What we did last week & weekend...

I'm not sure where the last week went. All I know is a lot of people came through our house for central air-conditioning estimates. The preliminary numbers aren't pretty. :o( But on to the fun stuff...

I dug out the Exersaucer and put Lincoln in it for the first time. He liked it, but only for a short while. His happiness timespan seems to increase each time I put him in it, though. I just have to pack him in so he doesn't flop around so much since he's still a little wobbly. I caught Emily violently rocking him back & forth this morning while I was in the kitchen getting lunch ready. I'm pretty sure she clearly got the message that was not acceptable!

Austin & I spent a good chunk of the week combing the house for things to sell at a friend's garage sale. I also baked up a storm on Thursday so I could sell bread & cookies. Our net total was almost $100, and we got rid of some larger items. The freezer is now overflowing with cookies. :o)

Friday was the first "Mom's Morning Out" at Orchard Hill Church for this school year. Lincoln was born 4 days after the last MMO in the spring. It has been a very long time! I was so excited to get a 45-minute solo shopping trip to Kohl's. I'd been waiting for that for over a month, and I made the most of it! ;o)

This weekend marked Waverly's Sesquicentennial (150th birthday). I missed the spelling out of "Waverly" on the football field by 500 people on Friday afternoon because both of the kids took 2-hour naps at the same time. Since neither one hardly ever takes a nap like that period, I certainly wasn't going to wake them up when they were doing it simultaneously! Instead I made cinnamon rolls and had a 45-minute uninterrupted phone conversation catching up with a dear friend. :o)

On Saturday afternoon I went on the cemetery walk at Harlington Cemetary led by a history professor from Wartburg. It was very interesting. The cemetery opened in the 1850's and has a lot of old stones and stories to go with them. I didn't realize how much the Bremer County area was affected by the Civil War. Apparently there were two companies from the county in the Iowa Regiment and they had one of the highest casualty rates in the whole Union Army. Sadly enough, all but 2 were due to disease rather than actual battlefield wounds because of their stations at the siege of Vicksburg and the swamplands of Louisiana.

Since Lincoln accompanied me through the cemetery in the stroller on Saturday, I took Emily with me on Sunday to the High Tea at the Bremer County Historical Society Museum. It was a fun little outing and a special treat for Emily. I kind of wished I would have left her Sunday dress on. There were lots of guides in old-fashioned dress clothes handing out hors d'ouvres and lemonade. The museum itself is a very impressive collection of artifacts donated by residents of Bremer County. It covers three floors of what was originally a stagecoach stop and hotel right on the corner of Bremer Ave (Hwy. 3) and 4th St. (Bus. 218). One could easily spend at least half a day studying the displays and reading all the plaques. Emily lasted almost 45 minutes before she started touching things she shouldn't. That was pretty impressive! Below are a few pictures. You can click on them for a closer look.

There is a whole wing built specifically to house the private collection of a Waverly resident who was a taxidermist for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in the early 1900's. He had been to Siberia, the Arctic and Africa. Emily liked all the stuffed heads on the walls and correctly named almost all of the animals. Another room is a re-creation of a log cabin using parts of the last remaining log cabin in Bremer County. Emily's favorite part was probably the 1800's kitchen where we knew the lady talking about it and she let us pick out some hats to wear at the tea table.