Busy August

August is turning into a busy month! I have so many pictures from the last week or so that need to be blogged about and I'm sure with school starting soon I will have even more coming up. Guess I will start with the beginning of the many pictures. This past week Carl and I celebrated our 9th anniversary. My parents were gracious to take the kiddos for a few days so we could get away. We drove up to Minneapolis and stayed right downtown at the W in the Foshay tower. It was a super nice hotel and it was great walking distance from everything that we wanted to see and do downtown. We got it on priceline for cheap which made it even better! Tuesday on our way up to Minneapolis we stopped at the Medford Outlet Center for a little shopping. Carl found some much needed new dress shirts and some new jeans and I found a nice new pair of capris on sale too! We finally made our way up to the cities where we got there about rush hour time. It took a while to get downtown with all the traffic but once we got there we were able to pull right up to the hotel where the lovely valet attendants took our car and we didn't have to worry about it for the rest of our stay. We walked into the hotel and immediately felt underdressed. This place was nice! We got checked in and made our way up to our room where we discovered when grabbing stuff out of the van we had forgotten to grab our dress clothes from the backseat for dinner that night. We went back down to the lobby where they had someone go get our stuff and bring it to our room. When we finally had our clothes for dinner we got ready and were able to take advantage of the hotels free Acura Experience. They basically have you fill out a questionnaire for the Acura you are riding in and take you to your destination for free. Since our hotel was a little ways away from the restaurant where we were having dinner this was a nice option to have. We ate dinner at Bar La Grassa in the warehouse district. It was wonderful! They offer half portion sizes of their main dishes so we were able to try several different things. Each thing was great and somehow each new dish was better then the one before it. We also had a great dessert of Caramel Crepes. After dinner I had brought my comfortable shoes with so I switched out my dress shoes for my comfy shoes and we enjoyed the beautiful weather and walked back to our hotel from the restaurant. The next day we went and ate a light breakfast and explored downtown a little bit. They had a 2 story Target where we saw many groups from their corporate headquarters walking around and looking at things, it was an interesting mix of people. At lunch we had reservations to try Fogo De Chao. It was good but Carl and I both agree it was a one time stop. Just too much food to enjoy any of it and the price even at lunch was pretty steep. We are glad we tried it once though and they even gave us this for free!

Carl liked the flower.

After lunch we explored the Nicollet Mall area a little more and went to Macy's and looked around for quite awhile. They had lots of fun dresses that I tried on, which you may be thinking Carl must have really had fun with that...it was actually his idea he had kind of over eaten at lunch so he was very excited to lay on the dressing room floor and let his food digest for a little while so I could try on dresses that I had no intention of buying:) After finding this Panera Bread with a great courtyard and having a frozen lemonade, we made our way back to our hotel to get ready to go to the Twins game.

We walked down to Target Field and the gates weren't open quite yet so we captured some pictures of the statues outside. Carl and Harmon Killebrew.

and with Kirby Puckett.

Once the gate opened we made our way to the Twins Shop and got ourselves some shirts since we didn't have any and then explored a little and found our seats.

The next day we actually were able to sleep in a little bit, we checked out of our hotel and headed to Ikea to look around a little bit and eat a cheap lunch. I did find a cute duvet cover for Callie's bed and we found several ideas we'd like to try in the kitchen. We also went to Mall of America for a little bit before we made our way back to Ames for a school meeting for Gabe that night. It was a great time and we were so glad we could get away for a few days even though we missed the 3 little munchkins. Don't worry the next few posts will have pictures of the people you really want to see:)