Easter eggs

Easter of course included egg dying and the traditional egg wars. I do enjoy dying eggs, but I have zero talent. I am always amazed at what people like Kelbie and Brennan can do with some paint or dye and a hard boiled egg.
We always have to do a Hawkeye egg.
I did not do this side of the egg. That's right, my talent stops at being able to write "Go Hawks". I made Brennan do the rest.
Kelbie showing off the cute little bird she painted. She's good.

Rich's niece, Angelynn, has been living with their family for a few months so we got to introduce her to egg wars. How sad that she has had to live so much of her life without fighting eggs.
A self portrait?
Participating in her first ever egg war.
It's a little blurry, but I had to document fighting mom. I swear she cheats, I can't beat her!

We had a great Easter, hope you did too!

Visitors

At the beginning of April, Mara and Jade came to visit for about a week. It was a blast to have them around, but as usual I sort of failed at taking pictures. But our niece in Utah, Mia, sent Flat Stanley to my mom to visit at about the same time, so we did get some photo ops with him. It was pretty entertaining. I hope her first grade class got as much enjoyment out of the letter and pictures my mom sent as we did in having Flat Stanley around. :)
Cute little Jade with Uncle Brennan.
Mara and Flat Stanley.
Chillin' in the back seat.
Flat Stanley even got to go out to eat at the Machine Shed with us AND drive a tractor. That is one lucky paper doll.

So after we ate at the Machine Shed mom tried to get a picture of Mara, Jade, Flat Stanley and I on the hay rack. Who would have thought it would be so difficult?

And I think that's where she gave up and decided that was as good as it was going to get.
Me and Jade the night before they left. So sad to see them go. She is the happiest and cutest baby! Thanks for coming to visit guys!

Once upon a time, Brennan had a birthday

Wow, I have some major blog catching up to do. I'm not sure how I let so much time pass. I have gone back and forth over whether to just forget about what has happened since my last post, or to go ahead and take the time to catch up. But since someday...maybe..I might make a book out of my blog, I would like it to be as complete as possible. So I will at least give a shot at catching up.

After our trip to St. Louis in mid March we had a couple of Birthdays to celebrate, dad's and Brennan's. Nothing too exciting to report on either one, just fun times with family.

Brennan turned 24 and we had family over for cake and ice cream and a game of Quelf. Brennan loves that game but the rest of us have not been convinced of its greatness. Since it was his birthday we let him choose. We are so nice. :)

The sweet Canada shirt Crystal and Rich gave him in honor of his mission.
I love this shirt my parents gave him. I never thought of the resemblance between Brennan's hair and a Chia pet until this shirt. Now I always sing the little diddy to him. He loves it. :/ He starts at the University of Iowa in the fall so they also gave him some Hawkeye gear and a handy dandy pocket knife that he has been dying for.
It's been so long I can't even remember if we went out for his birthday or if I just made dinner for him. But since he had to work later that night, I'm pretty sure I made dinner. And some yummy snickerdoodles. It seemed lame to just have cookies and not a cake on his birthday so I arranged them all cheesily and still had him blow out a candle.
That wrapped up the month of March. Getting closer to July....:)

Finally...the rest of St. Louis

Remember how we went to St. Louis? Yeah, I almost forgot too. And now that I am finally getting around to finishing the blogs about the trip I figure I better get it all in in one post in case I never get back to it. So it's a long post. Real long.

On Friday we started out by going to the art museum at Forest Park. When we got there we saw this group of people taking turns rolling down the hill in this ball. I thought it looked like tons of fun, but I couldn't convince Brennan to go ask them if he could have a turn. :) Chicken.
The art museum was lots of fun and we were definitely glad we went. Afterward we swung by a local pretzel place that was recommended to us. Not my favorite kind of pretzels, but it was a fun little place. After the pretzels we headed to the City Museum, the only event we had planned before we left for St. Louis.
The museum turned out to be a blast. It probably would have been more fun if we had kids with us, or at least more people. There were lots of groups playing tag throughout the whole thing, which looked like a ton of fun, but you can't exactly play tag with two people. The roof was closed, so we didn't get to go up there to see what it looks like. We were disappointed but at least the rest of the outdoor stuff was open. Here are some pictures. If you are ever in the St. Louis area we would definitely recommend this place.
Brennan on one of the indoor slides.
Okay, climbing around in some of these was really difficult. My legs were so bruised the next day! And I definitely wasn't thinking when I chose what to wear that morning.
The hallway of mirrors.
Brennan in the caves.
Brennan, about to head into the great unknown. I always got freaked out when I couldn't tell where these little slide/tunnels led.
I felt like I was in a sewer.
Outside, about to explore one of the airplanes.
Brennan is the second one from the right.
He's a hamster!
They had an arts and crafts area on the top floor. One of the many times that we got worn out and needed a rest we headed up there and made some clay creations. We got to leave them there to dry and pick them up before we left. I thought it was a fun idea.
The twister all the way on the left was the tallest slide in the building. I think they said it was ten stories high. It was quite a hike up there (that we made twice) and quite a dizzying and slightly painful ride down. Despite those facts, I was still laughing when it spit me out at the bottom. And there were people sitting at the bottom getting their entertainment just by watching people come down. Judging by the way Brennan laughed at me, I'm guessing they stayed pretty entertained.

We were so exhausted by the end of the night. On the weekends the museum turns out all the lights at 9 and you get to explore it in the dark with flashlights. We were determined to stay long enough to see what that was like. By 9:15, when the lights were still on we asked a worker and were told they wouldn't be turning them off until 10. Then we found out that they don't turn them ALL off. We still stayed around, but needless to say it wasn't that cool. We definitely didn't need to stay just for that. BUT a random, cool fact about the museum is that they had a fire pit outside and they provided marshmallows and sticks to do some roasting. Yum!

We finished off our awesome trip to St. Louis with a trip to the temple. It was beautiful! And a great way to end our trip.

And that's a wrap, folks. :)

Cockroaches

Well I didn't quite finish Day 1 on my last post, just ran out of time. And evidently haven't had a lot of time since, so...time to finish it up. After our adventures downtown we headed to Forest Park. It is full of free things to do, and we love free! After getting through the CRAZY St. Patrick's day traffic and finally finding a parking spot we headed to the zoo. This was definitely no one of the highlights of our trip. It was way too busy and we couldn't find a map anywhere. So we just started wandering and hardly found any animals out before we finally just gave up and left. Here are the few gems we were able to see:
A bush dog? Never heard of them, and I think I can see why.
Anteaters. Ugliest things alive.

After that incredibly successful and fascinating trip to the zoo we walked up the hill to the art museum. Only to find out they closed in 10 minutes. So we went inside to get a drink of water (because we were dying of thirst:)) and then just enjoyed the beautiful grounds outside the museum.
You could rent paddle boats and go around on this little lake. We wanted to do it, but giving no thought to the weather we decided we would save it for the next day. But the next day was much cooler and rainy. :( We definitely wish we would have...next time I guess.
Making big leap...he managed to make it. :)

After enjoying the beautiful weather we decided to head for the hotel and some dinner. Traffic was crazy and we thought for a moment that we were going to be stuck on the freeway for the entire evening, but luckily it cleared up pretty quickly. We ate at Bandannas, a BBQ restaurant my cousin recommended. The food was good and our waiter was very interesting. We played some SkipBo before deciding to check out the hotel's pool before it closed. No one else was using it which was kind of nice, and I was able to prove to Brennan that I can in fact swim. :) I just don't think I would fare very well if my life depended on my swimming skills. So we pretty much acted like 16-year-olds, having races and playing catch with a football. It was a blast....until it was time to leave...

...Now the hotel was not the greatest. We booked it through Travelocity where they have "Top Secret" deals. They don't tell you the name of the hotel because the deal is apparently so good. Well there was no way I was booking anything less than a three star hotel through something like this, but we found a pretty good deal on a three star so we decided to do it. We are not picky people, I do not need some sort of fancy pants hotel. Just clean. That's all. But this one did not impress. I kept trying to tell myself it was just old and that didn't mean it couldn't be clean. I will spare you all the details and just fast forward to leaving the pool. I wore my flip flops down to the pool and I moved one with my foot as a put it on and a bug scurried away. At this point I'm freaking out. Then Brennan puts his on and three more run toward the wall. At this point I'm really freaking out. I hate bugs. So Brennan uses our room key to flip them away from the wall so he can see what they are. Cockroaches. Cockroaches. COCKROACHES!!!!
Yeah...ten of them at least. I was a wreck. I felt like I had bugs crawling all over me!!! Worst hotel experience EVER. But...we survived. And continued to have a great trip (our trip really was great, minus the hotel). Which I will finish reporting on later. :) Goodnight.

(Sorry, not sure what's going on with the font, can't seem to fix it.)

St. Louis. Day1. The Arch.

Last week was Brennan's Spring Break so I took a couple of days off work and we drove down to St. Louis. We really weren't there for long and didn't do a whole lot, but it was still a blast! It was just really fun to get away for a few days and just spend some time together without the distractions of every day life.

The first place we headed was the arch, of course.
I've been up in the arch before, but we thought since Brennan hadn't that we would get tickets. Unfortunately, they were all sold out!!
It was pretty disappointing, but the weather was beautiful and the arch is incredible just to look out so we just enjoyed being outside. We also spent some time in the little museum they have under the arch.
Brennan pretending to be Jefferson.
This was a pretty neat display that told about the architects and builders behind the arch and compared this miniature version of the arch to other famous monuments. It was actually quite fascinating!

Next up was the old courthouse.
This building had a lot of interesting history about slavery. I really enjoyed reading about the story of a man who went to court to try to get his family's freedom. How sad that the case went all the way to the Supreme Court but they determined that he was not a citizen of the United States and therefore wasn't even allowed to bring a matter before the court.
Judge Rachel.
It was a beautiful building.
After the courthouse we headed back to the car, and on the way we got to check out the Cardinal's Busch Stadium.
We could not have asked for better weather and our time downtown was a great start to our trip!