Minnesota Adventure - Day 3

Day 3 of our adventure started out in our beautiful (and very white) DoubleTree hotel room. Luckily for Kristoffer the hotel had a wonderful selection of coffee in the room, and luckily for me (who only drinks fru-fru coffee) there was a Starbucks in the lobby! The boys started there morning with a few "Karter shows" and some cereal. (Karter is obsessed with Kaden's feet. He is always saying "I just love his little footie, I think I will keep it forever!")

After breakfast, Kaden decided to practice his counting skills. He is getting pretty good and when he wants to, he can make it all the way up to 20! Please excuse the terrible video quality, my video camera got "toasted" and this is taken with my actual camera.

Today was our "fun" day of the trip. We didn't have anything that needed to be done with the house, we could just be tourists in the big city! So, since we live in the country now, we did touristy things...like, take pictures of really big buildings!

And of course we had to get one last picture with Mary Tyler Moore!

(Kaden baby, could you please not look so concerned in EVERY picture?!)

We mosied our way down the Target Field. And Daddy and his boys sat in the golden glove.

Oh family pictures are going to be interesting this year!

What a stud!!

Karter wanted to pose with this guy (some famous Twin...Rod Carew maybe?), but was a little scared to do it himself!

After one with me, he thought he was safe!

Before leaving downtown, he had to stop at one more place...Candyland! It is an old fashioned candy store and Kristoffer used to go by there to get special treats when he worked downtown. They had pretty much any kind of candy you could want...we walked out with our share of yummy treats!

Kaden loved the cheddar popcorn!

After walking all morning, we were all pretty hungry and tired. We got back into the van and headed towards the hotel, with "Betty" directing us towards the closest Chinese restaurant! After eating too much, we made it back to the hotel just in time for our afternoon naps. During our trip the boys had been so good, but running on very little sleep. They would sleep well at night, but for 2 days they had very short naps. So, on this afternoon they made up for and napped for nearly 4 hours! Once we reached the 4 hour mark, we kind of started being a little loud on purpose to wake them up...normally I wouldn't do that, but we wanted to go swimming!

Before we headed down to the pool, I took this picture of our iPad. I am always so leery about leaving stuff in the hotel room, so I took this picture as evidence!

For dinner, we went to Apple Valley and met up with some of our friends, Brian and Mary Davis. Their daughter, Martha, was one of our first youth group members, and later became Karter's first babysitter. During our 5 1/2 years in MN, the Davis family became like family to us. They have and always will be very close to our hearts! Unfortunately, Miss Martha had to go off to college and we didn't get to see her, but I'm so glad it worked out that we got to see Brian and Mary...even if Kaden was NOT in the mood to cooperate with us during dinner!

Before bed the boys had a little energy to burn off, so we let them run around the room for awhile. They came up with some crazy games, but their favorite was hiding between the wall and the bed. Karter decided he wanted to sleep there, and wasn't very happy when we made his sleep in a bed!

Minnesota Adventure - Day 2

We spent our final night in the house on Thursday, so when we woke up Friday morning we were ready to get started loading up the house...well, after I went into Hastings and got us some coffee of course!

I really, really wanted to take pictures of every room before we took down any decorations, but of course I remembered that after we took all the pictures down...bummer! I know, its not like we are going to look at them everyday, but I just wanted to have pictures of what our first house looked like. I also really wanted a picture of our family in front of the sold sign in our yard, but while we were up there the appraisel hadn't come through yet so, so the realtor couldn't put that sign up. However, I am happy to say that our yard is now sporting a "SOLD" sign!! (Mandy is going to send me a picture!)

While I was out getting come coffee and bagels for breakfast, Kristoffer took a few pictures around the house. This is our entryway, taken from the front door. The sconces on the wall are the only thing we left. We thought if we took them down, that the nail holes would be too noticeable. So we left them as a housewarming gift for the buyers!

Oh, the downstairs...we sure did love that room!

The movers would pack and move everything, but they wouldn't take things out of crawl spaces or attics. Our crawl space was full of treasures! On Thursday when the boys were sleeping we pulled everything out. While we do have some things under there that we used a lot, most of it was just old college things that we haven't used/seen since we first got married. It was so fun looking through all the mementos we kept from when we first started dating. It was great to reminisce. Although, if anyone is interested in my old pt notes or random textbooks...just let me know!!

Karter's old room.

We wanted to make our movers job easy for them, so we took everything off the walls and made different piles for them. They were super impressed and couldn't believe all the work we did for them.

A few things accidentally got packed up (Karter's blanket), so we had to make the kitchen island the safety zone for our stuff. (Except for all the tp...that later got packed away!)

I remember when we bought the house how happy I was to have such a large kitchen! I was standing in front of that kitchen sink the day I told Kristoffer I was pregnant with Kaden!

The nursery. Kristoffer and I were walking around the house talking about old memories, and Karter picked up on it and said "Mommy, this is where you used to rock me to sleep." Then he wanted me to pretend like I was putting him down for a nap...so cute!

We had two guys show up to pack and help move, 2 people in the semi and two people came simply to build wooden crates to protect our fish tank and glass shelves for the entertainment system. We thought it was pretty cool how they come to your house and build crates for moving.

The semi was HUGE!!! The driver has some mad spacial skills and packed his trailer really good. The trailer as three different entrances...in the front doors (by the cab) was our furniture and elliptical, and in the main back was all of our boxes.

The cab was huge too! It had its own shower, toilet and kitchen...massive!

They sorted out all of our boxes into dolly loads for easier moving.

The semi had a little mover humor on it....crude mover humor!

All of the furniture got wrapped in plastic.

Our house was pretty hectic in the morning, and it was super hard to try to entertain the boys with so much going on. So I took them to Target (to relive our old routine!) and Kristoffer stayed at the house. We brought lunch back with us and then laid the boys down for a nap. There was so much going on around us, but we weren't doing ANYTHING! There wasn't anything to do...the movers had a system and they just rolled with it. Thankfully someone had an open wifi connection, so we could get on with the iPad. Kristoffer also snuggled with Rascal for a bit and...

...drew on Karter's magna-doodle.

Once everything was loaded, the driver asked the boys if they would want to come up in the semi. Of course, Karter was so excited!!

And yes, he is Kim Gray's grandson, so he went in barefoot!

We left the house right after the semi and headed up to the cities to check into our hotel. After a quick shower we were back out the door, off to meet up with our friends Mark and Katie. They had their son, Jack, back in March and we hadn't had an opportunity to meet him yet. He is such a sweet baby!

Karter was pretty fond of his new friend too!!

This has some random story behind it, but it was from their old college days...so it is really hard to tell with these two!

What a great ending to a busy day. We loved catching up with the Hokanson's!

Minnesota Adventure - Day 1

Last Wednesday afternoon, we loaded up our van and headed up to the (not quite yet) Frozen Tundra for one final time! It has been a long road to selling our house, but God has proven once again that He is always in control! We were starting to really worry if our house was ever going to sell, and with it going into the fall/winter months, we were really worried....houses hardly ever sell in winter...especially in Minnesota.

So not only were we stressing over selling the house, but then came the realization that we were soon going to have to start paying taxes and insurance on our house here in Indiana. And then, we found out that our home owners insurance was going to drop us as of September 16th, because we don't actually live in our house that we are having insured. In the same week we got the letter from our insurance, we also got an offer on our house!! It all happened so quickly, they saw it on Wednesday, saw it again Thursday and wrote an offer, we countered on Friday morning, they accepted Friday afternoon, and Saturday morning we had signed the purchase agreement...and they wanted to close September 16th. Talk about God's perfect timing!

The offer was contingent on us putting a new roof on the house, so we had to make a lot of phone calls to contractors and our insurance company. The roof had damage from a strong wind storm that came through, but our insurance were not being very nice and wouldn't cover any of the replacement. So once we found that out we moved forward and hired our contractor. It is very difficult to make such a big decision with someone we had never actually met!

We have been planning to go to Minnesota for Labor Day for many months, and we were just hoping and praying that the timing would work out that the house would be sold before we moved our stuff to Indiana. When we moved last October, we left everything (except our clothes and some of the kids toys) so that the house would looked staged when people came to look at it. Kristoffer's company would pay for a moving company up to one year after his start date, so we picked Labor Day weekend to make a nice long trip for our family. God's timing worked out and we were able to move our stuff home without worrying about staging the house.

We drove up to Rockford, IL on Wednesday night and then the rest of the way up Thursday morning. We arrived at the house just in time for lunch and a little nap for the boys. After they woke up we decided to head up to IKEA and the Mall of America for a little fun.

IKEA is the perfect place to find little decorations or an entire room if you are just starting out...

...or a little nap if you are a little tired from your drive!

...or a little nap if you are the world's cutest 3 year old!

After surprisingly only spending $20 at IKEA, we headed to the MOA to have some delicious BBQ for dinner.

This was our strangest trip to MOA, because we didn't do any shopping! All we did was eat and let the boys ride rides.

We bought enough "points" for each of the boys to ride one ride. Karter chose the Wonder Pets ride!

This ride takes them up a couple stories in the air and then bounces them around before slowly bringing them back down.

It is safe to say that he liked the ride!!

Then it was time for Kaden's ride!

Daddy was pretty excited to ride the Blue's Clues ride!

Karter loves a good self-portrait as much as I do!

It is always hard to tell id Kaden is enjoying himself.

But once the ride started he was all smiles and had a good time.

While we were watching Kaden ride his ride, someone offered us the rest of their points. They were leaving for the night and had enough for one more ride. Karter chose to ride the Big Rig. When we got to the front of the line the machine wasn't working, so she let him ride for free. Which meant he had enough points to ride another ride yet.

Karter was pretty upset that he didn't get to ride the same on Kaden did, so that is the one he chose to ride for his final ride.

Not bad for paying for 2 and riding 4!

We couldn't pass up getting some ice cream!

Karter walked up to the counter and declared "I want the blue one". Can't argue with that, so he got his own cotton candy ice cream...which of course he ate maybe 10 bites of. Oh well, we were on vacation!!

We packed a lot into Day 1 of our adventure...after some fun at the MOA, we were back to Hampton for one final night in our house.