it's been awhile

i haven't written for a really long time! i keep meaning to update but then i hadn't downloaded the photos and kept waiting until i got them downloaded. then- we download them to our new desktop computer and now i've been too lazy to actually sit up at night and post/upload. doing it from my couch or bed on the laptop just seemed to be sooo much easier.

anyway - we have had a great summer. we had our big trip out west which was fantastic. of course i'm not on the computer now that has those photos, so i'll post photo updates later this week. for reals.

we spent 5 days in san fran with my cousin, her husband james and baby jaden. awesome time. we did quite a bit. fireworks on the 4th from the boat, camping, golden gate park, muir woods, sonoma wine tasting, trolley and cable cars, fisherman's wharf area, berkeley, haight-ashbury area and lots of good wine, food and company.

from sf, we went to boise to visit my grandma. she's in a nursing home and hasn't been feeling good...but she had a pretty good few days when we were out there and we managed to go out to dinner with my grandma, my aunt, uncle and cousins. great to see the family and catch up with everyone. we pretty much spent all of our time in boise seeing family and having griffin catch up on all of his sleep he missed while partying it up in sf.

from boise we flew to spokane and hooked up with friends guy and dawn. we stayed with them and had a great time. saw the sights of spokane (isn't a whole lot to see), and caught up.
under normal circumstances i'm sure g would have been at the end of his rope by the time we got to spokane...but the bonus is that guy/dawn live on the top of a canyon that overlooks...TRAIN TRACKS. trains went by about every 20 minutes and he nearly exploded from excitement each and every time one went by.

we managed to do lots of fun stuff and griffin got to do something train related every single day of our 10 day adventure. he still talks about all of the trains from our trip and it feels good to know we are creating such fun memories for him.

coming back we were all pretty crabby for about 2 weeks. it was SUPER hard to adjust back to reality and the time zone. and griffin was used to eating whatever he wanted, staying up really late and basically being the center of everything. so - getting back to reality was tough!

in other news....we have a new niece! Aliyah Grace Lawrence. Matt, Wendy, Alex, Andrew and Addi have welcomed their baby girl. and we are excited to meet her too!




other things we've been up to: had a visit with my parents, my dad had back surgery, went to WI for grandpa bruce's b-day celebration and hung out with dave, cindy, aidan and reese, had some fun wedding-related activities for dyle, taken long bike rides, spending time with the krugers now that they are back in minne, dan had a guys cabin trip, g and i had a girls cabin night, g and i went back to WI for my hometown festival and i caught up with some great hs friends, hanging with jes before she leaves to australia for a 5-month adventure, gone to the beach, have done a lot of babysitting for friends, and dan ran another half marathon. i DO actually have pictures of that...
he did great once again. he had some knee/leg injury...so his training for this event was a little slower than the previous one...but he still was fabulous.

here is griffin trying to give daddy a high five. it took about 5 attempts to actually do it.






and finally - a family photo.


it's been a good summer. it's gone by waaaay too fast, of course. but we have been enjoying every minute of it.

this weekend brings grandma lynne (he calls her grandma precious) to town. we are also going to celebrate dyles wedding on saturday and then sunday dan does the minneapolis duathalon!!

pictures of our trip to come.