Minnesota

Tony and I flew to Minnesota for the week of July 4th. Of course we had the usual Northwest trouble of the flight being about an hour late, freaking out about missing our connector to Duluth, but everthing turned out ok and we made it in late the night of the 3rd.
The best part of our trip was getting to meet our sweet new nephew and Godson, Connor Joseph. He is AMAZING! So beautiful and just perfect. It was love at first sight! I couldn't get enough of him. It's another huge reason it's so hard to live so far away from all of our family...kids grow so quickly, and only seeing them once a year is not enough. I know the next time we see him he'll be sitting up and he'll just be so much bigger. It's too hard to think about. Hopefully something will work out soon to where we can be closer to both of our families.
We went to Tony's aunt's cabin for the day and night of the 4th. It's a really cute cabin and the lake is really nice. We boated during the day and then grilled and shot off fireworks that night. The next day Tony and I went canoeing, which just reinforced our desire to be somewhere where we can canoe as much as we want.
We also got to go up the shore a bit to Tony's parent's land and got to see the new cabin they're building. It's going to be so nice to have a place the family can go to get away from the city. Tony has great memories of 'the land' from when he was a little boy and they would go up as often as they could. Tony and I slept out under the stars that night (I was hoping to see the aurora borealis) and it was just beautiful. Tony fell asleep with one of his arms outside of the sleeping bag and woke up with 27 mosquitos bites on that arm! But spending time with Tony's family was the best part of the whole trip. It was great to play with the kids and visit with everybody. Tony's friend Whalen came up to the land the night we were staying there and it was great visting with him as well, Tony hadn't seen him for a few years.
I'm going to have to put all the pictures in some sort of album, after I find which one I want to use, but I'll try to post a couple of pictures now.

The first picture is of me and Connor.
The second is of me and Tony up on the land.