Shot Gun Weekend

For the last couple of years, Arlie's cousin invites everyone over to their place for their "shot gun" weekend. All the guys bring their guns. We camp in their yard, play yard games, golf, go catfish fishing, play shooting games and sit around the fire. The kids cool off by swimming in the pool and us ladies, well....we cook :) Next year we decided that we'd do something other than just cook for the guys. They have a great yard for this type of thing and to top it off... a fort in the trees for the kids. Corey and Roberta have two boys that are 6 and 11. Our kids have so much fun playing with them, in fact, they have a blast the whole weekend and never want to leave!

Sydney and Payton
All the guys ready to shoot
What they shoot at....how they hit it, i'll never know :)


So I had to get in on the action, only in a smaller form. I think I may have hit the target....once :)


The four cousins: Sydney, Payton, Mason and Jordan


How the kids stayed cool in the hot heat! They were in and out of the pool literally all weekend. About every hour you could count on them jumping in. It was great having it. We even cooled Pete off a couple of times in it....he wasn't quite as excited by that though...

Sydney's dance performance

Sydney has been taking hip hop and ballet, tap, and jazz class this summer. At the end of the session they do a really fun outdoor performance. Angie and Dayton came and watched her this year. She had two songs she had to dance to and they happened to be back to back (of course). She had different outfits so she had to figure out how to change really fast since everyone would be waiting for her. Her first song was Raining Sunshine. She loves ballet/jazz/tap. Her favorite was doing jazz squares. They only get 6 weeks (1 night a week) to practice this routine, so they don't get much time to learn the moves and it does show a bit, although they are still cute :) They all watch each other and the teacher.


Sydney's Hip Hop class was really small...only 6 kids. They had this really cute routine where they broke into three groups to do some of the moves. The problem? 3 of the kids didn't show up to the performance, so for the performance there was only 3 kids TOTAL. It totally threw them off. They did good considering, but there practices were so much better when they had all the kids. Sydney loves to perform though and we have fun watching her personality come out. She is that kid that always waves at her parents. Love it :)

Small group camping - not roughing it....

Our small group from church decided to all go camping together. We have 5 families...everyone has at least 2 kids :) It's crazy with kids all over, but it's so much fun. We went camping at Kamp Dells. It is most defiantly not a camping trip that is roughing it....they had a small water park, horse stables with pony rides, several playgrounds, a petting zoo, mini golf course, swimming pool, ball field, volleyball courts, basketball courts and much more. It was right across from a lake too. It was actually the perfect place for our small group as the kids never got bored. Our campsites were pretty close to a playground so we could let the kids run and play while we prepped meals.

Picutres and more to follow :)

Maija's Birthday

I had to work on my birthday, but we got to celebrate the next day...on Sunday. Guess what we did after church and lunch to start out the celebration?? That's right, we found a spot to go hiking :) Yeah me! We went to Springbrook Nature Center and hiked some of the paths there. It was beautiful and turned out to be nice and hot! :) I love it hot :) I try to ignore the complaints of the heat by the kids.

I do try to distract them by giving them the camera and letting them take pictures, or by playing games like "I packed my momma's bag"...sometimes we even sing :)

After hiking, we went home and changed to even cooler clothes and headed out to the Running Aces Harnes Park. I think this race course has been in Lino Lakes for at least a couple of years, but we've never been to it before. I love doing new things and on Sundays the admission is free! Can't beat that :) They also had cool things like unique animals to show the kids and free pony rides for the kids. Again...you can't beat that. The best part of the track is the kids can walk around and they don't get in anyone's way. It takes awhile between races and the kids would've gotten pretty bored if they had to sit in their seats the whole time.
We placed two bets...lost them both and decided the best thing to do was to bet with each other without using money :) After that we figured out how the odds worked and actually got pretty good at predicting the horses that would win. It was close to 50/50 for Arlie versus my wins. It was a great experience and a cheap way to spend an enjoyable evening! All I was missing was a large hat :)

Paddleboat ride

Arlie's bosses daughter graduated from high school. She is this amazingly smart lady. She had all over $47000 of scholarships that she was awarded. She is incredibly motivated and will change the world...somehow I'm sure. For the open house they invited people to join them on a paddle boat ride. Our family was invited. We thought the kids would love it so we accepted. It wasn't until later did we realize it was while the kids were going to be gone. We went anyway.... Arlie knew a few people from work, so we spent most of the time chatting with them. Finding out people's stories is so interesting. One of Arlie's old co-workers had preemie babies (but 20 years ago when it was much scarier). So we talked about having preemies and dealing with that. Unfortuately, they had one that didn't make it... We were once again reminded just how blessed we are. Another of the co-workers wife's was an illustrator and drew amazing images for a living. Talk about cool :) About half way through our ride, it decided to downpour. It was then that we realized the advantage of going to an open house NOT on a boat. If you want to leave you can :) We all went inside and talked until the ride ended. It reminded me how much I do enjoy meeting new people and hearing about their lives.

Arlie's boss is the one on the left in this picture. The other two gentlemen are old co-workers from Thrivent.

Like the beautiful storm clouds behind us??

Night on the town

After our tour on the segways we spent the evening on the town, walking by the river and eating on St. Anthony Main. We ate some appitizers from Vic's (we had a 50% off coupon from going on the tour) and then explored the path by the river.

I love this area of town and could spend hours just people watching and exploring!

Segway Historical Tour

We like to try and find different and unusual things around the city to try and do. While watching the Discovery channel, they showed a Minneapolis based business that was riding segways around downtown and learning about history. I looked it up and booked us some tickets.


Segways are really interesting. They don't have a brake...it's all in the balance. To go forward to lean forward. To go backwards, you lean back and to stop you balance in the middle. They have all of us practice for about 15/20 minutes until we are comfortable running them. My goodness is it FUN! They turned it on so that we couldn't go too fast and we had to stay in line behind the guides, but it was blast anyway. After about an 45 minutes, they do turn them up so you can go faster.

We made frequent stops where they would share the history of that location with us, then we'd move on. We stopped at the Mill City Museum for a snack and break before we finished our tour.
I had to sneak this picture because we were told to always keep both hands on the handle bars....oops :) Arlie didn't have both his hands on the handle bars either.

We stopped at several places that I'd never been before. It's really fun learning new things and finding new places :)

I totally recommend this tour! It costs more than I like to spend on dates, but it's not something you do frequently either. If segways were cheaper..ok correction, if segways were really cheap, we'd totally get one. The people that work there said that most people after riding one want one. I can see why! :)

Sushi and a fishing boat

My parents were heading down to Ben and Deanna's house to watch the boys for their 15 year anniversary. They decided to bring our kids with them, so that we could have the weekend to ourselves. We finally had gotten the hitch on our van so we could use our fishing boat, so we decided to take advantage of it. When we parked our boat after the last time we put the motor up...well...it leaked and there was a beautiful mix of oil and gas in our boat. We didn't feel like taking the time to clean it or we wouldn't be able to go out in it...so we just left ( we did clean it the next day). As we were leaving to go fishing we decided sushi sounded good...so we stopped and got some sushi to go. We headed over to the lake. Arlie backed the boat into the water...I held it while he parked. I noticed something strange..there was water squirting into the boat. Apparently, Arlie had forgotten to put the plug back in the boat and it was taking on water. Luckily there were only 3 to 4 inches of water in the boat when Arlie got there. He quickly plugged it and we jumped in.

I was careful not to touch the bottom of the boat. Arlie got the water out...at least some of it...and I just kept my feet off the bottom of the boat so I wouldn't get oil on them :) We ate our delicious sushi and then went to find a fishing spot.

We stopped and threw in our bait...Arlie caught about 5 tiny fish before while I caught nothing.

Finally we decided to have fun with the little fish and put a fly on both of our lines. We could barely touch the water and there would be a fish on. We set Arlie's clock for 5 minutes to see how many fish we could catch in 5 minutes....it was between 20-30. It was so much fun. Obviously nothing we were going to keep, but I giggled every time I caught another fish. It was the most fun time I've had fishing in awhile. We only had about an hour before it was going to be dark, but boy did we catch fish in that hour (probably all the same 10 fish over and over...but we'll never know :) )