A recap of our weekend

We are coming down from a very fun weekend. Courtney, Paul, and Tizita arrived Friday morning to begin the festivities. We went over to try out a new park in Oconomowoc, Imagination Station. The park was recommended to me by my hair stylist and she was right about this fun park.Here is the Van Auken family before the crash happened. You see that Paul is on the fastest middle slide while Tizita is on one that has two huge bumps. Well, she stopped on the first bump while Paul continued down holding her hand causing her to tumble head over heels down the slide! She was none the worse for wear but stayed away from these slides for the rest of the day!

Here we are having fun on the teeter totter. The ground is covered with soft recycled tires and is nice and squishy.
Here are Tizita and me in the animal cages yelling, "Let us out of here, right now!"
After our time at the park, we ate at the Chocolate Factory and headed home. Courtney and Paul went over to Herb and Pearl's old house to dig up some plants for their gardens. They came home with a carful of assortd perenniels to plant when they returned home.

We met Alissa and Nathan at Elias for a fish fry to celebrate Nathan's 30th Birthday. He has requested Elias fish and we were all more than happy to comply since it is the best fish fry ever!

The birthday boy and his lovely wife.

Helping Uncle Cheddah open his gifts.

The birthday cake. I made Nathan the candy bouquet you see in the picture.

The young people went out to continue the celebration on the town while grandpa and I babysat!


On Saturday Tiz got to try out the new slide and she enjoyed it just as much as we knew she would!
Courtney and Paul took off to work on planting their flowers and they let us keep Tiz overnight. What fun we were going to have! Alissa and Nathan also headed home on Saturday afternoon.
When Tiz woke up from her nap we took her back to Imagination Station. We wanted to share this fun place with grandpa.


This is grandpa and Tiz sitting in a bandshell type area enjoying children playing some drums.

This was an area that Tiz really liked. She enjoyed walking up and down these lily pad steps.
After our time at the park we ate pizza at Rocky Roccoco's, a favorite spot of ours. Tizu went to bed so well for us and because Courtney had forgotton the diapers we had to hope she would wake up dry and she did! I think the diapers can be thrown out!
On Sunday we took Tiz up to Oshkosh and met Courtney and Paul at church. We enjoyed their service. Paul plays his bass in the church band so we got to hear that. It was a good service.

It was especially hard to say good bye to our little Tiz today. I miss her running around our house and waking us up in the morning, I miss her spunk and her sense of humor. I miss her laughing and singing. I won't see her again for a few weeks and I know that will seem like a long time. But I won't cry because it is over, I will smile because it happened! ( I read that on the middle school message board!) Oh, the life of a grandparent, some parts not as easy as I thought it would be...