Kindergarten Graduation

I know this was 1.5 months ago but better late than never, right? At Meredith's school, they do a kindergarten graduation ceremony.  There are six kindergarten classes so they split them up into two groups of three for each ceremony so three classes graduated during her ceremony.  Some of these are blurry as they were taken with phone cameras from a long distance.  I have some cute videos but they are much to hard to upload to blogger but the whole ceremony was really cute!

They sang a bunch of songs where each child had an opportunity to be on the front of the stage.
Meredith is right in the middle with the peach dress.

Class by class, they called each child up to get their diploma certificate and shake Mr. Garcia's (the principal) hand.

We were invited back to the classroom to have cookies and punch.  This is the reading chair in her classroom.

Here is her cubby she shared with her friend Annika.   

 This is her teacher, Mrs. Johnson.  We LOVED her!

 Out in front of her school as a kindergarten graduate!  

 Bonus - just a couple of random cute pictures from Dairy Queen.  

State Parks 6-7

I've been meaning to post pictures of Meredith's kindergarten graduation but I'm waiting on 

Greg to upload photos from his phone.  I got a few pictures but my phone died so most of the pictures are on Greg's phone.  

On to another topic.  We spent last weekend camping with an old college friend of mine and her parents up at Cross Lake near Brainerd.  I spent a lot of weekends when I was college aged and just out of college up here so it was nice to come back after many, many years!  I didn't get very many pictures from the actual camping portion of our weekend but we had fun.  The weather had lots of scattered showers but it was by no means a complete washout.  We were even able to get out on the boat for a short ride.  

On Sunday we decided to stop off at a couple state parks on our way home since we left early in the morning.  Our first planned visit was Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area.  This is a required stop per the Passport Club.  We knew it was mostly bicycle trails but we figured there would be a few things to do.  The place is so large that we couldn't even find an entrance.  We did manage to find the park office which is located in the town of Ironton.  We never made it further than the office though as we didn't know where to go or if there was anything for a family without bikes to do.  

Here is our photo.  Please note that there must be a VFW right in back of it because I purposely aimed the camera as to not get the beer sign in on the picture.  

After Cuyuna, we headed over to Brainerd and stopped at Crow Wing State Park.  There was a family gathering of some sort going on in the picnic shelter but other than that, there was no one there.  The ranger informed me that some of the trails were flooded and he showed me exactly where the hiking club password was.  

This park is located where the Crow Wing River and the Mississippi River meet.  We headed out on the trail and there is some history to this park.  This boardwalk goes through the old downtown of Crow Wing.  There is this historic building along with historic stopping points such as the old well pictured on this short, self-guided tour. 

We got a few more photos in before we got attacked by mosquitos.  The trail map was not well marked and we missed the fork in the trail that we were supposed to take and we ended up down near the flooded path which was a breeding ground for mosquitos.  I have never seen such mosquitos.  We were literally running for our lives out of there.  I was running with Meredith while she was screaming.  Greg was running with Anna while she was screaming.  Our trail map was streaked with blood.  Our legs were streaked with blood.  I counted 60 bites on one leg alone so I estimate that I had over 150 bites on my body.  It was awful.