Wedding Bells

On Sunday we got to celebrate the wedding of Dan and Magdelina at the Refuge.

After church all the Refugees worked together to make the church look beautiful and then wait for the bride and groom to come.

Magdelina walked down on a carpet of flower petals to Canon in D.

As a church we joined them to open the ceremony with singing.

We sang the songs: How Beautiful and the song Blessed Assurance.

We rearranged the chairs to be facing a side of the church instead of the front and decorated that area with and arch.

Wolfgang was the photographer.

I also had my camera and tried to stay out of his way. :)

While Wolfgang took pictures of the couple I tried to get pictures of the guests including some of theses cute kids.
The flower girl and her cousin had fun playing with the flower petals during the ceremony.

They had a traditional ceremony. But it was also unique for them as a couple.

They couldn't get both candles in the frame when they went to light the Unity Candle so the best man held it for them.

During the lighting of the unity candle the Twins and I played You Raise Me Up.

Notice Melody is holding Rachel's music? We forgot our stand!

You may kiss your bride!
If you want to see more pictures from the ceremony you will have to ask Wolfgang if you can see his!
Cutting the cake.
Lauren helped walk them through the proper way to cut the cake!
Joyful servants!
Time for more pictures!
There were pictures of the bride and groom, pictures of them with the brides family and then ones with the grooms family, pictures with friends...
...even pictures with the pastor!

And there were plenty of photographers!
Wolfgang wasn't around to take pictures of the rings so I stole these!
I was pleased with how they turned out!
Here are couple of my favorites of the bride!

The arch looked so pretty we had to get pictures of everyone by it.

Kaleb just looks cute everywhere!Just over a year ago these two got married under this arch!

Chili Cook-off

On September 13th there was a Chili Cook-off at the Campground.That weekend was also Western Week-end.Lots of people came dressed up in their western apparel and we ate lots of chili!

We had a great turn out the room was completely full!

Bop had the perfect bowl for that evening!

Jamie Rogers MCed that night.
Share some with me!
That night everyone got to vote for the best chili.But in order to vote you had to try three different chilis.

There were 18 different kinds of chili so it was a hard choice.

Everyone put their vote on a sheet of paper...

...and we put all of the votes in a hat.

Jamie, Rachel and I counted the votes.
Here are the votes for the two winners guess who won.
Each of the winners won a toilet plunger. (An old Mendota Hills tradition.)

Second place winner!
First place!

Macrame

This past Sunday Jess taught some of us girls how to make Macrame necklaces.

We could choose different types of cord,

and different types of beads to make them.

Jess did a great job teaching and we all had a lot of fun!

We found out that it helps to be creative! We used pens to hold our string so that it wouldn't get away and then we put the pens through the slots in the chairs to hold them still!

The Twins, Zoe, our new friend Julie, and I all tried our hand at making them. We took a really long time deciding on what beads to use and we then started knotting. We spent at least a couple hours working on them!

Even Marge joined us! She said that she used to do it all the time and she really enjoyed picking it up again.

Joy didn't want the big girls to have all the fun without her! She even had a pen and then it had to go right through the chair like ours did!

Is it a little hard Becky?
Here is my finished project!
All of the girls decided that we need to make these more often! After we got done they all started to make plans of having someone take them to Walmart so they could buy supplies!

Thanks Jess for a great time!