Minnesota Wedding

Don't you just love weddings?

I have been privileged to attend many weddings in my life, all in South Africa of course. I have seen the casual and formal, the early morning, and late afternoon weddings. The sunny weddings , and rain-drenched weddings too. I hope to attend one here someday too.

In the meantime, however, I have discovered this gem of a wedding video on YouTube, that has already made the news here. So to all of the American folk who read my blog, my apologies, as I'm sure you've heard about this video numerous times already.

To the others, I do hope you enjoy this , as much as I did. In my time here in the States, I have found people to be fun-loving, and spontaneous. And this video confirms that.

It is a wedding that takes place in Minnesota on June 20th.



Credit for the idea of dancing down the aisle goes to the bride , Jill. Who say they only had 90 minutes to prepare for the wedding procession. They only had one rehearsal right before the wedding. The bride's father asked for the video to be posted online, in order for some of his other family members to see it. Up to now, it has received 17,6 million views.

I enjoyed watching some of the guests faces as the dancing starts, it seems they aren't sure what's happening.....and then when they realise it's all part of the service, they start smiling and clapping along to the music.......PRICELESS!!!!

Chapter One......

Well, we are officially moved in! Our new home is wonderful, although some of the rooms are still in abit of array.

Overall, the move went very well. We received the keys for the house on the Saturday morning, and because we didn't have our bed yet, we only moved in early Monday morning. And then finally, our container arrived about 10am. It had been sealed and stored and over the seas, and was now safely in our driveway!!

After about an hour of moving and carrying boxes into their correct rooms, the wonderful removal guys waved goodbye, and left us with a whole whack of boxes to unpack! Amazingly there were only a couple of things broken, and the kids acted like they were in the toy store after finding all their old toys again that they had forgotten about. That certainly kept them busy for hours!!

We started trying to make some sense of all the chaos, and soon had some semblance of order. At the end of the day, we fell into bed, and spent our first night in our new home.

Unfortunately, Andrew had to be back at work the very next day, and as exhausted as he was, he got up and went off for the day, while I carried on sorting things out. That's pretty much how things went for the whole week. And come Saturday, we merrily drove off to IKEA, to get some furniture, and odds and ends that we needed.

FIVE HOURS later......we left IKEA, and thus began the wonderful job of assembling all of our purchases. I'm STILL busy.....................

Overall, it has been a great, productive week and a half. We now have a home phone, cable TV and Internet (oh, the joy!!!) and I can now get back to the serious business of blogging. I will also be posting some photos of our new home shortly.

Another wonderful thing we did today, was go out to the kids soon-to-be-new-elementary-school. We went to find out about enrolling them, and also to see what grades they would be put into. So we met the counsellor (wonderful lady) who assured us that they have a lot of kids from all over the world, which made me feel a whole lot better, yes it did!! Now we just have to fill in the forms, and school here we come.......yippee!! I'm not sure who's more nervous, me or the kids? Just can't wait for them to start making friends.

Oh, and by the way.....I had my first telemarketer phone call today......it's starting to feel like home already!!!!

We're on the move!

It's gonna be a good weekend!

Tomorrow we go and fetch the keys to our house............. woohoo00!! Then we can go shopping for some bedding and odds and ends. And over the course of the weekend we will trek our stuff over to the house from the apartment that has been our abode since we landed on the 16th March 2009.

Then Monday our container arrives from South Africa! Such Joy!!
The best part of all is the fact that the shipping company moves everything in for us, exactly where we want it, and unpacks, how great is that!
God's timing couldn't have been more perfect on this one....the container was supposed to arrive only on August 3rd, which meant we would have to do some "roughing it" in the house till all our furniture came. But that ............. is no longer the case!!

I have never looked forward to a move before. And I've done my fair share of moving...yes
sir-eeee!!

We still have to connect our phone and internet lines, but hopefully I will still be able to blog, and keep you all up to date on the goings-on.......

"When the boxes are gone
And we've cleaned up the mess
We'll make a home of the house
That was just an address."
Jon Bratton

Fishing, fairs and fun!

Felt the need to share some more Vermont stories with y'all.

The kids were kept very busy indeed, what with the evening walks with Tux the family dog, and some interesting Peanut Butter Play dough!!

And one morning they went fishing at one of the scenic lakes there. Of course the two Mom's were the ones who ended up hooking the slimy, humongous night crawler worms onto the hooks....not for the fainthearted I can assure you. Right there and then I discovered that I could never do the whole 'Survivor'-eating-gross-bugs thing!! Never, I tell you!!

The fish prevailed however, and had a good meal on us...... managing to chomp down those night-crawlers like nobodies business! We walked away empty handed, but at peace nonetheless.

Vergennes was holding a fair celebrating 400 years, and an assortment of interesting characters were there. Local townsfolk who dressed up in character and knew all about the person they were 'playing', you can basically ask them anything about their character, and they will be able to answer you. Fascinating.

Here are a few of them.....

And then, the kids played of course! Slides and swings and tyres, you name it! There was a wonderful park nearby, where we let them all loose for an hour or so. I had great fun just taking photos of them all.

Thank you Atherton Family for a memorable trip!!

To the Green Mountain State...and back!!

Hello again friends.

We are back from our trip to Vermont with happy smiles, overweight luggage and fond memories! It was a great trip, and was wonderful catching up with my friend, who is now a contented wife with a husband and 3 sweet children.



She really went out of her way taking us to all the sights and helped us to taste (literally) the wonders in Vermont. Strawberry picking on Friday.....I have never seen so many strawberries in one kitchen when we arrived back home!! And thus the need for strawberry jam making on Saturday!!



Then it was off to the maple syrup farm, for some yummy maple syrup creemies (aka ice creams), and we topped the evening off with our first baseball game. We all enjoyed that, the kids especially loved the local teams mascot, "Skip". It was really a wonderful way to experience a piece of America!



So, it was indeed a busy time. And there are many photos of the trip, so I have made a slide show next to this on the right with some more of the photos for you all to check out. You can click on the photos to enlarge.

Vermont is a beautiful state, very green and lush in the summer months, although I have learnt there are 5 seasons there. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter & Mud season!! I would love to see it in Winter, and even Fall with the glorious reds, browns and rusts. Hopefully, we will be back there soon.

I will keep this post short, and add some more for y'all tomorrow....enjoy the pics of the scenery around Northfield, where we were staying!