A Trip to Minneapolis

I'm behind again at posting pictures with no excuse except for being lazy. So, here I am playing a little catch-up. Also, I feel I must add that I've been really horrible taking pictures, even on this trip I only took about 10. I'm so bad, I need to work on this.
Several weeks ago Dennis had a four day weekend. He didn't take any days off, it just happened because he was on call one weekend and ended up working Veterans Day, so we decided to take advantage of his schedule and the beautiful weather and head down to Minneapolis/St. Paul for an Ikea run, a little Christmas shopping and some extra-curricular activities on the side. We stayed with Auntie Mick and Uncle Mel, which is really enough fun, but we also went to The Minnesota Children's Museum.
It may seem like I only have a daughter, but that is because I was in charge of Sadie and Dennis was in charge of Eli. He was there.The weather was so beautiful (notice Sadie is just wearing a sweatshirt. In late November. In Minnesota.), we had to spend a little time outside. We went to the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory because it was close to the children's museum and because it's free.

I didn't take any pictures of real animals, but Sadie had to pose by every statue and hug and kiss every statue... You can never get that girl out of a gift shop...

Side note: I hate that every stinkin' museum feeds you into the gift shop at the end of the tour.The kids thought it would be funny to pose by the nude statue: I can't believe I'm going to admit the next place we took the kids. Actually, I can admit it, it's probably Dennis who would have a harder time admiting that he took the kids to The Mall of America. I mean, what's next, Disney World?? Dennis' values have gone slightly downhill since we've had kids.
Besides shopping, they do have lots of other ways to blow hundreds of dollars in a few hours. Take LegoLand for instance. The line was insane. Too bad I wasn't patient enough to wait in line to buy anything though I did find some things I wanted to buy. The kids got to play for free though.

Then we went to Nickelodeon Universe so the kids could ride the rides of their favorite Nickelodon shows. Dora and Diego were both in attendance, as well as Blue:Eli's first bumper cars. He looked petrified before he started but had fun once the cars started moving:
We also ate at the Rainforest Cafe and went to Underwater Adventures, an aquarium. Really, it was much too much for all of us. Can you imagine doing all of that AND going shopping too. Ai yai yai!!!
We did make it to Ikea and the Albertville Outlet Mall too which really weren't worthy of taking pictures at. It was a fun weekend!! Hopefully Dennis will get another one of those four day weekends again soon!