Katie's Wedding and Summer Fun

This past weekend, we travelled to southern Illinois to celebrate the wedding of one of my college roommates Katie!  We got to see many friends that we haven't seen in years.  The kids were great travelers for the 9.5 hours in the car each way.  We had lots of fun!  (The following are pictures from our little camera as well as photos we've borrowed from friends!)  Most of the photos are of my kids...after all, this blog is mostly about them.

As soon as we arrived, we headed right to the rehearsal dinner.  When the Hattons arrived, Sarah immediately recognized George and gave him a big hug.

After breakfast at Cracker Barrel the next morning, the kids found each other on the grassy field by the hotel...more play time!

 Smiles with Daddy.  Sarah is totally in love with her new sun hat.

After some time at the pool for Austin while Sarah took her morning nap, we had some lunch then got ready for the wedding.

My cuties!

The wedding!

Austin was great during the wedding. He just sat quietly like a little angel.  Sarah was a bit tougher to control...but at least she provided some additional entertainment as she wandered down the aisle every now and then and made silly faces at everyone around us.

At the reception...

Roomie pics.

There was a cookie buffet at the reception, and Austin thought it was great!  He overindulged a bit on the cookies, though.

The kids enjoyed playing around in the tent.

The kids decided they would dance before the music even began...

Then the dancing began in earnest...

The kids went crazy dancing.  Watching Austin and Rebecca dance with each other all night was absolutely precious and hilarious.

Patrick excited to join in on the fun.

Sarah had a blast dancing as well...although her version of dancing included a lot of spinning around and falling down on her cute little bottom.

The kids stayed up way past their bedtimes dancing and having fun.  Finally, we got them back to the hotel, bathed, and down to sleep.  Austin's overindulgence with the cookies, combined with lots of dancing, and a late bedtime came back to haunt us around 3:45am.  We ended up having to apologize profusely to the housekeeping staff after he wet the bed the first night and threw up in it the second.  Sorry Hilton Garden Inn crew!

On Sunday morning, we had breakfast with the roomies before heading home in the car.  Sarah was really excited to get her milk in a big kid cup with a straw.

It was a great, but exhausting trip.  I was so wonderful to see everybody and we're looking forward to spending some more time with my roomies when we go to Ellen's wedding next month!

We've also been busy with summer activities at home lately.  Austin's sports class on Tuesdays has been a big hit and he is doing great in swimming lessons on Thursdays.

Sarah likes to run around and explore the fields while Austin has his class.

Last week was field hockey.  I found myself silently praying that he won't like hockey.  I'm really hoping not to be a hockey mom....too much craziness!

This week was soccer.  Sarah found some extra soccer balls to play with for part of the class time and actually was pretty good at kicking it around for a 1 year old.

Austin kicking a goal.

Check out the video of Sarah kicking the ball around and Austin scoring a goal.

Swim lessons...
This is a video showing parts of Austin's swim lesson last week.  He is making really good progress every week and has a blast doing it.


We also discovered that we really like the library in a neighboring city much better than the one in our town.  Luckily, despite the library being in a separate county, we can use Austin's library card from our county in the neighboring county by taking 2 minutes to register it. Sweet!  The kids had a blast playing at the library and picking out books for our trip.  They even met a new friend and had a blast playing in the "garbage cans" (toy bins) in the children's library area.

Sarah has also taken an interest in the piano...at least while Austin was napping and didn't push her away from it.

We look forward to celebrating the 4th of July weekend with family, despite the fact that I'm working most of the weekend.  It has been really hot this week, so we're hoping for a bit of a cool down this weekend.  The summer is going so fast!  I can't believe it is already July! We've been working on getting house projects done, finding fun family activities to do with the kids, and finding some down time to play at home between travels, work, and kids' activities.