The weekend's picture-perfect weather made for a lot of high-quality outdoor time, which was improved by having my dad here for the weekend. In that way you can during spring and summer in the Midwest (when you know you're cashing chips earned during all those below-freezing January days), we soaked it all up with an almost embarrassing array of outsideness.
Saturday's high point was a half hour of miraculously ideal kite-flying weather. I've never flown a kite before this summer, when Julia got one for her birthday. So far we've had some good fun getting the kite up and running to keep it up, but Saturday, the westerly wind was ideal: it pulled the kite right up into the air and kept it there as long we could have wanted. Amazing.
After we tired of that, the girls shifted over to the slide, where Julia finally got the courage to try jumping off the the top, in imitation of her friend from next door. This is skill that will come in handy...
Vivi, being unable to leap like the big girls, watched for a while and then chilled out.
Sunday, we tried to make a little trip to Cannon Falls. We had to call it off on discovering that the town's only coffeeshop was out of business, and everything else in town was closed, too. Sunday morning and all.
So we headed back toward home, stopping at a huge playground in the county park on Lake Byllseby, just outside Cannon Falls. We've seen a fair number of playgrounds in our day, and this was a good one. The girls ran themselves ragged, and even Shannon tried the climbing wall. She's many, many feet inches millimeters off the ground.
All in all, a well-spent weekend.