A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!

Steve and I had such a wonderful weekend. Our neighbors Noel and Katja, whom I have talked about a couple of times before, got married this weekend (actually on my Mom and Dad's anniversary). They were married in a town called Dresden, where Katja grew up, and is a big city that was almost burned completely in 1945 and is part of East Germany that was behind the iron curtain. So, it had a lot of history, and was a beautiful city. The wedding was also beautiful and we are so happy we took the opportunity to go.

We left Thursday and stayed in the house that N&K had rented for the week since they were staying with her parents and in hotels for those two nights. We got to see their civil service at the courthouse on Thursday.


{They had to sign the book to say they agree to the marriage. Ronja (their oldest who is 5) had to as well, and she was a little shy about it.}{Right after the civil service this is Katja with her youngest, Oshin. He is exactly Blake
Skinner's age, and Krista says he is the same size.}

Then the church wedding was on Friday.



We again had a great cultural experience as we always do with them. All of Noel's brothers and his parents came from Ireland and so we got to see the beer drinking and hear the Irish songs. They are also all so friendly.
{The cake}
{The hair, which I totally Loved}

And of course we got to see some German wedding traditions that I thought were fantastic. The first was right after the wedding as people were drinking champagne, N&K had to cut this log in half with a two person saw. It took them about 20 minutes and looked like hard work. It symbolizes that they can work together.

Another thing I loved that I didn't get a picture of was they had enough helium balloons for each guest at the wedding. Tied to the balloon was a post card with N&K's address on it and there were sparklers on the end. We waited til after dark, then lit the sparklers, then let the balloons go. Now they just have to wait to see how many postcards they get back and how far the balloons got. It was a really cool idea.

But.... the best part of the weekend was that Steve and I got to go ALL BY OURSELVES. We have Tawna here who is doing a wonderful job with the boys and with driving standard transmission, so we took off without them, and it was so awesome!!! If you haven't ever done that, you have got to try it. We only had a 10 minute stop on our 5 hour drive there, and so much peace and quiet in the car. Then we got to enjoy the wedding and the dinners without constantly putting someone in time-out. We were able to sleep in until we wanted to get up, and tour the city according to what we wanted to do and not according to the boys behavior or someone needing to find a bathroom. It was so, so fantastic. And everytime we called Tawna she said things were going great, and we came home to a clean house with all the boys tucked safely in to bed.




THANK YOU TAWNA, WE LOVE YOU!!