Tales of Traveling, Part 2

In order to prevent extreme boredom, I think I'll share the second leg of summer traveling mostly with pictures.  They pretty much tell most of the story anyway.

Except for the crazy Nielson way of traveling.  We arrived back to church from our Kansas trip at just about 12:00 noon on Saturday, July 3rd.  We cleaned up at church, waited for all the high schoolers to depart and headed home.  We made it back to our house around 1:00.  The next few hours were a bit of a blur involving ONE load of laundry, changing the oil in the van, cutting Hub's hair, going through the mail, balancing the checkbook, holding the mail for the next two weeks, mowing the lawn, taking Kansas stuff out of the suitcases to make room for the MN and SD stuff I had piled on the floor before the first part of our trip, repacking the van, feeding Phoebe, watering plants, waiting for the buzzer on the dryer, and heading out of town just 3 short hours after we arrived!  

That's right.  3 hours.  That's how long we were home in between trips.  After all, we needed to be in MN by 1:00 on Sunday, July 4th.  For one very important reason.  

That's right, Friends.  Please don't forget that our annual trips home each summer are ALWAYS planned around the Twins schedule.  And how much more so this year, in our desperate attempts to see the new stadium.  THANK YOU to my dad for making it possible for us to get into this sold out 4th of July game without having to scalp tickets.

Okay, I'm really not that bad of a mom.  The (other) real rush to get to MN, of course, was this:

My brother and sister-in-law had Noah and Sophia (in addition to their own two small people) for the last 3 days of our Kansas trip.  We are so grateful to them for generously doubling their craziness and loving on our kids in our absence.  And really, I'm not a bad person for going to the baseball game with Hubs first before seeing the kids, right?

The remainder of our time in MN went something like this:

Sweetest P got to meet her cousin Mackenzie for the first time.  Cousin M was born just 4 days after Sweetest P!  And Oma had all kinds of time to love on the two sweetest baby girls I know.

We spent all kinds of time here:

We were, after all, in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.  (Did you know it's actually 14,000 some?)  And sadly, in all that time, this is about the only picture I have to show for it.

With the youngest two watching:

Strangely enough, this trip also involved a lot of this:

We rode rides at the Mall of America.  We rode rides at Como Zoo.  We rode rides at Oma and Opa's.  (If you count riding the tractor with your self-proclaimed "crazy uncle" a ride.)  All firsts for my kids.  And now I'm screwed because for the first time, they know what rides are about and there's no going back to that blissful state of money-saving ignorance.

And don't forget this:

If you exlcude sleeping time, I think we spent more time outside than in.

Which may result in this:

Which may result in an inconvenient, unplanned shower!

But the best part of this leg of our journey, was this:

All kinds of time with the parts of the frozen tundra we love best!

Peace out, MN!