All the World's a Stage

We had a nice visit from my sister and her family last week. They have two girls, E who is Sweet Pea's age and her little sister H who is three and a half. As soon as they arrived the kids started playing. When they ran out of toys to drag out, Lady Di suggested that they go to the basement and think up a show to perform. We have a cabinet full of old costumes in the basement that helped with the creativity. Actually, each 30 second show was pretty much based on which costume each kid wanted to wear and less upon plot and storyline. One of the plays was titled, "The Beautiful Princess and Darth Vader". It involved a tale of a beautiful princess walking around humming to herself when Darth Vader enters and menacingly shouts, "Where is the princess!?"

Then both actors ran offstage down to the basement.

Here is the cast of "The Soldier, The Princess and The Hunter".

The next still photo is a promotion for the upcoming "Princess and the Pea" production. Starring Sweet Pea as 'the princess', Number One Son as 'the mattress' and cousin E's debut as 'the Pea'.

Little cousin H got stage fright and was unable to perform unfortunately.

When the cousins had to leave at the end of the day we thought the theatre district would close down for the day, but there was one last performance on the marquee. We were able to sneak a camera into the theatre to snap this photo from the play, 'Disco Darth Vader vs Spiderman Scooby-Doo with antlers'.

Ho Ho Ho

This weekend we visited South Dakota to attend a friend's retirement party. On the way we stopped in Blue Earth, Mn. While pulling into the gas station, Ethan noticed a big, green, scantily clad guy. No, not the Hulk.
"Look! The Green Giant!" , he said.
So we had to make a detour to visit the Giant and little Sprout.
We could only stay for a minute, because the temperature was 20 degrees with a wind chill of 'igloo'. I think I saw some goose bumps on the Giant's legs. The kids were excited when they saw the statue, until they got out of the van. They literally ran to him, stood for a picture, and ran back to heat. Now we can cross one more 'wonder of the world' off our list. We've already seen the world's largest twine ball in Darwin, Mn.

Our trip also involved a lot of swimming at the hotel. After the retirement party, we got some pizza. The kids ate one piece each while getting their swimming suits on. Their cousins, Ella and Hope, from Mitchell, SD also came to swim. We swam from 5:30 to 8:00pm and were exhausted. I think we learned a lesson about pool-side rooms. It is fun to be next to the pool, but when the pool closes at 11:00pm, sleep usually starts at 11:00pm too. I can't believe that parents let their kids stay up that late. The next morning Ethan woke up as usual at 6:45am and asked if he could go swimming. Emery heard the word 'swim' and popped out of a deep sleep, like toast from the toaster and jumped into her suit. They had to wait until 8am, when the pool opened, so they swam from 8:00.01 until 10:30am. The 4 hour drive home was pretty quiet, even though Ethan slept for only 1/2 hour and Emery didn't sleep at all. We had a lot of fun on this short trip in spite of the cold weather. It was great to see my sister and her family too.

Emery and Ella.......... Ella and Hope....... Ethan on the log