Fourth of July

Okay, I think we're close to getting this blog caught up now. Just one or two more posts to go. We headed to Racine for our annual Fourth of July trip. This year was packed with quite a bit of activity!

Friday, the girls and I went downtown with Tom and Pat to see the Adirondack chairs that had been painted by local artists and to visit with Great-Grandma Iz and Great-Grandpa Nick.




That night, we went to Ben and Jenelle's house for their annual Third of July party. We had a great time visiting with all their friends and their kids. Ella and Lily had a really great time playing baseball, doing sparklers, climbing around on their fence, and more.

Saturday we made our way downtown to see the parade. The girls had a great time and loved it. For Andrew and I, the parade was a little lacking this year. But maybe that's because we've seen it several years now. We also were sitting at the end of the parade route and it just seemed like everyone was pretty tired and lacking energy by the time they got to us.


Ella hanging out with Cousin Rachel.

We had lunch at Andrew's grandparents and then relaxed for a bit before heading over to Uncle Nick's house for a BBQ. He had a snow cone machine this year! Not a Snoopy Snow Cone machine either! Like a real one! The girls thought that was soo cool! I'm pretty sure Ella had two or three of them.


We saw the fireworks down by the lake that night and were pretty wowed by them. The girls love that their is a smiley face firework and they were just waiting for it. It was their favorite last year. And they did two or three of them!

As if all of that wasn't enough excitement for one weekend, on Sunday, we all met up again for Nick and Iz's 60th Wedding Anniversary party at Infusino's. The party was a great success.

Do you see the number of kiddie cocktail glasses there are on the table?


And finally, here are a few random photos from our time there too:

Soccer Girl

Ella played soccer again this spring. She was on the yellow team and they called themselves the Sunshine Girls. She had a lot of fun and was great! She played really hard and tried her best and had a great time! Her team wasn't quite the same caliber as her fall team, but they all tried really hard.

Here's a few pictures from the season:




Ella and Hope with their medals on. Ella was sooo excited to get a medal. She was so proud! She loves showing it off to everyone!


And here's Lily playing with the soccer ball during one of Ella's games. She loved going to the games and would cheer and yell, "Go Ella Go!" and "Go Yellow!" It was super cute!

Ella is signed up for soccer in the fall. We start up again the middle of August!

Summer Fun

In the off weeks, we haven't been traveling, we've had a lot of fun doing regular summer-type activities like going to the lake, playing outside (alot!), playing in our new "rainbow" pool (the whale pool bit the dust by the end of last summer), playing with friends, and having a grand ol' time. That of course, has all been going on inbetween the unpacking, doing laundry, and repacking for all our various trips.

Here a few of my favorite photos so far:

Lily just chillin' on the drivewayHands down one of my favorites just because
if you look really close, Lily is in mid-air. I LOVE that!Andrew teaching Ella how to swing her golf club.
They've been going to the driving range too!

And here's a slideshow of some more photos:

Where in the World is Andrew?

Answer: Los Angeles! Last night he was at Manny Ramirez Bobble Head Night at Dodger Stadium. :-) Ironically, he is in Los Angeles to shoot footage for the Vikings package this year.

Cedar Rapids/Knosher Trip 2009

In the middle of June, we did our annual trip to Cedar Rapids and Galesburg for the Knosher Golf Tournament.

Shockingly, I don't think I have one photo from Cedar Rapids. I really have no idea how that happened! We traveled down to Cedar Rapids late on a Wednesday night and left the girls with Nana and Papi on Thursday morning to travel to Galesburg. We had a lot of fun hanging out with Bob and Amber and Chris, and then Garth later on in the evening. Amber and I did our annual trip to get pedicures while the boys went off to play a practice round.

We all had a lot of fun on Friday at the tournament which I realized was our TENTH one already! Boy does time go by quickly! Andrew's parents made the trip down for the tournament. Andrew really enjoyed playing on Thursday with his dad and I think Tom had a pretty good time on Friday playing in the tournament. And of course, we always have a great time seeing Harley and visiting with him!

Here's a few photos for you:



Amber, Bob, Steve Cottrell, Harley, Chris, Andrew and me.



Andrew's foursome

The other "young alumni" foursome. Not sure how much longer we'll be able to say "young alumni" but I guess everything is relative, right?

All the young alumni guys: front: Andrew, Steve, Garth, Bob. Back: David Marquadt (an '08 grad), Chris, Vince, and Jeff Ancelet.
You can see more photos from the tournament and past years by going here.

Friday afternoon we traveled back to Cedar Rapids and had a yummy dinner at my favorite restaurant The Greek Place. Saturday morning, Andrew and I met up with Amber and Bob again so I could photograph Amber's family (You can see those photos here). Then Saturday afternoon, I surprised Andrew with part of his Father's Day gift. He got to play golf at Cedar Rapids Country Club with our friends Molly and Derek and my mom. He had a great time and shot a 74 there!!

Sunday, Andrew made a nice breakfast (even though it was Father's Day--no one can make breakfast as well as Andrew!). And he spent the afternoon watching the US Open while I packed up the car. We went back home early in the evening.

Girls had a great time hanging out with Nana and Papi and we all enjoyed our trip!

The Garden Experiment Update

Oh, how our garden GROWS!

This has been so fun! Everything is growing very well and we've even harvested some green beans. They were absolutely delicious!

Corn is growing crazy high and we can't wait to see what we get from it. And the cucumbers are on their way as well. We also have cilantro and dill coming in well. I picked some of the dill and dried it and will save it for the next time I make dill dip or something else requiring the yummy herb.

Here's some photos of our garden from about a week and a half ago.

Minocqua 2009

We headed to Minocqua, Wisconsin to the "little red house" the first weekend in June (the same weekend we went last year). The girls and I hung out with Bubba and Grand Pat on Thursday and Friday while Andrew worked. We had fun at the beach, went fishing in the boat (but didn't catch much, just 2 small Northerns), played some mini-golf. You might remember Lily caught a 22-inch Northern on her little pole last year. She was so funny, I asked her if she wanted to try and catch it again. She said no, she didn't want to catch any big fish this year. :-)

Tom and Pat took the girls part of the time as well so I had a chance to blog and get caught up on things (that would be when I did my last real blog update...geesh!).

Friday night, Ben and Jenelle joined us and we all had a nice time hanging out. They went kayaking on Saturday morning while the rest of us checked out the shops in downtown Minocqua. We ate at Monical's Pizza for dinner Saturday night. And all eight of us took in a showing of Disney's Up! We didn't have the best weather on Saturday evening so we thought a movie would be a good plan. Up was really good, everyone enjoyed it!

Then Sunday, we packed the car up and headed out, but not before we stopped to play a round of mini-golf with Ben and Jenelle at Settler's Mill (I think that's the name of the place) and Ben beat Andrew by one stroke! Quite a feat!

Enjoy a slideshow of our trip! Sorry if this is a bit brief, but I'm trying to get caught up here. ;-) And I've included links to last year's Minocqua post which was very in-depth. We did many of the same activities.
Minocqua 2008--Part 1
Minocqua 2008--Part 2

Busy Busy Busy

I feel so bad for not having updated this blog more in the last month or so. We have traveled every other week since the middle of MAY! And the in-between weeks we've played catch-up with laundry, unpacking, repacking, picking up the house (who knew being gone so much could actually make your house messier!), grocery shopping etc.

I also have had less blogging time because my photography business is actually starting to take off a bit. I've had several shoots the last couple months and I have more on the calendar! YAY! I have my first non-friend, non-family member shoot on Saturday and I'm so excited. They are a referral from a friend of ours and I'm crossing my fingers that it goes really well. My big goal this summer was to break out of taking photos of people I KNOW and get some new clients. I'm also taking my cousin's SENIOR PHOTOS next week. Which makes me slightly nervous because senior photos are such a big deal. But at the same time I'm sure it'll go fine and be a lot of fun!

So anyway, these are the reasons you haven't heard much from me on here. But the girls are in summer camp in the mornings all next week and hopefully I'll be able to get a post or two up during that time.

Thanks for being patient! Hope you all had a fantastic and fun Fourth of July!! And are enjoying the summer! It'll be over before we know it!

Where in the World is Andrew?

I was actually going to post a photo of Andrew WITH US because he's not traveling for work this week. However, Andrew wanted this photo up instead. ;-) Apparently it's a very big deal to have your photo taken with these guys. They are THE game entertainment at the Brewers game. Check out the newest member of the Klement's Sausage Race.