there.

When finished it will be way huger than Mount Rushmore. In fact, all four heads from Mount Rushmore would fit inside Crazy Horse's head. I had no idea!



After Crazy Horse, we headed towards Custer State Park. On the way we stopped at Sylvan Lake, which was seen in the film National Treasure: Book of Secrets.



We had fun hiking around the lake and even met up with some boy scouts who knew all the cool places to go like between big boulders!



We spent the night at the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. It was beautiful!

Michael entertained himself for hours with the mirror on the wardrobe. He kept trying to eat the little face in the mirror! He would bang and bang on it and then laugh and yell.

Scott took me out for a nice dinner at the restaurant at the State Game lodge where we split a bottle of wine and I had a buffalo fillet! It was to die for!