The Gradens

Our wonderful friends, the Gradens, stayed with us in the middle of July and things have been so busy, this is the first chance that I have had to blog about it. For those of you who don't know, which is probably most of you, Liz and Alan Graden introduced Ben and me to each other. I grew up with Liz in St. Louis and Ben grew up with Alan in Springfield. They seated us next to each other at their wedding dinner...Ben finished my chicken, and lets say the rest is history :) We hadn't seen each other in years and had a wonderful week together. I wasn't the best at remembering to take pictures, sorry, and most of the pictures I did take were with my phone, but enjoy what I do have!

Liz and Alan have 3 little girls ages 6, 3 and 7 months. It was so much fun to watch Ari tag-a-long after the older girls and play with the baby. She is ready to be a sister :) We went to a lot of parks and I was so surprised to see Ari doing most of the "big" kid things. She even went down the tallest slide without even a second thought.

 Of course we had to do an Andy's trip (or two). We had some other friends over also and decided to walk to Andy's we loaded the girls up in strollers and the wagon and had a blast:

 Ari learned some new (and old) tricks while they were here. She was introduced to no spill bubbles and has been in heaven ever since. She can do them all by herself. She sticks the wand in, pulls it out, and blows bubbles :)

We also got the swing out for the littlest one, which some times turned out to be Ari :)
 And she mastered the ice cream cone...

We also spent some time at Bass Pro:

Ben and Alan worked together for 2 summers in a wood shop. During that time they built racks for Bass Pro to display their fishing rods. Ben believes he built this very one...
We had an amazing time and hopefully Liz and Alan took more pictures and will send them to me :) We made some great memories.