My Best Friend's wedding

My best friend from Jr. High got married over Memorial Day weekend. They rented the Audobon Center, an owl rescue center about an hour south of Duluth. It was a beautiful weekend with wonderful weather. The wedding ceremony was absolutely beautiful. Such a blessing to be around such wonderful, cool people for an entire weekend! We had a blast and even had some couple time as my mom drove up for the wedding and kept an eye on Isaiah so Nathan and I could enjoy ourselves at the dance. We look forward to spending much more time with Sam and Laura! YAY!!!

Isaiah is finally walking!

Some cute photos of Isaiah to show just how big he is geting! He is already 14 months!

Some of us, including Nathan, didn't think this day would ever come. But at Laura and Sam's wedding, Isaiah started to stand up without holding on to anything. In fact, he was doing this as Laura and Sam had their first dance. :) He was on the grass and he would grab a handful of grass, stand up and throw it, sit back down and grab more grass, stand back up and throw it. He essentially did up-downs like this for 10 minutes. He took his first step that same night and then 3 steps Tuesday night (while Nathan was out of town). :( With everything, it seems like our sweet boy is a late bloomer, but when he figures it out, he runs with it (not literally...yet). :)

Isaiah and his friend Willa at the wedding

The Exciting World of Fruit

Isaiah has been quite the kiddo during our weeding and planting days! And enjoying a lot of organic matter! :) Not the best picture ever, but it gets the point across! :)

Though we live on a lot that is 25 feet wide, we still hope to produce as much food out of it that we can, while still having a yard for Isaiah to play in. We already have our chickens, which give us around 3-4 eggs a day (or about 1000 eggs a year) and we planted raspberries last year and a small amount of vegetables. This year, we have decided to expand our fruit plants. Earlier in the spring we bought 6 blueberry plants. They take very little work and fresh blueberries are GREAT! Last year, we made it to the blueberry farm where we picked several gallons of blueberries. Our favorite Saturday morning breakfast was blueberry pancakes! Next, we purchased 2 great vines to grow on our south facing fence and for old time sake we planted rhubarb! This means that the 5 foot strip on the north side of our lot is all fruits. if they grow as they should, we could get gallons of grapes, raspberries and blueberries...YUM!! Not a bad use of space!

We are continuing the same vegetable gardening set up that we had last year: a very small amount at home, a community garden plot and helping our friends Jay and Mary B. We ahve almost everything planted (early because of the warm spring) including sweet potatoes that we are trying for the first time. Sadly, I think the crop is a complete failure already!

2 wheels are better than 4 wheels (unless you include a bike trailer)

This summer we have started to get into biking for transportation and recreation. Since we do live in the middle of a hill, this is a bit of a challenge, but a challenge that we are figuring out. Nathan has been biking to work (all uphill on the way there) a lot on an attempt to strengthen up (though we wonder if that is possible!) :) And Veronica has biked straight up 7 blocks from the lake to our house. We have also done a good bit of biking for fun on a lot of the beautiful trails in and around Duluth. Though we have a long way to go to truly be able to bike everywhere we go, there is a lot of summer left!


A beautiful rainbow

One of our friends had a baby bike trailer they weren't using so we have been borrowing that to pull Isaiah around in. For the most part he likes it; in fact he normally falls asleep in very awkward positions while we are biking around.

Here are some highlights of our biking from this summer so far:

--Nathan has put on about 80 miles and Veronica has put on about 65 miles this summer

--Our longest bike ride was 21 miles on Memorial Day on the Munger Bike trail (Nathan pulled Isaiah the entire way)!

--We biked along Lake Superior on a trail near Goosberry Falls...we didn't realize quite how hilly it was until our bike back!

--We were both biking to a friend's house and some kids were in the alley in front of us. Nathan was pulling the trailer. Suddenly, one of the kids yells out "Hey, it looks like that guy has training wheels!" It was hilarious! Veronica couldn't stop laughing! :)