Pink

Life in our humble St. Louis Park home continues to move forward at a rather frantic pace; it's hard to keep up sometimes. There's a lot going on for the Minnesota Deans. Time to catch you up...

Back in early May, we celebrated Karen's 34th birthday with an extra special event: a "cake reveal." We invited our Minnesota family over to our house to celebrate with some ice cream and some extra special cake. After our first ultrasound (16 weeks), we delivered a sealed envelope, containing the sex of our new baby, to bakers at the famous Oulette's Bakery and asked them to bake us a cake with either blue or pink cake inside, so we could share the excitement of finding our what "kind' of new baby we would be expecting in October. Here's how it went down...

You could cut the tension with a knife as we all waiting for the dramatic reveal.

Here we go...

It's PINK! Mommy and Daddy are excited. Lucas is confused.

Lucas finally reacts. It's delayed, but he is super psyched for his sister!

The Deans revel in the news while the family erupts with laughter and applause.

In October, this cake will be replaced with a real-life baby girl!

A few weeks later, we ventured up to Blaine for a BBQ to hang out with some of Karen's college friends and their kids over at Worm and Mike's house. Brian and Kristy had dinner plans that night, so they dropped off Ingrid (our niece, Lucas' cousin) so we could take her up to the party with us. It was an early taste of what it might be like to be a family of 4. A lot of work! The kids had a blast playing in the water and Lucas, especially, got nice and muddy. It definitely took all of the adults to corral the kids all afternoon, but we had a really good time and all went well. Luckily, we made it back inside before the hail storm.

Lucas with Taylor Gabrielli doing some mud bonding

How deep can my hand go?

I found my hand again!

Dinner time was a big production

One dry (Ingrid) and one wet (Lucas) cousin.

Here's Karen at 20 weeks. Looking good! Look at how nice our lawn looks, too!

Last but not least, we thought we'd share two of our new favorite videos. In the first one, Lucas is dancing to Jay's rendition of "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" and Karen gets him to share some new words from his growing vocabulary. In the second, Lucas trains for the 2024 Olympics in backyard downhill cart racing. Enjoy.

Summer Comes Early

Spring has come early this season.  We've had so many sunny, warm days you'd think it should be August already and that we'd be preparing for fall.  I continue to smile everytime I realize it's only the beginning of May and that we will still get to enjoy more months of outdoor weather!

This week, it reached almost 80 degrees.  It seemed like the obvious choice to get the pool out and have the neighborhood boys over.  Everytime people ask us how our transition is going after almost a year away from California we always say it's hard and we miss so much of our life in SoCal.  We also always follow it up by saying, but our neighborhood is so awesome and we couldn't be luckier to have landed in a spot with so many young families and 2 year old boys! Lucas has made the best of friends and begs to play outside with them everytime I open the front door.

Lucas, Will, Charlie, and Hutton enjoying the summer fun!