Crazy 8: Introducing Dr. Lindemann!

Oh, what a weekend! Including our own family, there were 8 adults and 5 kids living at our house Thur - Sat, and I have to admit I was a little nervous about how that would work out. Although, we love to open our home to our family and friends (we truly believe that God has given us a home to share it with others, not just to use it for ourselves) and were recently lamenting that we haven't done so more in our "new" house, so we were looking forward to the opportunity. No matter how much you love each other, though, that's still a lot of people in a relatively small space. (Hopefully) everyone would agree that it really was a great, even strangely (despite the chaos) relaxing weekend. We planned a few activities to get everyone out of the house and proactively minimize the obvious likelihood of people getting on each others' nerves, but ended up not even doing all of the few things we had planned.

Steve did such an awesome job not only this weekend in presenting and defending his work, but also in actually doing the work during his career at Iowa, that I hear his committee didn't really even question him, much less grill him as one might expect. Ben (one of his committee members who hung out at our house the rest of the afternoon on Friday) described the defense as "much more of a discussion".

Some pictures from the weekend:

First, the fast-becoming obligatory shot of Haley and Elias together.

Steve looking very relaxed just prior to giving his seminar, despite the need to call for backup on getting the powerpoint up and running.

Steve looking even more relaxed celebrating his degree completion.

All the girls prepping favors and notecards for the big party!

The final product

Special thanks to Amanda and Abbie Chidister for Steve's awesome "Rabbit Fever" cake! It just happened to be Elias's 5 month birthday. Most of you probably know this already, but for all 4 kids we've always baked a cake and taken a picture with whoever we happen to be with on the evening of their month birthdays until they're 1 year old. I'm pretty sure the is the biggest crowd we've had to date! It's also just cool to have a photo record of so many of the people that came out to celebrate Steve's accomplishment.

Probably the funniest thing that happened all night was this long row of black curtains that had obviously been set up for Sunday morning crashing to the floor and Zeke just waltzing out from underneath it all as if nothing had ever happened. I could never describe it well enough, so here's what you have to do. Mentally merge the next two photos (replacing Grace with Zeke and pretending that the curtains are on the ground). If someone could actually do that for me with photoshop or something, I would be forever grateful. I was so bummed that my camera wasn't in my hand at that moment.

A few of our awesome friends and family that traveled to come celebrate with us: