rockford, part 2 (and my 1 year anniversary!)

first of all, happy 1 year blogging birthday to me! a year ago today i wrote this post, and i have greatly enjoyed being able to record our lives for my own memory and other's enjoyment :) i have written 135 posts (i know, i haven't gotten to the point where i can blog every day) and have 42 followers (most of which i don't know- thanks to all of you!). i'm excited to see where this next year of blogging will take me!

so this is actually the 2nd part of saturday that my last post left off with. remember how it was so beautiful on friday and we played at the park? well on saturday......

yep. about 3-4 inches of snow. that we were not prepared for. luckily i remembered to pack the boys some beanies, but we didn't even have our coats with us! ha! after mandy left we went to lunch at buffalo wild wings then headed up to mt. horeb, wisconsin to visit a friend that we hadn't seen in over 6 years and meet her husband and little girl. when you look out the car windows in these pictures it just looks cold

this is sarah, who is one of the most beautiful "about to pop" pregnant lady i have ever seen. i mean seriously, she looks great! here we are with our "4" kids! her daughter avah is so sweet! she's almost 2 and played so well with the boys.

apparently i didn't take any pictures on sunday. i went to church and saw soooo many people that i knew from my days in rmc. after church we had the big family lunch at my homeopeners house that we used to do every sunday after church when i lived there. it was al & barb, their 2 daughters brittney and lynne, 2 of lynne's kids (the other was sick), the 4 of us, and the rmc girl who lives with them currently. so great! i met up with a friend that afternoon for pastries & lemonade at panera, then we just spent the evening at the house. of course i ran and got some cold stone for us to enjoy while we were watching movies!

we left monday around noon and started driving home. we decided to continue to be spontaneous and called up our friend jenna who lives with her husband in salem, illinois and asked if she cared if we stopped by for dinner! of course they didn't mind so we stopped by their house and went out to pizza with them. we enjoyed ourselves so much that we crashed at their place for the night and did the rest of the drive on tuesday.

jenna is such a good wife and irons her husbands shirts :) she is also very talented! she makes biscotti and sews and does all sorts of crafty things (in fact, you can see her creative side here)

the 'men' having deep conversation, or something, over coffee :) i say 'men' because they both act like children and it is TOO much fun!

sean let us know that he was not interested in being in this picture with us. i have super sleepy eyes here because we stayed up til 1am talking and this was pretty early. or that's my excuse. until you look at jenna and she got the same amount of sleep i did and looks fabulous! ;)

it was a beautiful day to drive home on tues! dathan is so manly that he doesn't mind driving with my fuzzy purple steering wheel cover

look at those blue skies!

our attempt to take a picture together (dathan has the funny look on his face because he was trying to keep his eyes on the road)

i have one more post to share about our trip. it's not exactly a part of our trip but actually just a super random & funny touristy spot we stopped at while driving home. stay tuned for it, it's great!