Model Megan

Last week when I made the Gazella, my cousin Megan commented asking me to put her head on a model. She was joking, but I accepted the challenge regardless.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Love you!

I had an awesome weekend home for your birthday. I hope you had a great day!

Gazella

More more more field trips.

Today we went to Leif Ericson park to play and picnic, and then on our walk home we stopped and got ice cream. It was all quite fun and tiring. Somehow, though, the kids did not get tired. WHAT? Tomorrow the owner of our center and the lead preschool teacher are off for a long weekend. Hopefully attendance will be low : ) The two other ladies I'm going to be with are a lot of fun, so regardless it will be a nice Friday.

I am excited to hit the road at the end of the day, though! I am going HOME again for the Hengel family reunion and also my nice mommy's birthday! It will be a good weekend. Also, it is the tall ships festival here in Duluth so it is a really great time to get the heck out of town. There are a gazillion people here to see these giant, old pirate ships come through. If you pay $100 you can go inside one. Ha, no way. (Poor Dan is so good at his touristy job that they scheduled him over 60 hours this week! YUCK.)

Here, enjoy some photos of today...

some rad duck duck goosin' going on.

Ice cream face

Bonus story.
I'm reasonably good at photoshopping things, so when we jokingly made the nickname "gazella" for the slowest, clumsiest, cutest little preschooler named Zella, I might have put a gazelle head on her. I might have done that. Maybe.

Lone Female

Have I mentioned that the guys I live with are nerds?

Just in case you doubted me...

This is our basement common area. It is complete with posters of Back to the Future, super sexy princess Leia and a dragon attacking a village. 

Dining room table. Currently devoted to a card game called magic. It's like expensive pokemon. I think.


Happy Friday.

Foggy

Hi! Today I went on Dan's Vista tour. The tour was super awesome, my kids were almost well behaved, and no one drowned! What a GREAT field trip.

It was extremely foggy today. We barely saw anything from a distance on our sightseeing cruise, haha. It was a 2 hour tour and luckily by the end a lot of the fog had burned off. Kinda. Dan does a really good job of engaging the audience despite sometimes dry material and today's limited vision. The adults I was with were quite impressed with his tour and I thought it was so neat to see how the other tourists on the boat enjoyed and interacted with him. He doesn't especially love children, but he was awesome with our group today. He even told my kiddos that Miss Abby is always right. (My coworkers said I should keep him around.)

Photo highlights:

Look! They're almost listening to him!

Totally listening.

With the majestic flag

Yayyy!

I am totally exhausted. We had a good time but it was so much work to keep track of a few feisty little ones. I barely got to pay attention to my older kids because I was doing so much child wrangling. We spent most of our time on the first level which had tables and chairs, but I did get to take my group up to the open and breezy top deck for a little while at the end. It was fun but stressful. I tried to remind them that they shouldn't be bugging Dan unless they had an intelligent and thoughtful question ready. Unfortunately, my second grade boys don't really have intelligent and thoughtful radars. They settled for giggling loudly and disruptively at Dan saying "stock pile" because they thought he said "snot pile." 

...ya do your best.

Work and Weekend

 We go on fun field trips and I am so grateful! Last week on Tuesday we went to the library for a free show. We saw a funny man do lots of circus tricks including wild juggling, riding a unicycle, balancing huge things on his head, fire swallowing, and more!

Rainy walk to the bus stop.

Thursday we went to Lester Park and it was way cool. Also it was beautiful outside, which helps 1000%.

All the kids colored their own backpacks. This kid cracks me up. (Monster breathing fire on small screaming human)

Follow the leader

Look at the little boy in the teacher's lap. He loved the field trip, obviously.

I took Friday off to go home early! I hung out with my nice mommy and aunt Jill. SPECTACULAR.

Then I went to the W.O. cabin weekend with the Andersons. It was rather dreary and rainy out. I didn't spend any time outside at all except for an hour by a fire where I was absolutely eaten alive by those sneaky mosquitos. It was worth it.

Bizarre antique shop in Emily MN

Raisins in the antique shop

Antiques

Cousin Joe on fire duty

Lake Butterfield

Taking this picture was as close as I got to the water all weekend

Dad and his alien pocket

Most joyful baby on the planet. Also, Michael.

Photo contest winner wall

Michael after I took this picture: "I think I blinked"

More Michael and Jasper because cute.

Blog Forecast :

Thursday - sunny with a chance of field tripping to Dan's Vista Fleet boat!!! I AM SO EXCITED. I hope my kids are good for him, haha.

Smile for Auntie

Today I was thinking about my aunt Jill and how cool she is. Sometimes I feel like she is the only one who reads my blog, but in the rare case that someone else reads it also, I believe he or she should see how fun she is.

I crept pretty hard and found a lot of pictures that I really love. I meant to choose three, maybe four to share but I simply couldn't keep it so low. There are more for another day perhaps.

STATE FAIR

Jill's wedding. I was her 10 year old maid of honor because we were even bffs back then.

She never missed any of my shows. Even the ones that sucked. A lot. Like 12 Angry Jurors.

Post Sound of Music

I was (alphabetically) 8th out of 650 graduating students, and she STILL sat through the whole ceremony!

Still lovin' the state fair.

I just... I can't even...

Did I mention we're state fair goers?

She gave me this outfit. Majority of my clothes were hers, actually.

Shopping

Over all, I just think every-day heroes deserve some lovin'. 

My aunt Jill's positivity, humor, and unconditional love are pretty darn heroic if you ask me.

I love you! I can't wait to see you sooooon : )