To Indiana and back

This past week was spent recovering from Memorial Day weekend, and then preparing for our trip to Indiana. Sandwiched in between those two big events were a couple of rainy days, and one absolutely beautiful Thursday.

Here's what we did on that nice day ... ate breakfast fast so we could get out of the house and actually do something before Kate's morning nap; spent about an hour and a half at Olbrich Gardens playing in the fountains, running around the rose garden, enjoying the "touch and feel" garden, and resting by the Thai pavilion; played a game or two with Anna while Kate napped; ate lunch outside at the picnic table; worked in the garden while the girls napped; then towed both girls in the bike trailer to meet Matt at our new favorite local park for a picnic dinner. While waiting for Matt, we walked out on the public pier to see some ducks, fishermen, and waterskiers, then played on the playground before we watched and heard a freight train (up close and personal) go past on the railroad tracks. All in all, a great day!

This past Sunday we drove out to Ft. Wayne to visit with my grandma and to see my aunt, cousins, and my cousin's kids. The girls did pretty well with all of the car time; Kate seems to be getting better at travelling, especially compared with how she was last summer.


It helped that we stopped at a couple of parks on the way out and back to give both girls some running around time to (as Anna likes to say) "get the wiggles out". Here's an old college favorite, Valplayso, in good ole' Valpo. We actually found this one without having to ask for directions!


While in Ft. Wayne, we visited with Grandma for awhile in the afternoon and then met up with Aunt Sandy, Leigh, Travis, Lucy, Gus, and Judson at the hotel before going out to eat.


The kids seemed to enjoy meeting each other, although Anna was already pretty tired and out of sorts by that point in the trip. Sweet Kate was just as social as she always is. We remembered at the last minute that we wanted to get pictures of all of them together, but it's REALLY hard to get 5 kids under the age of 5 to be in a picture together :)


After dinner Matt and I played around in the pool with the girls (we can't really go to a hotel and NOT play in a pool these days) before crashing. Our original plan was to take a leisurely drive back home and stop at the Northern Illinois Railway Museum, but we missed the exit and the girls happened to both be sleeping about that time anyway, so we just got home earlier than expected.

It was a nice break and mini-vacation for our family, but it's also good to be back. Anna tends to get ornery and emotional when she's low on sleep and, since she doesn't really nap in the car much anymore, she has been pretty out of sorts today. In fact, just after lunch she was leading Kate back and forth around the house (for what reason? I'm not really sure) and when Kate decided she wanted to do something else, Anna just completely melted down. Poor kid. It didn't help matters that Kate woke the whole family up at about 5:20 this morning. Hopefully we'll be back to normal soon :)