Trip to Minnesota

We recently enjoyed a visit to Minnesota. Our main reason for going was to see our newest nephew, David, sealed to my brother, Taylor and his wife, Lisa. They adopted adorable little David last August and everything was official in April. It was such a beautiful occasion. We were also glad for the excuse to take a trip home to spend time with my parents, along with all my other siblings and their families (minus one brother and wife who were off the hook for having a baby the week before!) as well as Lisa's parents and sister.

The boys had a great time. Jaron in particular wore himself out. My parents have a great big back yard. Add cousins to that and it's a recipe for sure fun. He was always in and out of the house. At our house, we are suppose to take shoes off when we come in the house. So of course, Jaron was doing that. But then a minute later would decide he wanted to go back out. I don't know if we got sick of helping him put his shoes back on or if he decided it wasn't worth effort; eventually he just went shoe less.

Here's a few pictures from our trip:

Russell prefers to go up a slide rather than down.

Jaron found the longest slide at the park and was a repeat customer for the durration of the time.

The whole group (all 28 of us) went for our traditional Nelson's Ice Cream (aka Brown's) in Stillwater, MN. I'm telling you, Cold Stone has nothing on this place. Yes, it is just a little shack on the corner but this little shack dishes up the best ice cream around. And for super cheap! For about $2.75 when you order a single scoop of ice cream what you really get is about 4 scoops! Usually Clark and I split a single and select two flavors and the ice cream is towering. It looks like it's close to the size of a quart. I should have taken a picture but we were too busy consuming it. Russell was upset that we decided to eat ice cream at 5:30 pm instead of dinner.

I'm just throwing this picture in because we've had several days like this. One of the boys gets so tired that they fall asleep during a meal. Here's Russell after a busy morning of running around the house, pulling things out of cupboards and playing outside. He finally decided he couldn't make it through lunch without a little nap. I wasn't there at the time, but apparently, Clark put him in his crib (shortly after taking this picture) and he still had food in mouth. I later found it in his crib after he woke up. Yuck!