Sadie Hawkins

Melting my heart, and instantly reviving a tradition we'd sadly let slide for too long, my precious little Rosie said early last week "Daddy, will you go on a date with me sometime soon?".

My better half selected rock climbing (where she crushed a 60' adult wall), an art museum (the Walker, where she was in her element drawing her favorite exhibit from each room), Punch Pizza, Cherry Berry, and Target to spend some of her allowance money... and to pick up a kickstand for her bike (which, she made very clear, would be on Dad's dime). 

Spring?

Spring appeared for a few hours late February (54 degrees), so after four months of being bottled up indoors and buried under scarves and snow pants, we Minnesotans stripped down and flooded the local trails, parks and all things outdoors!

Art Shanties

Since 2005, local artists have been creating a temporary, interactive, ice house community of art on the frozen White Bear Lake.  In 2016, we finally checked it out.  

The girls enjoyed the Dance Shack and Play Bunk most... and Griff was in heaven playing sled dog!

Big Apple

The General sent me to NYC for a three day "trend trek", but Mother Nature played a trump card and grounded me in Rochester, NY for all but a few hours.  

Making the most of it, when I finally arrived in Manhattan, I got in an early morning run on the West Side Highway to Battery Park to say hello to Our Lady Liberty, then meandered back through the city to the site of the 9/11 attacks to pay homage to the 2,606 victims and heroes at the sobering North and South Pools. 

Bed rest

Auntie La & her bun in the oven are in good health, but some complications along the way have had her in and out of the hospital and on bedrest for the remainder of the pregnancy.  So, the girls paid La & Opie a visit to help break the monotony, bringing Chipotle, Pictionary and Hangman. 

Downhill Divas

E & S also picked up downhill skiing this winter.  Evie is cool and calculated on the slopes, while Sawyer is more of a "bomber".  

Ballers

E & S "enjoyed" (more on this in a moment) a season of winter hoops.  E at Rush Creek (with Dad as head coach and S as his assistant), and S at Chris Carr's 43 Hoops Academy.  Both programs focus on fundamentals rather than games, which was nice... and both girls improved leaps and bounds by season's end.  E's all girls team won the season-end skills competition, and she can now knock down shots on a 10' hoop... and S became a master thief on the court, and on the offensive side, can dribble fast enough that her mom couldn't steal the ball from her if her life depended on it!

Regarding that "enjoy" comment... On the first day of practice when walking in hand-in-hand with Sawyer she looked up at me and said, "so, Dad, basically everybody here either loves basketball or their Dad does?".  I said, "which one are you?", to which she replied simply with a shrug and a smile.  SMH.

Title IX

Earrings!

EBGB earned a pair of pierced ears four years ahead of Dad's schedule for an impressive string a good behavior on school day mornings (she and the Mamma Bear don't exactly see eye-to-eye before 8am).

E braved the one-ear-at-a-time process, as Claire's was short-staffed.  Nothing was getting in that girl's way of blinging out those lobes!

Pond Party

The annual fire on ice and night skating pond party was a hit again this year.  New additions included a work-in-progress ice igloo... and cousins Lucy & Alex joining in on the fun.

The frozen tundra of TCF Bank

A buddy with an an extra ticket... plus a forecast that looked to make the game the coldest in NFL history (at -25 degrees F, it wound up only being the third coldest)...  plus the game being the franchise's first outdoors at home since I was 6 days old made the Vikings/Seahawks Wildcard match-up at TCF a must-see-live for this guy. 

Unfortunately, more memorable than the historic frigid four hours was the missed chip shot field goal with 26 seconds to play, down 10-9, by Blair Walsh that left Vikings fans stunned (again).