Chicago Trip - July 4th Weekend

This last weekend we went to Chicago to visit Shawn's family and celebrate some of the kid's summer birthdays. It was really great! :) We stayed at Marty and Valerie's (Shawn's sister) house. Noelle (Shawn's sister) and her son Dylan were there from Kansas City, Shawn's Mom and her husband Tom were there on Saturday and Sunday, and Todd (Shawn's brother) and his wife Kelly came up to spend the day with everyone on Sunday. It is always so much fun having everyone together and especially letting the cousins all play together! Brannon LOVES his cousins! He especially loves his cousins trampoline! Whenever we didn't know where he was, we would just look out the window and see him jumping, or just laying, on the trampoline.

Here are some collages of our trip and family. I can't wait for Picasa to finish making their Mac version! I had to do all the collages at my mom's house.

This was Friday night. We went to a park and watched the fireworks, and the boys "played" (I don't know if that's the best word of it) with sparklers for the first time.

On Saturday, we went to a festival not far from their house. There was a petting zoo, rides, food and fun. The neatest thing was that they had a hot air balloon "thing". They blew them up right infont of where we had our blankets, and at dusk, they let everyone come out on the field with the ballons. It was really neat. There was a huge pink Energizer bunny balloon, and they were giving out pink bunny ears. :)

These are just some cute pictures of the fam! :)

We got a lot of good group pictures of the cousins...minus Madison and Todd's new additions :(. At the bottom is a picture of Alex, Shawn and Todd (Shawn's brother...if that wasn't obvious). We think that Alex looks just as much like his uncle as he does his Daddy! The first picture in the first row is of us girls recreating the Charlie's Angels pose. :)

This is an Alex collage. :) The picture at the top right was the face he gave me when I said that I wanted him to stop jumping and smile so that I could get a good picture of him and Matthew (he is only a couple of months older than Alex). Can you tell he wasn't happy with me? :) I also LOVE the picture of the two of us I took on my own. The first picture on the second row is of Alex with his new Spiderman boxer briefs that we got him. They are WAY too big, and he put them on all by himself OVER his pj's. :)

This is the Brannon collage. The boys got to make and eat s'mores for the first time. They liked roasting the marshmellows, but didn't really like eating them...give them time and they will be begging for the gooey goodness! The bottom right picture is of the boys in the car...yes I said car. We decided to save on gas money and take Shawn's TWO DOOR Civic. It really wasn't that bad, and we probably saved $100 on gas!