Father's Day and Rowan's Birthday

Most of this will be a repeat for my Facebook friends, but since I use my blog as a family scrapbook of sorts, I feel I need to enter everything in the blog as well. So, here come all the pictures from Father's Day and Rowan's birthday!

For father's day, the kids and I planned a super secret canoe trip on the Wisconsin River.  Of course the same day I told the kids about our super secret trip, Jason told me that Ellie told him all about it, but that he couldn't tell me he knew because it was secret.  Now I know I can't trust Ellie (or Jason) with my secrets :)  Seriously though, I knew Jason would find out, so I wasn't too worried. 

I reserved the canoe (using Groupon, have you checked if your city has Groupon?  It brings a new amazing deal every day!), packed a couple days' worth of food, and drove the family 45 minutes away to begin our adventure.  The canoe company picked us up at the ending point of the trip, shuttled us to a location 10 miles up river, and left us with a canoe, life jackets, paddles, and instructions to paddle down to just before the third bridge to where our car was parked.  I expected a little more instruction than that, but I guess navigating canoes is not too difficult.  We made it out alive at least!

We really had a blast!  Ellie was whining a lot at first that it was too scary and we were going to tip (which we never did), but the nice thing about the Wisconsin river is that most of the river is shallow enough to reach the bottom.  There are so many sandbars that create little islands perfect for a stopping point to eat and splash in the water.  Jason and I came home with sunburned legs and random other spots on our bodies, but other than that, it was a great day.  Definitely worth doing again.

We're ready!

Our navigator.  Although we realized halfway through that the person in the front does twice as much work at the person in the back for half the results.  So, Jason switched to the back and I just did pretty much nothing :)

Look, from behind I don't even look 7 1/2 months pregnant :)

Ooh, Jason caught a fish

Rowan's birthday started off with him waking me up super early.  But how can you get annoyed with this adorable 3 year old smiling at you?

We went out to lunch at Noodles and Company, shopped at Border's so he could spend some birthday money on a toy he picked out all by himself, and ran into the grocery store for some supplies to make his brachiosaurus birthday brownies he requested.  I found an easy tutorial online on how to make this fun dinosaur, although I made it even more fun by coloring it bright blue instead of dino green and adding colorful M&M spots.  And Rowan made sure to point out that it wasn't really a brachiosaurus because the "cake" has spikes, and brachiosaurus do not.  Whatever, the spikes were too cute to leave off.

The bright blue frosting and chocolate ice cream left wonderful mustaches on all the kids