North Pole Visitors

...or Minnesota visitors, anyway.  Same difference, right?  We were happy to host our good friends the Lus this weekend on their way down to south Texas for their annual vacation.  They were only able to stop for a few hours this time, but between their three boys and ours, everyone had a wonderful time playing and visiting.  We each got married in 2007 and it's been fun to see how our families have grown since then :) Here are me and Rachel and the boys from last year (Michael and Charles had their superhero hoodies last year):

And here were Rachel and I with our new baby Benedicts (Edmund and Joseph, respectively):

And here we are this year:

The babies are now proficient climbers and scavengers, the middle boys are our natural athletes who enjoyed playing football with Mathew, the older boys had fun playing trains and Legos, and as for us?  Rachel said that her middle son noticed that I am the same person as he sees in a picture they have at home, from when we were in college, "but she looks different now."  We agreed it's better not to go into all the ways we may look a little different than at 21 :)  We are very thankful for this friendship. 

Fun weekend

I was so happy this weekend to have my friend Rachel in town with her family.  Since graduation, we have never lived closer than hundreds of miles apart (New York/D.C.), and it's often been much more (counting her stint in Uzbekistan, and the current thousand or so miles between Dallas and St. Paul).  But when you are lucky enough to find such a great friend, distance doesn't really matter so much, and although I'd love to visit in person more than every couple of years, we do what we can!  It was so great to hang out, go swimming, meet her cute little guy Charles, and visit with Mathew.  The four of us enjoyed some good discussions over pizza, barbecue, and burgers, while the boys all got along very well.  Michael was also very intrigued by Mathew's iPad - I think touchscreens are made for toddlers.  Mike commented that, as usual, Rachel and I never ran out of things to talk about :)  I am thankful they made time to come visit, and hope we can make a return trip sometime soon!





Me and Rachel

After Rachel and her family left, everyone in our house took a nice, long afternoon nap before heading out to the park in the evening. It had clouded over so it was a bit less oppressive than it had been in the morning, and the boys had a great time playing after the obligatory snack.  Now that Malcolm wants to be moving around, we got him a little pair of shoes.  He's still getting used to them but they definitely help outside.

Malcolm is interested in getting more goldfish



Still loving the swings!

Rachel's visit

My best friend from college came down from Minnesota this week to spend time with Mike, me and the baby (and she ended up getting to hang out with Chris and Stefani and my father-in-law too!).  It was so great to see her since we probably haven't seen each other in a year and a half, or close to that, even though we talk a lot.  In any event, since we tend to talk for hours at a time on the phone (causing our husbands to roll their eyes), we enjoyed getting to visit even more while just hanging out around the house and not worrying about work (she is a doctoral student at Cornell and teaching now at St Thomas in Minnesota, but their classes haven't started up yet for the spring).   So, thanks to Mathew for letting Rachel come down to hang out with me for a few days :D

As Mike alluded in his last post, Rachel did bring the Minnesota weather down with her for a few days (boo), but then it got nice again and we were able to enjoy a nice afternoon walk in the sun yesterday, which was cool.