minneapolis vacation - day one

saturday morning we hit the road headed for minneapolis and our big family vacation! this is the first vacation matt and i have taken in five years and, obviously, our first as a family. we figure that we don't plan on living in wisconsin forever and that we should take advantage of the destinations that are within driving distance.

this kids napped some and watched movies during the ride. we stopped at a nice mcdonalds with one of the best playplaces i have seen - it even had video games. mason enjoyed getting to stretch his legs and madelyn didn't want to leave so she must have had fun too. we were impressed with madelyn's willingness to climb all the way up. she usually doesn't like to climb up when she doesn't know the other kids. she gets scared that she will get stuck and she also doesn't like how her socks slip when she climbs up.

i can't remember how long it actually took us to get there but it was somewhere around 6 hours. since it was too early to check-in at the hotel we decided to head over to the mall of america and check things out.

we didn't just 'check things out'. we covered the entire mall in a few hours! the mall of america (moa) is not small and we walked every bit of every level. it felt nice to walk for most of it but then i started to get uncomfortable and hungry. we stopped for a smoothie and a rest but then kept right on going. we were planning to come back to the moa on tuesday before heading home so that madelyn could ride the rides. madelyn walked the whole time and didn't complain at all. she got a little fussy towards the end but it was just because we were approaching bedtime.

we happened into a few characters on our walk which madelyn happily posed with for a quick picture.

madelyn was really excited to see all the 'rides' in the middle of the mall. every time we would get a view she would tell us all about the things she could see and name the characters she knew. i thought that a picture would be nice but matt had a hard time backing up enough to get us all in the shot because the mall was crazy crowded! it had taken us forever to find a parking place and it was difficult to talk to each other while walking around because of all the noise. i guess that we shouldn't have been too surprised going on a saturday over a three-day weekend during back-to-school shopping season.

we didn't go into a lot of stores, but we did check out a few that had good browsing for madelyn. at a toys-r-us outlet (or i think that is what it was judging from the merchandise) madelyn picked out an ariel camera that daddy said she could get. and she loves that camera! it doesn't really do much but it says two or three phrases and has a few lights on the front when you push the button. here she is taking a picture of me taking a picture of her while we waited for our dinner. between that camera and her plastic elmo purse she almost always had something with her every where we went all weekend.

after dinner we headed to the hotel. again, madelyn was really excited. she had been looking forward to going to the hotel and cried a little that we didn't go straight there. we brought a pack-n-play for mason to sleep in; he wasn't too crazy about it. madelyn got her own double bed and daddy and i shared the other double bed. the one good thing about us all being in the same room is that daddy and i got to go to sleep early every night. everyone fell asleep pretty quickly but daddy and i have been spoiled with our super comfy, king-sized temperpedic mattress at home and let's just say that the double bed wasn't cutting it. i think that we would have been okay if i wasn't pregnant and going to the bathroom every couple of hours. i just kept thinking of little madelyn all alone in the other bed while matt and i were squished together and not getting much sleep. we changed things up on night two - see the next post. love.