Reunion

On Friday afternoon in St. Louis the city was infiltrated with midwestern teenager girls playing volleyball. They were high on the freedom of being away from their parents for a weekend and super excited about being in a city. And after driving through the the Missouri back roads on Sunday, I can't say I neccesarily blame them for being giddy. As teenage girls tend to be, they were extremely excited about EVERYTHING. Martin proclaimed we are not letting our daughters play volleyball. I told him I think it's just a teenage girl thing and NOT specifically a volleyball girl thing. I didn't bother to inform him that they were basically acting exactly as I would have as a teen. Needless to say, tickets to go up the arch were sold out that day.

It didn't matter because it was 70 degrees outside and the river was calling Aubrey's name! If the teenage girls were excited about everything else, Aubrey was just thrilled to see the Mississippi River.  And I told the story at least twice about how monumental it was for me to see the Mississippi River for the first time (in 2010) because I devoted so many hours to playing Oregon Trail as a youth.

Ingrid is ready to pose for this picture, but Aubrey is intently staring at the water as she is in every picture taken near the water. Scroll back up, you'll see.

And anything with grates needs to be walked over immediately.

After spending sometime playing in Arch Park, we went to the restaurant Pi (like the math symbol which I don't know how to type) for pizza (pretty clever name, huh?) It was early in the evening so we ordered two appetizers and settled in to try a few different kinds of beer.

We eventually decided we had overstayed our welcome at the restaurant as it was starting to fill up with the dinner crowd and the corner we had commandeered for Aubrey to run around in was starting to fill up with guests. So we got pizza to go and returned to hotel room to enjoy the amazing view and catch up for the evening. This is the part of the night where Martin and I really put our best foot forward to show Ingrid how cool we still are, even with two children. And when I say we really showed her what I actually mean is we fell asleep at eight o'clock while Ingrid was on the phone. I'd say Ingrid is at least five percent to blame. Leave us to our own devices for more than a minute after the sun goes down and you really shouldn't expect any better.