State Fair

I laugh every time I come on here to try to catch up. I finally made it to the end of August! I will catch up. I will.

We always love our yearly trip to the fair. Our kids talk about it all year long! They can't wait to go back. And this year, much to their delight, we ended up getting to go twice! We had some friends from out of town come and we went with them. And we also went with some friends from here. Double the fun. Double the crazy. Double the terrible and delicious food.

A day with the Koehlers:

Somehow we don't actually have any pictures of the Koehlers. But they were there! And we had so much fun with them! In fact, the boys still keep talking about when Matt and Sarah and Isaac came and went to the State Fair with us. Or as Carsten kept calling him, their kid baby. :-)

And a day with the Zehrs!

We love both of these families so much and so much fun making new memories with them!

Crystal Cave

Every time we drive through Wisconsin we say we should go to Crystal Cave sometime. At the end of August we were on our way to my class reunion (which was really fun! But I won't tell you how many years it was. We can just say five. :-)) and we saw the sign again. We didn't really have anything to rush home for on Sunday so we decided to do it!

We love surprising the kids with things like this, so we didn't tell them but gave them clues to try to figure it out. They were so excited to find out we were going to a cave!

We didn't take pictures in the cave, but afterward they got to do a little mining. They had a blast and brought home all kinds of amazing rocks. :-)

A Day With the Dinosaurs

The dinosaurs were back at the zoo this summer! It's been a couple years since they were there and Tyler asks about them every summer. They were so excited to find out they were back. They looked forward to it for months until we finally got there. It was worth the wait. :-)

This is the only picture I have of the love and protection that came from Carsten that day. He was not convinced that the dinosaurs weren't real. For the most part he stayed back a ways from each dinosaur but he was ready at all times to save Aria if disaster struck. Aria on the other hand, had no fear whatsoever. And every single time she ran up to a dinosaur, Carsten ran after her and dragged her away. And every time he tried to drag her away and she yelled at him and fought it, he shouted, "Mommy, Daddy! Protect her!!!"

A couple days later they boys got to be paleontologists with these awesome eggs from the dinosaur gift shop. :-)

They were so excited about the fossils they found and loved getting to play scientist. :-)