#theardensarehere

as if it wasn't exciting enough to have matt and tara fly in from california for our wedding [and kick off the honeymoon with us] we got a double bonus this year when they came back to the midwest with two of my favorite little people. they were in missouri for a family wedding and lucky us got to steal them for a few days on their way in and out [not to be confused with eating at in-n-out, which we sadly do not get to do].

our visits are usually few and far between so we tried to soak up all the dyer/arden love we could in just a few short days. matt loves barbecue so i'm pretty sure the highlight of the trip for him was eating at the little pig bbq that we happened upon in belton, which he declared to be the best he's ever eaten. we ate there twice in one week, got a pound of meat to go and if it hadn't been twenty five minutes away i suspect we would have been back for round three.

we love the ardens and are so glad we got the chance to make memories kansas city style!

matt . tara . donald . shelly

tori . sophia

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way fun wednesdays

summer is arguably my favorite time of the year. while i love all four seasons almost equally, to me summer is the epitome of fun. as a sort-of-teacher by trade, the summer obviously provides some freedom of time that doesn't happen all year round. and the swimming, staying up late and eating shaved ice certainly doesn't detract from the general feeling of fun.

since kim and i don't have the pleasure of living together this summer we have implemented a little something we like to call 'way fun wednesday'. we made a list of fun things to do and places to go [spoiler: the majority of them involve water] and every wednesday we check something off. it's basically my favorite day of the week.

super splash

noodles & a movie

the bay water park

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the camping trip that almost wasn't

we had quite an eventful start to donald's second ever non-parking lot camping adventure. but since his first camping trip involved a group of eight year olds lost in the wilderness [he being one of said children], i guess i shouldn't have been surprised.  

camping weekend was scheduled to start not with camping, but with a cardinals game. mark and nicole had some extra tickets for friday night so we headed to the lou, delightfully oblivious to the pending weather events. we headed to the stadium and got settled into the bank of america club just in time to have something to eat before the game was called off due to the impending storm. not wanting our night go to waste, we high tailed it over to ronnie's cinema to catch a movie. we arrived just as the rain began only to find the lobby crammed with people watching the local weather on the lobby screen, since all the theaters had just been shut down because of the tornado. long story not very short, we waited out the storm, called it a night and headed home to play cards instead.

bright and early saturday morning we got a call from our campground saying the river was rising and that they strongly advised we not make the trip. so we scrapped the plan of camping and canoeing on the gasconade river and headed to cuivre river state park instead.  

thankfully the rest of the weekend was relatively drama free, if you don't count nighttime raccoon invasions, and donald even said he'd go camping again.

mark . james . nicole . jordan . shelly . donald

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