Sioux Falls

Daddy had to head to Sioux Falls for a Senate golf fundraiser so we decided to make a little family getaway out of it. We had a blast! We stayed in a great hotel with a indoor waterpark. This was literally the view when you opened our hotel room door......We managed to fit in as much swimming as possible and tried out all the slides....well, I tried them all out. This is the only one Harrison would go on.
But I finally worked up my courage and on the last morning, I went down the big slide with Daddy!!!


We headed out to the Butterfly House one day as well. We had a lot of fun visiting this place when Christie took us there a couple years ago and we enjoyed just as much this time. Apparently, the butterflies thought Harrison's head made an excellent landing spot too!

You have to look a bit closely, but there is actually a butterfly on the back of the bench that Harrison is sharing a funny joke with....

The last night we stayed with Mom and Dad's friends again because the grown ups had to go to a fundraiser at the Lt. Gov's home.....thank God we didn't scare of their babysitters last time because they agreed to watch SEVEN kiddos again and once again everyone had a great time that night! However, Mommy and Miss Chris are a bit concerned to hear that Harrison and their daughter Mallory shared their first kiss and got married!!!! Yikes....neither one of them is ready for all that! But 20 some years from now, we'd be happy to see the two consider such an arrangement! :)

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend away and Mom and Dad are so grateful to have such easy going little travelers to take on these fun little getaways! We arrived home just in time for Aunt Jen, Uncle Kevin and Bobby to arrive in Gettysburg on their cross (half of the) country road trip. Stay tuned for pictures from their visit!

Locks of Love

Indiana Bones

Our local library had a special storytime last week with a man who calls himself Indiana Bones. His story was all about a lady who wore black and had snakes for hair named Medusa and some guy named Poseidon and Perseus and a horse with wings....but the funnest part was his dragon puppet that had us all in hysterics a lot of the time.
Apparently, we didn't like the dragon puppet as much when Mom wanted to get a picture of us with it. So Indiana Bones put it down for the photo (you can see that Neva and Harrison remained vigilant for his reappearance though!)
They had the storytelling in our courthouse since there was more room for all the kiddos in there than at the library. On the first floor there are two old jail cells they used to use to lock up the bad guys. Harrison refused to go in....but I volunteered to get locked up and as you can see I thought it was pretty fun (apparently not an effective scare tactic for me to avoid getting in trouble!)
Well, the big news this week is that I'm finally going to cut my hair. We are all a bit apprehensive about this decision but I'm getting pretty tired of all the nuts and the work it takes to do my hair these days. We're pretty sure that it's long enough to cut off enough to donate to Locks of Love and still retain a bit of length on my head. We're all scheduled for Wednesday night with our cousin Joey (but mom is going to have her verify mom's measurements!). We'll post before and after pictures for everyone!

Sprinkler Fun!

We pulled out the sprinkler the other day and had a ball jumping through the water hoses and squirting each other (we even tried to squirt mom, but she claimed we couldn't get the babies wet and they were on the blanket with her --- I think she was making that up, but luckily we listened!)

Mom included this next picture because Aunt Amy keeps asking for a picture of the garden boxes that Daddy built for us and she kept forgetting to take one. You can kind of see them in this picture next to the playhouse. Amazingly, mom's not-so-green thumb is doing okay so far at her first attempt at gardening. We have budding flowers on our tomato plants, the bell pepper plants and the strawberry plants! And the herbs are growing huge! Now we just have to cross our fingers that our friendly bunny visitors don't eat all the goods before we get to!

One More 4th of July Photo

We never did get a picture of the twins in their 4th of July outfits from Pops and Gams. They wore them again the other day, so we took a picture of them so you could see how cute they looked!

Handy Manny

We had a guy out last week to fix the water line to our fridge and apparently Harrison was watching him pretty closely. The next morning we came out to find him "fixing the sink" with his tools. pretty cute!

Uncle Ryan

We had a lot of fun with Uncle Ryan while he was in town last week. He came and took us swimming one day and luckily, Grandma went along and sent Mommy some pictures. Harrison and Ryan went down the water slide together. It's one of Harrison's favorite stories to tell right now because they got stuck inside the slide and then went underwater when they got to the bottom!


On the 4th of July we went fishing with PaPa, Grandma and Uncle Ryan while Mommy and Daddy got the house and food ready for people to come over for dinner and fireworks. We managed to catch a few fish but unfortunately were not lucky enough to catch Ryan or PaPa's sunglasses which fell into the pond!

The next night we played out at the shed and got PaPa, Ryan and Daddy out for a watergun fight. We must be pretty good because all those boys ended up pretty darn wet!




Things were a little calmer inside with the babies....
Ryan stopped by to say goodbye and we snapped one last picture of him holding Madison (Kennedy was already asleep so she missed out)....Madison woke up from her nap yesterday with crazy hair:
Then the girls helped Mommy with folding laundry....mostly they just pulled all the clothes out and tried to chew on them! But once they got the mesh basket empty they realized it made for a pretty fun toy....



Why do we even bother buying toys?????

Happy 4th of July!

Mommy's two favorite holidays are Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July and it looks like the 4th keeps getting closer and closer to taking the #1 spot. We had such a fun weekend and topped it off with dinner at our house and fireworks last night. We sure missed our annual houseguests, Aunt Amy and Abbey, but hope maybe they can rejoin us next year with our new cousin!

Mom didn't get too many pictures but thought we'd share a few of the ones we got....

We topped off the night with our first campout! Daddy pitched our tent in the backyard and Harrison and I hauled out enough stuffed animals, flashlights, and blankets to keep everyone safe and warm. Mommy stayed inside with the babies -- maybe next year we can all pile inside there! We slept great -- but I did have to complain a little when I came inside at 8am that the birds woke me up --- apparently, I still have a few things to learn about the joys of camping!
We are having a great time with Uncle Ryan, too, who is out visiting for the week. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures to prove he was here so that will be our goal for today!