During our last few hours in the city, we had the opportunity to eat at an amazing little cafe in St. Paul and play in a park in Minneapolis. The cafe is named Trotter’s Cafe and is a delicious spot in a cool neighborhood in the city….highly recommended if you are in the area. The park is Minnehaha Park and is famous for it’s waterfalls and house that mark the start of the current city of Minneapolis. Only catch is that there isn’t any water going over the falls…sort of like someone turned it off. The rumor is that the area is in a drought – which when you come from Colorado and see everything so green, is really hard to believe….but whatever. We enjoyed walking around and playing on the swings before grabbing a little ice cream snack on the way to the airport.
There is a video attached to this posting where you can watch Ezra in is never ending attempts at perfecting walking – and new this past week has been his ability to stand back up on his own.
So after spending a day and a half at the farm, it was time to head back towards the cities….oh, did I mention the weather? It has been nothing short of remarkable. Daytime highs in the mid-70’s, wind, a little clouds, and a rain drop or three. IE: not what you would expect in this area at this time of the year. It certainly made everything a little less sweaty, sort of.
Matthew needed to be back in the cities for some business, so we took this opportunity to spend a little extra time with them, as well as with Grandma and Grandpa. On Monday afternoon we headed over to the Como Park Zoo to visit with the animals for a little while. It’s a zoo and conservatory in the middle of Como Park, and is free (donation recommended) to all comers. It was a real pleasent stroll around the grounds, and we ended in the butterfly building – and we can now attest to the fact that you can in fact have thousands of butterflies in a small area. They were everywhere; landing on us, on the ground, on the camera lens, etc. Of course, they make good photography subjects, and they made me want a longer/macro lens….
The stimulation for this annual trek back to the midwest is Bestemor’s birthday, and this year we are celebrating the 97th one of those. It’s been a lot of fun to have this date seemly set aside by everyone every summer for the past bunch of years, and this year has been no different….execpt for the way that we had to make it happen.
Due to schedules, Ahna and Ezra left a few days before I was able to make it out of town – which meant that it was the first time that either one of us traveled alone with the little man. From all accounts, it was a relatively easy journey, with a few notes made for the next attempt. The afternoon after I dropped them at the airport was a moment or two of non-committal fun, including a Rockies baseball game with some friends from work, and a beer or two before heading home. Since it marked the first time that one of us traveled with Ezra alone, it also marked the first time that I was home alone without Ezra; and ‘alone’ was the perfect description of the feeling. I was amazed at how much I actually missed the two of them…
We reunited at the Minneapolis airport and immediately started the 2 hour drive down to the farm. On the road, we were able to experience the user-end of the scheduling and planning process of the MDOT…and I can positively tell you that it stinks. Three road closures and three detours marked the 90 mile stretch between the cities and the farm. Due to the aforementioned traffic, we arrived in northern Iowa a little later than we anticipated, and therefore weren’t able to stop by the farm that evening. Instead, we hung out at the hotel for a little while, then joined the Smith’s and the Bersagel-Braley’s for a nice dinner at the Subway/Burger King inside of the casino attached to the hotel.
The next day, we hit the farm hard. All day (after the morning nap), and all of us….totaling about 21 if I heard the number correctly. It was a thrill to be able to celebrate three different occasions all at once: Bestemor’s 97th birthday, Dave and Mary Jo’s 40th anniversary, and Ezra’s 1st baptism anniversary. The day was filled with the kids playing together and with lots and lots of yummy food. We celebrated all of this in the morning with a very special in-home church service given by Dave: it was really, really cool to see the whole family sitting in the living room of the farm together enjoying a beautifully crafted service.
We are back in the midwest visiting with family…..but due to some shared space in the hotel room (ie: Ezra won’t sleep if the computer is up and running), we haven’t been able to update with some postings. Hopefully we can get something up pretty soon…
First, here is the photo (although smaller, because it wasn’t e-mailed to me as promised…I had to steal it from another blog….Tori!!) from the Columbine House family reunion last weekend.
Secondly, here are some pictures from a fire that we had at work on Thursday afternoon. Super crazy story as to how it happened….a Park/Rec employee was filling a golf cart with fuel when static buildup from the filling process caused a fire. His shirt caught on fire, he ran. The fire then spread to the golf cart, and to the pickup (which was about 50 feet from the building). As the worker ran away, the fire burned through the brake lines in the truck, and the truck rolled down the hill and into the building. When it hit the building, it ran into the gas meter and that started some small explosions….catching the building on fire. Wew.
So I lied about getting some photos of the ‘plans’ from last week on the site. Just didn’t happen. We spent three days cleaning out and reorganizing our crawl space and garage. We added some lights down there, we added some shelves in both places, and we got rid of a ton of stuff. The events concluded with a garage sale last Friday – which turned out to be mostly successful. All leftover items were taken to Goodwill. The last 5% is just three or four things to go through and figure out where to put – and one item to repair and bring into the house. The trick now will be getting that last part done…it seems like this is one of those things that we will wake up one day and it’ll be three years since we cleaned out the garage and that stuff is still sitting there.
Funny how things happen sometimes. On the same night that we were fortunate enough to have Erin and Lotsen back in town, we had to say good-bye (for now) to a dear friend – Mike Waide. Erin and Lotsen were in town as part of a vacation, and they stopped back here for the first time since moving to Seattle 2.5 years ago. With their return, it proved to be the perfect time to get the Columbine Family back together…Ahna, Mary, Jennifer, Tori, and Erin all lived together before life started taking them apart (you know: marriage, jobs, etc).
We met at City Park in Denver for a picnic and some music…every Sunday night in the summer there are free jazz music concerts in the park. We all got there early (like 2 hours pre music) to get a place and to have some quality time as a group before it got too late. It was special to see everyone and to catch up, but it was especially special to see everyone together again….almost like it’s still going on – with the addition of a few more people.
I had to leave the party at City Park early to get to the party in Castle Rock. This one was a little different, as we were saying so long to Mike Waide. He is moving on to a new opportunity with the Valdez, AK fire department, and we had a little going away celebration for him. It was a lot of fun to relive past stories – Mike started at the CRFD about a month before I did, so we have known and worked with each other for 10 years now. It’s always bittersweet to see such a good person leave, mostly because I know that the department won’t be better off without him, and he is a great friend…but those are selfish reasons, and for Mike, it’s time. I know that intellectually, but there is a large part of me that’s really sad to see him go. Oh well, guess that I will have to plan a visit to Alaska sometime soon….
One of the fellas at work also works for the Colorado Rockies as a clubhouse hand. He has been doing this for 6 years, and prior to having to move to part time to accept the firefighter gig, he would even travel with the team. He set up a behind the scenes tour of Coors Field for the folks from B-Shift, and we headed up for a few hours of dreaming yesterday. We had the opportunity to see the visitors clubhouse, the Rockies’ clubhouse, the batting cages, the equipment room, the workout facility, the rehab area, the Rockies’ dugout, the bullpen, the fountains, etc, etc, etc. Even though they offer tours of Coors Field to the public, needless to say, what we got to see isn’t on the public tours – especially all of the home team stuff. It was freakin’ cool.
We have plans. Plans to clean out our crawl space. Plans to clean out the house. Plans for a garage sale. Plans for trips to Denver for 4 out of the next 5 days. Plans for work. Plans, plans, plans. But the execution of those plans can wait….at least for today. We took the opportunity to spend a nice day together and settled on Breckenridge as the venue. Nice drive up, walked around, played in the park, had a great lunch, and a nice drive back. Get this: no photos. Not for any other reason than I decided that it wasn’t a take-my-photo kind of day. So don’t worry, more will come soon….of all those plans.
We pulled the safety mats of home and headed for them there hills. Yes, we decided that it was high time that we spent our first night in a tent with Ezra and experienced the concept of camping with a baby. If you want the short version, here it is: most of the time it wasn’t nearly as hard as we thought it would be…but there were moments.
We left yesterday morning with a reservation for a tent site in the Rocky Mountain National Park (about 2.5 hours drive) and a car that seemed as packed as if we were trekking across country. It seems as though you add one person and you exponentially add more stuff (I think that sounds familiar). We stopped in Estes Park for a picnic by the small lake in town and then headed for our site to set up. We brought along our large tent, and a sun shade – which we used as a place for Ezra to play without sitting in the dirt…and it worked perfectly. After we set up camp, we headed back into town and hung out till dinner time. When we planned the trip, we gave up on trying to stay in camp for hours and hours then trying to cook dinner…we thought it would just be an easy meal to let someone else take care of while we got our feet wet with the experience.
We returned to camp, and started a fire with wood that the previous tenant of that spot left behind. We enjoyed being chased in circles by the smoke for nearly an hour before attempting to turn in for the night. We brought an air mattress to sleep on, which is great until anyone has to move. Our biggest mistake of the trip was trying to get Ezra to go to sleep before it was dark outside…he fought and fought it. He thought that being in the tent was just the coolest thing, and wanted to play with everything – which meant that he didn’t want to go to sleep. Once it became dark however, we were able to get him to sleep. Everyone slept fairly well throughout the night – as good as could be expected since it was our first night camping, we were on an air mattress, and it was 40 degrees outside.
We woke this morning and made some breakfast – eggs to be specific. It was great to see that all of our camping gear still worked as though it was used just last week; when in fact it has been two summers between uses. After breakfast, we joined about 10,000 mosquitos and hiked around Sprauge Lake and then a little up another trail before turning around because Ezra fell asleep while being carried. He stayed alseep all of the way back to the car, then until we drove down to Boulder, where we stopped for another picnic lunch.
The trip was good fun, and we are already planning our next excursion into the woods. We are hoping that after a couple of times, we are able to pair down what we are taking and streamline the operation. It’s not so much the packing or the space in the car as it is the unpacking….
