Skip to main content

A Rare Weekend in Minneapolis

For the first time ever we got up early and were out of the house before 10am. We headed to Lake Nokomis for a Nature Club meetup. Nokomis Park had recently replaced their playground and added  a natural playground. Meadow was loving the balance beams.

She even got me, Mr. I'll-Watch-You-Play to try it out.

Before you know it Meadow was racing back and forth down the tree balance beams.

Our friend Anna runs the nature club for the Minneapolis Park Board. She lets the kids take charge and explore the environment. This time they built a structure out of branches.

All the kids and adults were involved and helped each other out.

It turned out to be a pretty nice structure.

Once it was built everyone crawled inside and Anna read a book about fall. It wasn't the book she had planned, but all the kids liked it.

Before leaving the kids played on the playground.

Back at home Meadow and I played some games.

Well we accepted an offer on our house and put in an offer for a condo. 

Since we will be packing up before Christmas I figured it was okay to put out a few decorations before Thanksgiving. We also needed to slim down our 6 boxes.

We're not going to have nearly the storage that we currently have nor the space for endless Christmas decorations.

Of course the advent mittens had to go up.

Just the little tree this year.

After we finished decorating the house we had to drive down to our potential condo for the inspection walk through. The condo is in southwest Minneapolis near Lake Harriet. We never imagined ourselves living in such a swanky area, but it turns out we could afford a condo. Where we'll be living, is a mix of older apartments and charming, but expensive homes.

It will be change losing 1000 sq ft of space with a baby on the way, but I think we are going to love living here.

After the inspection we were invited to the Northstar Roller Girls Roller Derby.

My friend and realtor, Nate, is sponsoring the league this year.

 I had never been to a roller derby before and was completely lost at first at how the points work.

Eventually we caught on. It was a pretty entertaining way to spend a Saturday night.

There was a guy making balloon animals for all the kids. Meadow requested a sword and was having so much fun with it that she popped it. 

So then I took her back down to get a new one. This time she picked a flower.

At this point we hadn't eaten dinner yet.

After some discussion with Nate, Jess and their friends we ended up at J. Selby's in St. Paul. When we first sat down a part of Meadow's balloon popped. The whole place stared at us. Whoops.  

The cauliflower "wings" were really good.

Brooke got faux-chorizo tacos, Meadow the near-chicken nuggets and I got a simple asian stir fry. After finishing I kind of regret not getting one of the fake meat menu items. We'll have to take Blake here next time he's in town.

It was getting late and we were ready to head home. 

It was a nice change of pace to actually go out with people back in the cities. We usually only go out with folks when we're out of town. I think that might change a bit after we move to the new place near Lake Harriet.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Chicago Chrismukkah + Michigander Xmas

 Before heading out on our trip we let the kids open their Christmas gifts from us. A knitted sweater for Theo and a kitty dress for Meadow (I fixed the straps for her) both made by me. I wanna a sweater. Scott got them new compact sleeping bags. We all got smaller sleeping bags this year and we'll now have a lot more room in our car. This year we had talked about hosting my family at the cottage. Then meeting up in Milwaukee, then meeting in Chicago. But in the end we made stops in Chicago and Lowell this Christmas. We left on a Sunday which was nice to have a few days to prepare. On the way down to Chicago we stopped at our favorite roadside restaurant, Foster Cheese Haus. We had plans to break up our drives so we didn't have to rush like we normally do. We had made it just before the cheese haus was set to close for the winter. Just not enough folks stop here in winter and snowmobile season is becoming shorter and shorter this far so...

I Go to Oregon and They Go to Cottage

  I had to get back from Little Chute just to fly out to Oregon for another shoot out there. This was after also doing an overnight shoot in Worthington, MN.     Meanwhile, we had left Meadow in Little Chute during the week. Theo and I headed to the cottage to pick her up.  Still winter up here.  Theo looks so cute in the Stormy Kromer hat.  There's still ice on the lake with a few open spots of water.   

A Weekend of Bike Rides

With the kids finishing up school we had to treat them to Sushi Train. They picked the downtown location, which meant a family bike ride.  Theo asked why we don't go to this location anymore. The other location is more convenient but we agreed to go the one downtown this time.  I swear we did in fact eat sushi. We seem to always miss strawberry picking season. This year I was determined to go. Afton Apple was the first place I found that was open for the season.  One of their old fields that they were ready to retire was producing a lot of fruit this year.  Luckily today turned out to be a cooler day.  I treated the kids to strawberry shakes.  Then we drove over to Prescott to pick up some food for lunch and ate at Point Douglas Park. Then we did some hiking at Carpenter Nature Center to do some geocaching. Later Scott and I bike through some rain to Northeast to go to the soon to be closing Bauhaus one last time.  Gonna miss you Bauhaus. In the mornin...