One more highlight....

Andrew's brother, Benjamin came to visit us for the weekend July 25th. We had a lot of fun hanging out with him! He and Andrew visited Mystic Lake Casino and Andrew actually won a bit of cash! We tried out the ice cream ball to make sure we knew what we were doing for Ella's birthday party. But the main reason for the visit was for all of us to visit the Science Museum of Minnesota on Sunday morning to see the special Star Wars exhibit they had there.

The exhibit was pretty cool. They had actual costumes and props used in the 6 movies. Luke's vehicle (is it a speed cruiser? land cruiser? Forgive my lack of Stars Wars knowledge--I'll have to check with Andrew) was there. The actual full-size vehicle. They had videos showing behind the scenes montages. They had different hands-on stations where you could build vehicles and robots. Ella enjoyed it quite a bit. Lily was still a bit young for it. They had a cheesy touristy green screen photo-op that we took advantage of while we were there. Check out the new blog sidebar photo! While Andrew and Ben looked at more of the exhibit and went to the special Star Wars IMAX show, I walked around the rest of the museum with the girls where we learned about excavating dinosaurs, the different properties of light, weather and wind.

They had special demonstrations going on with light and dry ice. We learned about the special lights used in lighthouses. Did you know that every light house has a different timed beat for their light when it is going around. So back before GPS and fancy technology, not only could ships tell where shore was from the lighthouse light, they could count the beat of the light and know exactly where they were by which lighthouse they were near! You learn something new everyday! A lady was doing different experiments with dry ice and teaching the kids about the gas and the solid (and sublimation for you science experts out there!). She blew bubbles into the tank with the dry ice on the bottom and the bubbles just sort of hovered in thin air. Really, it was the gas coming up off the dry ice holding them there. But it was a very cool effect. She also put a balloon over a beaker with a small sliver of dry ice in it and the rising gas blew the balloon up. The girls were really impressed with all of this!

After the Science Museum, we headed to the Mall of America for lunch and perused the Lego Store and Disney Store before dropping Ben off at the airport. All in all, it was a quick visit, but a fun one! The girls loved playing with Uncle Ben and we enjoyed our time with him as well! Sorry for lack of photos. But that would be the weekend the camera broke. Andrew has one or two on his cell phone camera that I'll try and upload later.