Wine Country.

This past weekend we went away on a grown-up weekend. That's right, we had 4 days without kids. We haven't been alone for that long in 5 1/2 years, we were way past due. We went to Sonoma County for a friend's wedding.

We did a lot of this:

Saw a lot of this:

Visited several of these:

Made some new ones of these:

Tried a lot of this:

All because of this:

Thank you so much for the great time!

Sand Pedi.

On vacation this year, there were many good memories.One of my favorites was the day we took the pontoon out. Every year we go to the same spot that we just happened to find the first year we came up here. It is a little inlet in the lake, with shallow water that you can walk out pretty far. It has a small beach and it pretty much protected from waves and people. Reese loved playing in the wet sand. Mike and I were sitting on the blanket enjoying watching the kids frolic. Reese started to rub my feet with sand, I mean really taking time and massaging my feet with it. I sat up and told her it felt really nice. She told me lay down and take a nap and she continued to rub. Then she got the watering can and rinsed them off. Then she went on to Mike and started rubbing sand on his feet. He said something to me. Reese stopped what she was doing, looked up and said "Shhh. No talking." A minute or two passed and I sat up to watch her and said something to Mike. Reese responded with "I said no talking. Lay down and nap, Mommy." Still makes me giggle thinking of her concentrating so hard. I kind of expected her to end with
"No soup for you!"

Harriet.

On Wednesday we headed out early and picked up Nani. Our destination was Lake Harriet. We walked around the lake a little, fed some ducks, had a picnic and headed home. Reese is so funny with the ducks. At one point we saw a mama duck with her babies swimming around. They were not interested in loud kids, so they swam further away. Reese stood at the shore line and was calling to them "Ducks, come here. Come and eat ducks!" She had no luck with those ducks.

We also watched some fish swimming in the lake from a dock and Owen suggested that 

he and Mike go back to go fishing.

Before we went to the lake, we stopped off at Yum bakery and I let the kids pick out a cookie for lunch. Bribery works best for taking photos....

Here's the cookie they picked. I'm not a huge fan of store bought cookies, even from a bakery. I'm kind of a cookie snob. I know what stores/bakeries have ones worth $2 and ones that I'll pass up.

Zoo Trip.

We haven't been to the zoo in quite a while....in May it's crazy busy there with all the end of the year school field trips. We planned to meet my friend, Angela there about two weeks ago. We all got there about 9:30 am with clouds looming in the sky. We spent about 2 hours outside enjoying the animals. Most of the animals were active when we were there, so that was great to see. This trip I could really see Reese become aware of the animals, it's so neat to see that.

The prairie dogs were especially fun to see, they are so busy and a couple came right up to the glass and seemed to want to play with the kids. They just loved it. I've always loved prairie dogs (even though I put them in the rodent department). I have pictures of me feeding them in the wild on a trip to Montana when I was young.

We also got to go into the butterfly garden, we've never done that before. I'm not sure if the kids thought it was special to see butterflies flying around, I didn't hear many oohs and ahhs.

We got sprinkled on a little while on the Minnesota Trail, but not much.