Minnehaha Falls

Marissa's "portrait" while at Minnehaha Falls. (She always decides she doesn't want her photo taken when I pull out the camera.)

And then there's Lindsey -- her eyes just pop in this photo.

One of our neighbors comments to us that we manage to spend an awful lot of time with our girls, despite working our two full time jobs. And I have to say, we do fit a lot in, which I'm thankful for.

For example, this weekend we spent hours on Saturday at the Fulton Festival, a little festival cooked up to help fund our neighborhood committee, which publishes a newsletter, does all kinds of neighborhood activities, and so forth. The festival was at the park we always go to, about 1 1/2 blocks from our house.

This year is was incredibly well attended and had LOTs of great music! The woman who organized the music is a casting director, so who better to be well connected and be able to get talent in for cheap? (Read "free.") Marissa and Lindsey spent lots of time in a bounce house, then Marissa got fussy and went home for a long nap. I took Lindsey back then and we closed the place down. Lots of freezies, roasted corn, face painting, animal balloons and dancing were in our plans! We finally shuffled back up the big hill to our house and made it home around 3:30, about the time Marissa awoke from her nap.

Then today we finally made it to Minnehaha Park. I've been wanting to go there all summer but was getting overruled by others. We went and it was worthwhile. The park has 167 acres of you name it, they got it. We drove into the park quite a ways and finally parked, thinking we would scope it out. Lucky us, we happened to park near Minnehaha Falls, which was a source of great amazement for Marissa. "Wawa! Wawa!" she would say, pointing. This was followed by a great game of hide and seek in all the large oak trees near the falls, which resulted in hungry tummies, so a picnic soon followed. After that, we managed to find a playground with a slide and monkey bars, the old fashioned metal kind that you can really hurt yourself on. The slide was made of metal, so you could really SLIDE down, Clark Griswald speed.

Hopefully we'll make it back there one more time this fall as the leaves are turning. It was gorgeous!