Two Nights Out

Jeff and I have had plans for several weeks to go with another couple to the Milwaukee Art Museum to see an exhibit of posters from Paris during the era of Toulouse Lautrec.  We chose to go on the one night a month that the museum is free, so it's been on the calendar for a while.  The night before though, I was feeling a tightness in my chest.  I have been feeling it off and on fairly frequently the last few weeks and this one was lasting too long.  The first few times I felt it I thought I might be having a panic attack like what my mom has had in the past.  This one made me more nervous though, because it was lasting so long, I worried it might be something heart related, so we went and got checked out.  They told me that my heart was fine and that it is most likely panic attacks.  I have been struggling with crazy hormones for the past few months and it looks like this is a fun new symptom I get to add to my repertoire.  We are so grateful for friends who kept the boys for us at the last minute so that we could have some peace of mind.

The next night, was a much better time!  It was fun for the boys, oops - men, to walk quickly around the museum entertaining themselves while my friend Jessica and I actually enjoyed the art.  She served her mission in France so she could actually read the posters and understood the surroundings of where they would have hung.  It was neat for me to see some of the beginnings of design and I especially enjoyed looking at the lettering and how that has evolved over the years.

Last Big Summer Fling

Jeff had to travel north a bit on Friday for work, so we decided to join him and make an event of it!  We left out early Friday morning so that he could make it to an 8 o clock appointment and had breakfast while he had his meeting.  We drove another hour north for his next meeting at 10 and found a great park close by where we enjoyed our wait very close to our final destination - the beach!  This meeting was in Two Rivers, the same town we went camping in a few months ago with our neighbors.  We learned that we were there for their annual kite festival that is put on by a local kite shop.  We spent the afternoon at the beach where I had a good laugh at the different personalities of my boys.  Lincoln and Jackson both wanted to be buried in the sand, but Harrison didn't even want sand on his fingers.  Every time they got dirty he would ask for a wipe.  I kept sending him back to the water to wash them off... but the water was ice cold!

I enjoyed jumping into the waves with the older boys and Jeff and watching one of the expert kite flyers practice for the next day.  He even brought the kite down so that it was right next to Harrison and bounced it around teasing him with it until he could touch it.

That night Jeff found us a hotel in Green Bay (a little further north) that has two big water slides.  We enjoyed that in the evening and again in the morning.  We spent the afternoon at Bay Beach (the 25cent amusement park where we went with Amy, Sarah and Jeffrey).  They have a really great nature preserve there with several centers to explore and see animals.  I don't think I've ever seen so many ducks in one place.  It reminded me a lot of feeding the fish in my parents backyard... they swarmed all on top of each other to get to the corn that they sell in the center.  We went back to see the kite festival at the beach that night.  It was neat to see the kites with lights on them dancing and moving in sync with each other.  They had hoped to have a lantern release (like the one in Tangled), but it was too windy.  We waited and waited and they finally had a firework display - we decided it was worth the wait!  What a great summer of memory making... and exhausting - bring on the school year.  :)