Weekend Recap: Family Fun & Date Night!

Happy Monday!  It's been awhile since I've had some free time on a Monday night to write a blog post.    I could be finishing up some notes for work but…they'll still be there tomorrow. ;)  We didn't have much planned this past weekend, which I was happy about, but it turned out to be a pretty darn good one.  I'm drawing blanks on what we did on Friday night besides stay home and watch Dateline.  We were both so tired we barely made it to the end.  It was our usual Saturday morning of music class for Ben and me and studying for Andy.  Ben and I stopped by my mom's after music class.  Even though they had big "to-do" list, Nana and Papa John graciously offered to take Ben for several hours so I could get some stuff done.  I was a little sad to leave him, but it was so nice to have some free time!  My mom was inspired by my blog post from last weekend and wanted to check out the park we went to.  It is a good 45 minute drive, but totally worth it!  So while Ben was doing lots of this:

I was busy doing this:

I did some much needed organization of all of our baby clothes before my pager went off.  I'm on call 1 week a month and I typically get 1-2 calls a week, but I had to go in on to see a patient on Saturday.  At least I didn't get interrupted doing anything fun! ;)  On Saturday night, my dad came over so Andy and I could have a date night!!!  We really don't go on many dates these days and we especially do not go to movies, and we decided that we were due for one!  Again, I was sad to leave Ben, but he was SO excited for grandpa to come over.  Despite his 20 minute power nap in the car earlier in the day, he was in a great mood.  This boy LOVES to play baseball, and I love any opportunity where I don't have to be the pitcher.  (Mostly because he hits the ball nearly 100% of the time and he hits it HARD.  Andy got pelted in the arm right before we were about to leave and the ball left a mark.  He has a tee but apparently a real pitcher is more fun…)

I do not know what he is doing in this picture, but I do know that he did NOT want to stop playing to take a picture.

And of course, we needed one of us, since it was such a special occasion!

We tried a new local "farm to plate" restaurant and it was excellent.  We will definitely be going there again.  After dinner, we went and saw "Gone Girl" which we both really liked.  I want to read the book now!  It was our first movie since we went to a movie in Belgium when I was pregnant with Ben.  We kept saying, "we need to do this more often" and we definitely do! 

We missed Ben, but I'm pretty sure the only thing he missed was Grandpa not being there in the morning.  "Grandpa go?  Grandpa come back to Ben's house!!!!"  (Almost with tears, I might add.)  So he did the next best thing: played with the new toy from Grandpa.

Later on Sunday morning, we went to our cousin Lydia's baptism.  Andy and I were both too busy telling Ben to whisper and that he can't eat a granola bar in church that we didn't have time to take pictures.  (Side note, he later received a sucker in the middle of the service after he went up to the front with Auntie Anna and the rest of the kids.  He is probably going to want to start going to this church on a regular basis…)  I only managed to get a few pictures from the day.

As always, Ben loved hugging and kissing baby Lydia.

After I tried REALLY HARD for over an hour to get Ben to take a nap, I accepted that a good nap was not in Ben's plans this weekend.  Instead, we decided to take Rosco to the dog park.  We didn't last very long because it started to rain, but it was still fun.  There were about 25 dogs there and Ben wasn't scared at all until this giant dog came over by him.  I was scared too!  Mostly he just watched in amazement.  Love those little folded hands.

My boys!

We wrapped up our weekend with some much needed grocery shopping and an early bedtime.  Ben was asleep before I even left his room!  That never happens.  Have a great week!

Weekend Recap: Date Night & Pumpkins!

Another fabulous fall weekend in the books.  We've really stepped up our workouts, so we were beat by Friday and crashed nice and early--so early that we didn't even finish a really good Dateline.  Thank goodness for DVR!  It was a typical Saturday morning with music class for Benji and momma while daddy hit the gym.  It was a rainy Saturday so we cleaned the disaster that was the work room in basement--exciting stuff!  However, we didn't want to exert ourselves too much, because Saturday night was....DATE NIGHT!!!  I still can barely believe that we had a Saturday night out!  Thanks, Auntie Anna, for volunteering to hang with Benj for a few hours so we could be grown-ups for a bit!  We went to a wine bar we've been wanting to check out and then to one of our fav restaurants.  It ended up being a gorgeous night and we had so much fun together.  Hopefully Auntie Anna had fun too so she'll want to come back more often... :)  We used to have date night every Monday, but Auntie has quite the social life!  We love you, Auntie Anna!

We got our workouts (and Packer game watching) in on Sunday before heading to the pumpkin farm!  I am truly blessed in the fabulous co-worker department, so we went to the farm with some of my coworkers and their families.  No sooner were we off the tractor wagon was Benji off and running in search of the perfect pumpkin.  As anticipated, he found a super sized pumpkin and proceeded to try and pick it up himself.  :)

The pumpkins were so huge that unfortunately Benji could not carry his own, so he asked daddy for some help.  

He wasn't discouraged though and found plenty of rocks and sticks that were his own size. :)

Luckily, daddy is super strong, so he was able to carry 2 pumpkins so I could keep track of the cutest pumpkin (Benj--obviously).

It was a little different than last year's trip to the pumpkin farm, but equally fun!

After we found the perfect pumpkins, which was actually hard because you had to hurry back to the tractor before it left without you, we checked out the corn maze.  Luckily, we had some great navigators because with Andy pulling the wagon and a certain hungry boy who was refusing to hold his own bottle, it was hard to pay attention to a map. :)

Talk about a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon in the fall.  Hopefully the ginormous pumpkins will offer lots of seeds!