Happy Birthday to Ella!

Ella turned four years old last Sunday! Hard to believe that she is four already!! I still remember the day she was born like it was yesterday and she was so little. Or how she used to sleep in her swing all the time. Or crawled faster than any baby alive and once she was walking there was no stopping her. She can be so goofy and silly and happy and cute. All the teachers and people she's met think she's so "delightful". They seem genuinely surprised and excited by how delightful and happy she is.

I've said before she has talked about her birthday pretty much since January. Every time we were at the grocery store, she would look at the birthday cake display and pick out which cake she wanted. About a month ago, I had her pick a cake and told her that was going to be her birthday cake and we started the countdown to her Tinkerbell party!

July 28th, we had about 20 family members over from my mom's, my dad's and Andrew's side of the family. Ella had been so excited, too excited I think. When the party started she, Lily, and her cousin Emilee went on a treasure hunt for little treasure chests each filled with a gold dollar. After that, they decorated crowns and picture frames with princess stickers. And then it was time to eat. About this time, Ella realized she was tired and a bit overwhelmed by all the attention. She felt it would be best to go up to her room and conk out for a bit. So we ate and waited. and waited. Then we tried to wake her up after about an hour and a half. It took 15-20 minutes to get her to wake up. I've never seen her so hard to wake up. But she got up and opened all her gifts and then had cake, so she was the belle of the ball after all. Thank you to everyone who came to wish her Happy Birthday and those of you who sent along birthday wishes!!

On her actual birthday August 5th, Andrew and I took the girls to Mall of America and Ella was Princess for a Day. Our friend Molly, who is also Ella's godmother, was in town and met us at the Mall. We watched Ella ride the rides for a bit including the merry-go-round! This is a huge feat because she has not been on a carousel for two years. The last time was a disaster turn with me and my dad at Valleyfair (an amusement park here in MN). She screamed the entire ride. But this time she WANTED to go on it. So we said okay. And she really enjoyed it. No screaming. She was smiling and said, "that was fun!" when it was over. After that we moved on to the Libby Lu experience where Ella received the Princess treatment. She loved every minute of it. The funny thing is that afterwards we went to lunch and while we were waiting for our food, Ella gave Lily the Libby Lu experience. Please see pictures at the end of Ella's birthday photo album to see what I'm talking about. It was so hilarious how Lily knew just what to do and listened to Ella tell her, "Okay close your eyes."

After that, we visited the Disney store and stocked up on Tinkerbell t-shirts and some purple sparkly mary janes that Ella just LOVES! That night my dad came over for pizza and Ella opened a couple more gifts including her "big" gift of a new bicycle. She and Lily took turns trying it out in the house before we took it out on the path by our house. She's still a little leery of it, but likes to try it out. :-)

Now she's onto telling what we need to do for Lily's "Nemo" birthday. She's decided all by herself that Lily will be having a Nemo birthday and there needs to be a Nemo cake and Nemo balloons. We'll see, I haven't asked Lily what kind of birthday party she wants yet. :-)

The Many Faces of Lily

Here's a few fun pictures of Lily to make up for the upcoming surge of Birthday Ella!

Full House

Last weekend we had visitors! Our friends Bob and Amber and their daughter Brianna AND Chris and Abbie came to stay with us for the weekend. And they were all in our house! Andrew and I decided we wanted to host a golf event for some of the Knox golfers that included significant others and children. Most of their golf outings are for the guys only so we thought it would be fun to include everyone at one of the events.

The guys spent the weekend playing golf at the Chaska Town Course, Chaska Par 30, Deer Run in Victoria and Braemar in Edina. Abbie joined them for a couple of rounds too. The ladies visited Riley Lake and the Mall of America. And we all visited Golf Zone on Saturday night to play a bit of mini-golf. Time was spent engaging in lawn games, Euchre and Trivia Pursuit as well. I think we all had a great time and were completely exhausted by the end of the weekend! We hope to get everyone together again in the future!

I picked up the latest Harry Potter book on Saturday and spent Monday and Tuesday devouring the book. It was fantastic! I'm so glad I got through it before I heard anything about what happened!

In other news, we are having Ella's birthday party tomorrow. It's a Tinkerbell themed party and she is soooo excited! She's pretty much been talking about her birthday since the day after Christmas. And I think she can hardly believe that its finally here! Yesterday, as we pulled in to the grocery store parking lot to order her cake, she started singing, "It's my Tinkerbell birthday. It's my Tinkerbell birthday. Yeah!!" So cute!

She picked out the theme. She's informed me there must be balloons and candles to blow out. She specified green, blue, and yellow balloons. She is just so funny! The other day we were talking and I asked her if it would be okay if we actually sang "Happy Birthday" to her this year. And she said, "No." Then I asked her if we could just say, "1-2-3, Happy Birthday, Ella." And she said that was okay.

I think I may have mentioned before how Lily likes to push Ella's buttons. Well, she must have been listening to the exchange between me and Ella. The only song she ever sings all by herself is "Happy Birthday to Ella." And she looked at Ella and started singing it. Ella told her, "Stop singing, Lily." And Lily stopped, paused and then sang, "...to you." Oh my god, I laughed so hard! Lily is just such a character.

Just a cute picture of the girls

Lily's most current thing is carrying around an old purse of mine. It has a shorter strap so its just perfect for her to put on her shoulder. She walks around the house with it, finding stuff to stash in it; bits of paper, a straw, receipts, a Little People person. Then if we get into the car to go somewhere and she's forgotten it, all of sudden she says, "My purse! My purse!!" Such a girly girl already!

I've been playing around with my fun new camera so I've taken a lot of pictures lately. Just haven't had time to upload them yet. There's a few in this post to tide you over. And I think since I've been focusing on Ella more in the last few months, I'll put up a Lily photo retrospective. :-)

Sleeping at the lake

We have a full house again this weekend with Tom and Pat and my mom and Dave in town for Ella's birthday party. They'll all be staying with us too! And Uncle Ben and Aunt Jenelle are making the trip too!

Enjoy the end of July!

Back home, but no slowing down

After traveling 4 out of 6 weeks we are home now for a month and half. But we're not slowing down at all. Andrew actually traveled to Denver from Saturday to Thursday to go to a conference for work. He spent his time golfing, rafting, schmoozing clients and running around like crazy! He's back home again now. My mom and Dave have been here all week helping with the kids and visiting. We went to the Mall of America and the MN Zoo. Ella has thoroughly enjoyed the multitude of people available to "go play in Ella's room" with her.

Ella also started "summer school" which really is a speech therapy session but through the school district. It is located at the school where her preschool is though so she will be well acclimated by the fall. She had no problem saying good-bye to me and then simply said, "Hi Mom." when I returned. Hi MOM. What, is she 8 years old? She'd never said Mom before, always Mommy or Mama. My little girl is growing up!

She also started a feeding program with an occupational therapist. It's once a week and through Capable Kids where she gets her private speech therapy. It is designed to help introduce her to eating new and different foods and get her to move outside of her comfort zone with textures and colors. She is borderline with sensory issues and her food intake seems to fall into that category. She pretty much only eats white or yellow foods and meat (unless it involves sugar than it doesn't matter what color it is, of course). At any rate, our first session was very interesting and I think this will be very helpful.

Ella has had a busy week, she also tried out a gymnastics class at a place called My Gym. She had fun and it was good for her to be in a group/teacher session. She had to follow directions and I think she had fun. She's never done anything structured before so it was new for her to not just run in and play.

Lily was lost without Ella. She just doesn't know what to do without her around to play with or watch. When we walked in the door, Lily came running saying, "Ella, Ella, Ella!" all excited and gave her a big hug! It was very cute. Lucky for her Ella's preschool is pretty much during her naptime so she won't even miss her!

In other news, our digital camera broke on 4th of July. Someone (ahem, I won't mention who) dropped it and it finally broke (this was probably the fifth time we've dropped it so it took a lot for it to finally go). However, I did get a fancy schmancy new camera out of it. I'm still learning how to use it. But I'm very excited about it and will probably be even more camera happy than I already am (I know, you're thinking, how is that possible?). And we will have lots of photo opportunities coming up in the next few weeks! Next weekend we are hosting the first annual Isaacson Golfapalooza event for Knox alumni golfers and families. Their other events are mostly for the guys so we thought it would be fun for us to all get together with wives and kids too.

The following weekend we will be having Ella's birthday party. Then my cousin Cindy's annual pig roast and Ella actual birthday the weekend after that. So like I said, we're home, but we're not slowing down! :-)

Hope you all are having a great summer so far!

Fourth of July--Racine

We spent five days in Racine around the Fourth visiting with Andrew's family. Ella and Lily did surprisingly well on the drive there. And we arrived to Grand Tom (aka Bubba) and Grand Pat sitting outside waiting for us with an arsenal of vehicles, bikes and trikes for the kids to ride on. It's funny, as Tom put it, much of our time there was spent sitting around and then it would be hurry up and go to an activity. We discovered Ella LOVES fireworks. She saw two small fountain firecrackers that Uncle Ben set off in the backyard and there was no stopping her from wanting more. Lucky for her, we saw three separate displays during the week!

Sunday, we had a turkey dinner with Andrew's aunt Sue and his grandparents. Then Ben, Andrew, Tom and I played nine holes at Johnson Park golf course. After a nice kid-free dinner with Ben and Jenelle on Sunday night, we picked up Ella and visited with our friend Phil at Meadowbrook Country Club. We were treated to a very nice fireworks display and could just barely see the fireworks at rival Racine Country Club too. Ella got her face painted and saw a smiley face firework. She was in 7th Heaven!

Monday, Andrew played golf with his cousin Tony while the girls and I hung out around the house with Grand Tom. We played outside and Ella drove her Jeep around and around and around the house. We took Ella to the dentist for the first time on Tuesday. And she had a great time assisting in the cleaning of my teeth. She helped rinse and suction. She might have a good future as a dental hygienist. ;-) Tuesday night we had a great time at Ben and Jenelle's annual July 3rd BBQ with family and friends. Ella and Lily had a lot of fun playing with all the little kids that were there this year. And we were treated to some "sparkly" backyard fireworks from Ben and Tom.

It's the largest 4th of July parade in the state of Wisconsin. The pre-parade consists of every fire engine and police car in the area (this would be a great time to rob a bank!) blowing their sirens for 45 minutes! Then you wait a bit and the actual parade starts and goes on for three more hours. Lily decided this was a good time to take a nap. Wednesday, the big day! We went to the 4th of July Parade which just keeps going and going.We rested for a bit after the parade and then made our way to Uncle Nick and Aunt Lisa's house for another BBQ. And then topped off the day with the third fireworks display of the week. We had a great view on the dock outside a friend's boat. These had to have been the BEST fireworks I have ever seen in my life! And I'm not exaggerating! They started off like a finale and went on like that for about 10-15 minutes. Then slowed down to one or two at a time for another 30 minutes and then finished with a great finale! It was fantastic and Ella got FOUR smiley faces! ;-)

After all those festivities we made our way back to Minnesota on Thursday. We really had a lot of fun with Andrew's family and my mom and Dave made their way over to Racine too. We're already looking forward to next year. There are photos on Shutterfly as well!

Girls Weekend 2007

Last year four friends from high school came to visit me in Los Angeles. We had so much fun that we decided to make it an annual event. We decided it was fun to visit a city where one of us had an insider's knowledge of things to do. So this year we all convened in Philadelphia. Erin J. had moved there about a year ago. None of the rest of us had been to Philly before so we thought it sounded fun.

After some annoying flight details, Erin F. and I arrived in Philly on Thursday, June 21st and stayed in Erin and her husband, Dave's apartment near Penn's campus. On Friday, Erin F. and I took our time getting up and out and about, took the bus to Old City or the historic part of town. We walked around and had a cheesesteak sandwich at Jim's Steaks after waiting in line for a good 45 minutes or so. We enjoyed taking in all the old architecture and catching up. Despite a minor annoying incident where my flip-flop broke and I had to walk around for 20-25 minutes without a shoe before we found a place to buy some new ones, it was a very enjoyable afternoon. We joined up with Erin J. after work at our hotel and then picked up Claire and Allison at the airport. We dined at Positano Coast and had quite a delicious meal sharing several dishes.

Saturday, we toured the countryside visiting the Battle of Brandywine battlefield site for a picnic lunch. We took in a few historic sites including George Washington's headquarters for the battle. The gift shop there proved to be an amusement for all and we each left with our own revolutionary era basket weaving kit. We thought it might be entertaining to try and weave a basket in a hour as the package promised. And joked that perhaps we needed to complete a cheesy crafty souvenir on each of our future trips. ;-)

We traveled around the Brandywine area in the afternoon visiting the Longwood Gardens gift shop. We didn't have much time before they closed so we didn't pay admission to actually go in, but it looked like it would be absolutely beautiful. If you're ever in the Philly area, I would definitely check that out. We also drove through the campus at Swarthmore College. It was extremely beautiful there. Very picturesque.

Allison, Claire, Erin Jensen, Dave, Erin Friedline, Me
at Marigold for dinner

We arrived back in West Philly (yes, the Fresh Prince song was sung at least once during the trip) at Erin and David's apartment to rest for a bit and looked at her pictures from their trip to Africa. Then headed out to dinner at Marigold. Dave joined us for dinner and was entertained with our silliness and talk of band camp (yes, Claire attended band camp). We started getting a little bit too loud with stories and whatnot so decided to head back to the hotel. We started the basketweaving extravaganza around midnight. And despite the instructions saying it would only take an hour, we proceeded to plug along for the next 2.5-3 hours. They turned out fairly well given all the grumbling and profane words slung around.

Sunday, we toured the city on foot. We walked through an art market, the Italian market, got some water ice (a Philly phenomenon, sort of like a slushie), and had lunch in South Philly. There are two cheesesteak places across the street from each other. Pat's and Geno's. We decided to get sandwiches from both so we could try them and decide. I preferred Geno's but I think everyone else liked Pat's better. You be the judge next time you visit Philly.

We continued on walking around various neighborhoods to Rittenhouse Square where we took a breather and relaxed for a bit in a park (yes, I was complaining about all the exercise I was getting by this point). And continued on back toward the hotel stopping at the Naked Chocolate Cafe. YUM! We visited Elfreth's Alley, the oldest continuously lived in neighborhood in the US. The houses were really cool! There was plaque on one of them dating 1752. There was a sign in one saying it was going to be on the market, if anyone's interested! ;-) After our tour of the city, we cooled off in the hotel pool with a nice swim and some synchronized swimming from Claire, Erin J, and Erin F. Sorry we forgot the camera for that one. And finished on with a dinner at a fairly forgettable Italian restaurant (I can't even remember the name of it).

We said goodbye to Erin J that night because she had to return to reality and go to work on Monday and the rest of us sort of did our own thing Monday morning before we all caught our flights back home. I visited the Polish American Cultural Center. My paternal grandfather was Polish so I thought I would check it out. I learned that Poland had the second oldest Declaration of Independence (ours was first). And there was a painting very similar to the one of our founders signing the Declaration. I also learned Poles built the first factory in America to produce the first "made-in-America" products, which were glassware.

Claire and Allison went off to the Mutter Museum, full of medical anomalies. Claire told me on the plane about one set of siamese twins who had two heads and one torso/body. Interesting to hear about, but glad I didn't see it for myself.

We all made it back safe and sound, and had a great time! We are planning on Denver next year, home to Erin Friedline now. She's already scoping things out for us! Can't wait!! There are pictures on Shutterfly if anyone is interested. :-)

June/July Photos

I uploaded a couple new photo albums today. I promise real blog updates very soon! We've been traveling a lot lately so I'm still playing catch up and recovering. Check back soon!

Everyone on vacation?

As some of you may have noticed, I have a hit counter on our website. The people over at amazingcounters.com who host the hit counter kindly keep track of daily and weekly stats of visitors. We average a little over 16 visitors a day. I'm very happy with that and it makes the time I spend on this that much more worthwhile. So here's a visitor appreciation post for all of you!!

I did notice that visitorship (is that a word?) dropped quite a bit last week. Was everyone on vacation? Or are you just sick of me not updating the blog as regularly? ;-)

Well here's 3 posts in two days just to get back on track!

And for an added bonus some pictures of our lovely flower bed out front. The flower bed was there when we arrived at the house. And of course because that was the dead of winter it was brown and barren. We are continually amazed by the flowers that just pop up. And thank god it was already there! I don't have a green thumb in my body so here's to hoping that I don't kill anything and they keep coming back year after year!

To Illinois and Back

Every year the second full week of June we travel back to Galesburg, Illinois, home of our alma mater, Knox College. The third Friday of the month is always the Harley Knosher Alumni Golf Outing. We've been attending every year since we graduated and so look forward to visiting with Harley and the golf buddies. And every year, I am continually amazed at what a phenomenal man Harley Knosher is. He has the ability to make anyone feel special and the most important person in the room. He celebrated 40 years of being involved at Knox and had people at the tournament from his first year there through his last year. He is Andrew's mentor and taught him that golf (as well as life) is not an individual sport but a team event.

The obligatory Andrew and Harley picture.

We take one every year. :-)

We drove down to Cedar Rapids on Wednesday and left the girls at my mom's house. On Thursday morning we made the quick trek over to Galesburg. Andrew and Bob Carroll played a practice round in the afternoon while Bob's wife, Amber and I took advantage of a kid-free afternoon and got pedicures. We had dinner at the Landmark Cafe and then hung out with the golf guys, first stopping at a very disappointing Cherry Street (funny how things change, that used to be THE place for alumni to hang out when back in town). We quickly moved on to Seminary Street Pub once the very bad karoke started up at Cherry Street. We sat in the beer garden at Seminary Street and chased all the "townies" away by being loud and telling stories. And stayed out waaay too late!

The gang at Seminary Street Pub

The next morning we all gathered at Soangetaha and had a fine day for golf. Andrew's foursome of Bob, Jeff Ancelet, and recent grad John "Hawk" Hawkinson finished with a 55, the lowest gross score (that's first place for you non-golfers). But lost out by ALOT for the lowest net score.

A team photo (left to right):
Jeff Ancelet '98, Garth Gilster '02, Vince Pavilionis '02, Andrew '99, Chris Endlund '02,
C.J. Rugh '04, Bob Carroll '02, Josh Quinn '01, John Hawkison '07.

I may try to draft a Knox women's team next year. We'll see. :-) I picked up these very cute matching Knox hats and shirts for Ella and Lily at the bookstore. I also got sweatshirts for me and Andrew. I thought he could use another sweatshirt now that we're living in Minnesota. His one Mickey Mouse sweatshirt is getting a little old. Maybe we'll have to take a Knox family picture sometime once the weather gets cooler. :-)



For more photos from the Knosher outing please visit: knoxalumnigolf.shutterfly.com. I have also uploaded pictures from last year's Knosher outing. And I will be updating the Carnival of Golf website (www.knoxcarnivalofgolf.com) very soon. You can also check out Bob and Amber's blog for another account of the event.

We spent Saturday and Sunday morning visiting with my mom and Dave and then drove back in time for Andrew to see some of the U.S. Open. He had a pretty nice Father's day despite it taking us an hour longer than usual to get home. We gave him a movie I made of photos of the girls and him. A gift card to buy some fishing gear, another requirement for living in the Midwest. And Season 7 of E.R. We don't have the previous seasons, so what makes Season 7 so special, you ask? Well, it just so happens that if you are looking really hard in Episode 16: "Witch Hunt" you can catch a glimpse of Andrew as an orderly.

When we first moved to California and before Andrew became Hornet's uber-producer, he worked at Central Casting as an extra to earn a little money and try and get his foot in the door. He was an orderly on E.R., a bus boy on Providence and a gallery member in the courtroom of The Practice. He even had a conversation with Noah Wyle (aka Carter on E.R.) walking back to their cars after the shoot. I was about as jealous of him as I was when he spent the day working with Bon Jovi for Hornet. Aww.....memories. At any rate, for those of you who may want to catch his television debut, look for E.R. Season 7 Disc 5 from Netflix.

Andrew is currently in Los Angeles shooting footage for the upcoming football season. And on Thursday I'm off to Philly for GJWHF 2007 (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun) with Claire, Erin F., Erin J., and Allison. More on that in the future!

The theme this month: Water Fun

It seems the kids are waterbabies this month. We have a Nemo sprinkler, which Ella had fun with. Lily is slightly leary of water. It takes her a good hour and a half to work herself up to actually going in it. And Ella's attention span is nonexistent so with the two of them, Ella plays for 15 minutes and Lily ends up watching. Then we're done and in the house :-)

We had a BBQ for the Engelhart (my dad's) side of the family on June 9th. It was the first time we had them all over and the first time we had a large group. Everything seemed to go over well, we had 19 people and everyone stayed for hours so hopefully they had fun. We learned a few things about the food since it was our first cookout with the gas grill. So things weren't 100% perfect, but at least we didn't set the bar too high the first time. LOL! It was a lot of fun for Ella and Lily. My cousin Kris, from the Seattle area was in town with her kids Alex and Charlie, and Emilee was there. So they all trotted around playing in the whale pool all decked out with the slide, the sand table, and then finally playing dress up in Ella's room.

The kids all had popsicles for dessert. Here's a picture of them responding to the question, "What color do you have?" (Lily, Ella, Alex, Emilee, Charlie)


We also swam at Riley Lake last week for the first time this summer. The beach is open now with three lifeguards on duty. It's great! They have two different swim ropes. And the most shallow one only come up to Ella's chest, if that. She had a blast splashing around the water and playing in the sand. She just ran right in as soon as I told her she could. Lily was freaked out. She just played in the sand about five feet back from the water for about an hour. Then she started to play in the water's edge, barely. Then she let the extremely small waves lap at her feet and finally about 10 minutes before we left, she waded in up to her calves. I brought all these sand toys and she spent the majority of the time playing with a plastic gatorade bottle cap she found. Nice, huh?

The best part about Riley Lake is that it is only a mile from our house! With a park right next to it an some shade on the beach. And it wasn't overcrowded at all. We could walk if we didn't have so much crap to carry. We do walk when we're just going to the park.

And our last water outing, but definitely not least, and probably not last for the month, we visited Nana Mary an Papi Dave this past weekend. We went to the splash pad at the park just down the road from their house. Again, Ella jumped right in, Lily was more hesitant but it only took about a 1/2 hour to warm up to the idea of getting wet. Maybe by the end of summer she won't have to think about it anymore. ;-) You can enjoy many MANY water photos in the June photo album that I added to Shutterfly today.

New Photos

Just a quick photo update. I've added an album from our trip up north and one for my Grandma Mazie's party. There are also some pictures I had taken of the girls at Flash Digital at the mall. I added just a couple pictures to the May album as well. Enjoy!

Awake the Lakes

"Awake the Lakes" is apparently the adverstising tagline for Memorial Day Weekend here in Minnesota. This explains the northern movement of three-quarters of the states' population "going up north to the lake" for the long weekend. Andrew and I decided to join the mad dash this year. We left early enough to miss most of the traffic on Friday but still saw our fair share of boats and camper stampers (as my stepdad, Dave would put it).

We made good time and arrived at the Grand View Lodge just north of Brainerd in Nisswa, MN. The lodge is located on Gull Lake which is over 9,000 acres! As we checked in, there was a sign saying the lodge was on the National Register of Historic Places. Upon further reading in the room, it was built in 1919 and added as a historic place in 1979. It's funny though, the trees grew so high around it, the view became more trees than lake. Meaning the view is not as grand as the name indicates. But it really is a wonderful place. Trees, paths, and flowers everywhere. A great beach on the lake with a poolside bar. A ton of different things to do. Very family-friendly. We may bring the girls with us and go back next Memorial Day weekend. Ironically, my People magazine just did a cover story on the 20th Anniversary of the movie Dirty Dancing and this place completely reminded me of the hotel in that movie. Complete with an activities schedule when we arrived! They had pontoon cruises, watercolor classes, campfires with s'mores, etc. We only took the pontoon cruise around the lake. It was pretty cool to see all the beautiful lake homes.

How Andrew spent a lot of his vacation

There are several golf courses associated with the lodge, and Andrew played three of them! Our room looked out on the 9th hole of the Woods course at the Pines. He played all three nines at The Pines and 9-holes with me at The Garden course (which is where all the people who don't know how to play golf go). And then he also played at Deacon's Lodge, which is a signature Arnold Palmer course. Andrew said every hole looked like a signature hole. He didn't play super great anywhere but he enjoyed himself. I got a 47 on the nine we played together, but I pretty much took a mulligan on each hole. I hadn't hit a golf ball in about 2 1/2 years and actually had a few really nice shots and could putt pretty well overall which was NEVER my strong suit. To say the least, we had a lot of fun!

We spent Saturday afternoon and evening up in Bemidji where our friends, Jon and Jess have a cabin. We stopped at the Northern Lights casino on the way there. Andrew had absolutely no luck at the Black Jack table, but did win the jackpot on a penny slot machine. He won 19,030 pennies!! Can you believe that?! We loved visiting with Jon and Jess and their family and seeing the cabin. We hope to get up to visit them again sometime when they are there.

How I spent a lot of my vacation

Other than that, I pretty much laid around and read all weekend while Andrew golfed and we ate and shopped and relaxed. It really was a wonderful vacation, especially when you know that we had nothing planned except the tee times and just decided to wing it the whole time. Everyting just sort of fell into place.

We came home Monday afternoon and found the girls had a great time with Grand Tom and Grand Pat. A giant thanks to them for watching the girls for us!

Grandma Mazie turns 80!

Last weekend our family celebrated my Grandma Mazie's (my dad's mom) 80th birthday with a surprise party! She thought we were all getting together on her actual birthday on Sunday, May 20th up at my aunt's cabin with just the family. She told everyone, "No party! I don't want a party!" But as the Engelhart's are, they didn't listen to her. And the family plus many friends and neighbors from the old neighborhood gathered to wish her well at Doyle's bowling alley (owned by a friend of the family). When she walked in she was floored! She had no idea and she was just shocked. Then she started in on us with a smile on her face, "I told you guys, no party!" :-) A good time was had by all, food, cake, bowling, and more. Plus, as my birthday gift to her, I put together a video of her life. It was so much fun to see the old photos of her and the rest of my family. I am planning on updating our Isaacson movies page very soon (in the next couple weeks) so look for it there!



In other news, we have been furniture shopping the last few months and purchased an entire room of furniture for our livingroom/dining room. The room is currently completely empty. The girls have commandeered it and are using it as a large gym/play area, but that will soon come to an end. By Thursday next week, we will have a dining room set. And by July (darn custom orders!) we'll have the living room stuff. It was a lot fun and somewhat stressful to make the decisions. As many of you who have visited us know, all the furniture in our house is pretty much from the IKEA catalog (Not that there's anything wrong with that:-). So it's a new thing to go to a furniture store and purchase real furniture that you don't have to put together yourself and you actually pay some money for. Hopefully everything we picked out will come together well! I'll of course post pictures when it all gets here.

This post is currently brought to you by me, sitting in a white lounge chair, on a beach with lake water lapping gently in the distance. Andrew and I are vacationing at the Grandview Lodge in Nisswa, MN for Memorial Day Weekend. More on that in a couple days!! :-)

Ella the Flower Fairy

I enjoy photography (if you can't tell from the millions of pictures I always take) and like to try and capture the girls in fun and interesting poses. Ella was out in the yard picking dandelions one night and I just couldn't resist capturing the moment. Enjoy her flitting around!

Happy Mother's Day

Hope all the mothers we know out there had a nice day yesterday! I had a wonderful Mother's Day. We spent the weekend visiting with my mom. We went to the park and had my aunt and Grandma Betty over for dinner on Saturday night. My mom left on Sunday morning and then Andrew took the girls out to Chuck E Cheese and the Arboretum. I enjoyed lounging at home and then did a little shopping for myself. That night we walked around Round Lake and picked up Applebee's for dinner. It was a very nice day and I didn't have to lift a finger all day. Andrew also put together a movie of me with the girls which I will put up on our movies site when I have a chance. And I'm getting a knew stroller called the joovy caboose! Now I won't have to carry Ella back to the car when she gets tired after following me around on our outings.

We had nice visit with Andrew's brother Benjamin last weekend. He and Andrew had a great time playing with the girls outside and catching up on their brother bonding by playing video games. We had fun watching him run in the Budbreak 5K at the Arboretum despite a little rain.

We have a weekend off from visitors next weekend but we are looking forward to Memorial Day weekend when Tom and Pat are visiting again to watch the girls. Andrew and I are taking a little getaway up to Brainerd , MN, also known as the Brainerd Golf Trail. Andrew is planning on playing 3--18-hole rounds and a 9-hole round with me. Mostly, I plan on just relaxing and reading, hanging out by the pool.

There are new pictures up in the May album. Enjoy!