Cabin trip 2010

WARNING: GIGANTIC POST!!
Our annual cabin trip was a great success as usual!  We were there for about 10 days and had wonderful weather, beautiful scenery, and even some time for a trip to Lagoon.  On our way to UT, we stopped in Bozeman, MT to visit my cousin Melea so her sweet husband could perform a root canal on Garrett!  Melea has 8 kids and such a fun kid house, so the kids were big fans of the stop over.  They played in the hot tub and loved how the water changed colors, they love petting all the animals, and Rylynn and I got to go to a musical too.

Melea set up an outing for a group of us to go to "Once upon a Mattress" the night we got there.  Rylynn had never been to a musical or play so I knew she would be so excited.

She was quite the enthusiastic clapper after it was over:)  She couldn't wait until she could meet all the actors and actresses.  I was a little worried and started to explain that she couldn't meet them until I saw them all file out to the lobby to greet people.

It made Rylynn's night!  Here she is posing with "Larken" one of the ladies in waiting.  She was so excited!

The kids went in this hot tub about 5 times. 

Carter LOVED the kitties.  They had three baby kittens and the kids always wanted to hold them.  But they were very good about keeping them away from me so I wouldn't get sick.  They like to tell everyone that their mom is allergic to cats.

Here's another one of the kiddies.  This is Ephraim, their youngest posing with Rylynn and Carter.  They had so much fun together.

Beckett kept busy playing with sharp sticks when I wasn't looking:)

Garrett with his favorite dentist (Well, tied with Dr. Poyfair)!  Thanks for all the vicodin:)

We made it to the cabin late on Saturday night and were so happy to finally arrive!  The weather was beautiful and it was so fun to see the excitement on the kids faces to be back to their favorite place in the world.

Rylynn was so good about following the cabin rule of making your bed before breakfast!  She's such a good little helper and cleaner.  She also set the table every night.  My grandma complemented her on being such a great helper.

On Wednesday we took the kids to Lagoon.  First we hit up Lagoon a beach but quickly after we realized it was really lame for Carter since he was too short to go on the slides and they wouldn't let Rylynn wear her floaties on the slide, which made her nervous.  So, we decided to leave and go on rides instead.

We had fun on the lazy river but it was COLD!

Beckett was glad to get into some dry clothes and take a much needed nap in the stroller.

He was sooo wanting that nap right at this moment.  Poor Carter wasn't getting any love from the little bro!

Rylynn and Garrett were going down one of the water slides, but Carter had already changed and was not about to wait for them to get done to go on rides.  Papa took him to the spaceships and he hopped right into a pink one with a bunch of strangers and had a great time!

It was so fun to go to Lagoon with my parents since they met there over 35 years ago!  My Dad worked at "Tip em Over" and my Mom worked at the "Darts" booth right next to his.  It was love at first sight and they got to just sit and talk to each other every day at work.  So for old times sake we went to where they met and played Tip em over.  Garrett won the cheetah my mom is holding and we thought we should take a picture to document the magical moment!

Once Rylynn and Garrett got back it was full speed ahead on kiddie rides.  This was one of their favorites!  The Dino Drop!  Papa was a little tall for the seat but he was a good sport about it:)

Rylynn was so terrified the first time they dropped us, but after that she couldn't get enough of it.

Round two of the spaceships!  This time Rylynn got to ride too.  

I have wanted to take my kids to Lagoon every summer but it is so much dang money that we just keep putting it off.  I'm so glad we finally did it this summer though.  It was so much fun to see my kids on the same rides that I used to love as a kid.  I got to relive my childhood through them and they loved it just as much as I did.  

I love Papa's face in this picture!  He was such a trooper to go on so many rides with the kids.  Nana doesn't do so well with rides because of her neck so she manned the stroller and kept Beckett asleep.  It was so nice to have four adults to keep track of all the kids!

Beckett was so happy after his nap!  We took this picture because his hair was hilarious when he woke up.  He had gotten pretty sweaty in the covered stroller.

I think we did bumper cars three times in a row!

Rylynn really got the hang of the cars and drove all over the place.  Carter however, pretty much stayed here the entire time and turned around in circles.  It was so funny, but he didn't seem to mind.

What happy kids!

This was just the beginning of the stuffed animals craziness...more details to come.

Beckett was the keeper of the stuffed animals, and a big fan of that job!

We took a little junk food break and Beckett got to have some punching lessons with Papa.  I love his face in the picture.  He absolutely adores his Papa!

I remember driving these little cars when I was younger with my little sister and we felt so cool and grown up.

Rylynn had the pageant wave down pat by the end of the day!

Love these little boats!

Look at Carter's steering abilities!  That is some serious arm tangling:)

Beckett gets his first taste of ice cream.  Don't let the face fool you...

you better believe he came right back for more!

The kids finally got to experience my favorite childhood Lagoon ride: Puff the magic dragon!

I thought I should ride with them for old times sake.  It was so fun!

Okay now for the stuffed animals story.  I don't know what possessed my Dad, but basically every game we walked by he would say, "Garrett come play this one" then Garrett would proceed to win the jumbo prize!  It was seriously insane.  The game booth people got scared when they saw us coming since we were pushing a stroller full of stuffed animals.  It was so bad that at one point my Dad and Garrett had to take a special trip to the car to drop off some of the animals to make room for the kids!  He won two jumbo prizes on the hole in one golf game (big surprise) for sinking 2 20 foot double-breaking putts.  The guy basically gave him a dirty look and told him he couldn't play again.  He played the three point contest, tip em over, break the dish, spill the milk, and the list goes on and on.

Here is what we ended up with!  I swear we had a hard time fitting them all in the car for the drive home.

The trip to Lagoon wouldn't have been half as fun without Nana and Papa!  We couldn't have done it all until 10pm without their help.  Nana even stayed with the kids so Papa, Garrett and I could go on some serious roller coasters.  I recommend "Wicked"!

So after all day long, the drive home was pretty quiet:)

Best money we spent all trip!

I love sleeping babies.

On Thursday night I got to go down to Park City for a girls night out with some of my favorite girls from London study abroad.  We had so much fun!  I haven't laughed that hard in quite awhile.  Thanks girls!  

We decided to split up the drive on the way home and stopped in Missoula for the night.  Garrett and I love the book and movie "A River Runs Through it" and Garrett has always wanted to stop by and see the Maclean's house.  This plaque was in front of the Presbyterian church where Norman's father was the preacher.

This is the church.

This is their house.  It was just down the street from the church.  It was cool to see where Norman and Paul grew up.  

We finally made it home Sunday afternoon.  It was a great trip, I think we'll do it again next summer!

Strep x's 3

Maybe this makes me a terrible mother or weird, but I have to say that I actually like it when my kids are sick.  The exception to that statement is if they are sick with the flu and throwing up.  That I DO NOT like!  All three of my children have strep throat right now, so we have three bottles of pink goodness in our fridge.  I just love how life is forced to slow down when my kids are sick.  We don't go on errands, we don't have to be places, except maybe the doctor.  Most of all I love how my kids are so cuddly when they are sick.  They love to be snuggled and they love to just sit and rest.  Yesterday was the first time ever I think that all three of my kids and I were able to take a nap at the same time.  It was wonderful.  I am thankful for medicine however, because I don't think I would love it so much if the pain and sorrow lasted weeks and weeks.  It really is amazing how fast those antibiotics work!  I am always reminded when I go and pick up an antibiotic prescription for my kids of how thankful I am that I was not a pioneer whose babies died from a cold.  How horrible!  So yay for modern medicine and yay for illnesses occassionally to slow life down and to remind us of how blessed we are to have healthy bodies and medicine.

Fun with the Poyfairs and garden parties

The Poyfairs came for a fun weekend visit a couple weeks back.  It was so great to spend some time with them and catch up on our lives.  The kids were thrilled to see each other again too!

The girls destroyed the toy room and tried on every single dress up within minutes of reuniting.  And the boys played and fought over toys just like old times:)  Carter is not so great at sharing his cars.  Maybe preschool this year will help with the sharing problems...we hope.  The parents just hung out and chatted and then we got a babysitter and went to Eclipse together.  It was humorous trying to catch Adam up on the Twilight saga, but I think he actually liked it.  

The next day we went to Coeur d'Alene to swim and play at the beach.  We have never been to the beach there before so we were really excited to have an excuse to go.

Beckett mostly liked being held.  He was not a fan of the water which is unusual for him, but it was pretty cold.

As you can tell in this picture since carter is shivering to death:)

Rylynn always seems to create a mud hole when we go anywhere with sand and water.

Beckett ate his fair share of sand and rocks, but oh well.

Carter opted to eat doughnuts instead.  What a smart child!  These doughnuts are UNBELIEVABLE!  We discovered them when we lived in our apartment because we lived right behind the doughnut shop and it always smelled like doughnuts.  I was pregnant so that was a great combination!  I thought I would be okay though since I am never or rarely tempted by doughnuts, but these are not your typical doughnuts.  After one try I was hooked.  Now every time we have visitors come to town we have to buy them some to try.  We've never had a single disappointed guest.

The little sunbather

This is the sunhat that I bought for Beckett after I burned his little head earlier this summer.  I felt so bad so I decided I would bring a hat whenever we go out in the sun.  Well that doesn't really help if your child refuses to wear the sun protectant hat!  I can't believe we got a picture with it on his head!  It never stays on for more than a few seconds.

Nothing like burying yourself in nasty rocky sand!

These two cuties had so much fun together.  Rylynn cried and cried after Olivia left.  She kept asking why she couldn't live right by us so they could play together everyday.

I was asking myself the same question!  Carissa and I have so much fun together.  Oh well, I shouldn't complain, at least we live in the same state!

This picture makes me laugh.  This is so Adam, I just had to post it!  Sorry Adam.  These guys have so much fun together being huge dorks.  We love you Poyfairs!!  Come again.

After the Poyfairs loaded up the car and set off for home, we went downtown to meet up with Stacey and her family for a picnic in the park.  This park is beautiful and has tons of different gardens surrounding it.  It was kind of late, so we only had time to make it to the rose gardens.  We will definitely go back to see the other ones.

Rylynn was in heaven surrounded by all the beautiful roses

Beckett was just cute as usual

Carter was too busy running around like a maniac to really care about the flowers and of course notice he has a car in his hand:)  He can't go anywhere without his cars.

I did manage to get him to pose for one picture in front of the flowers and of course he had his eyes closed.  At least he's giving me his patented Carter grin.

They had every color of roses throughout the gardens.  I especially loved these yellow ones.

I think these were my favorite though.  I love multicolored roses!  This one looks like a sunset to me.

This little guy loved crawling all over the huge lawns.  He was really good about not picking all the flowers.  I was a little surprised.

Of course we needed a picture with the red ones!

Rylynn gathered a little pile of flower petals to bring home.  Of course they had already fallen off the roses and were on the ground.  They smelled so good!  What an awesome weekend!

Miss Independent

My little Rylynn is so independent these days!  We have a new chore/behavior chart in our house and it has proven how responsible she is.  She will get up and go to the chart and get all her chores done first thing.  We are so proud of her!  Just to prove how independent she is I have to share the following story:

So Rylynn has been begging us for weeks to take off her training wheels on her bike.  This all started when two of her friends on the street started riding their bikes without training wheels.  However, their bikes are the tiny little kid bikes like Carter's size so we told Rylynn that it wouldn't be as easy for her since she had a much bigger bike.  She did not care and was determined!  Now in our defense, we know how Rylynn is and we knew she would be so disappointed if she couldn't do it and she would just get frustrated and never want to ride her bike.  That is why we procrastinated the day of removing the training wheels.  Well, she had other plans...so as we are going in one night Rylynn hops on the neighbor girl's little bike and says, "hey mom and Dad watch this!"  Then she proceeds to hop on and cruise all around the cul-de-sac like she'd been doing it for years.  Garrett and I just looked at each other in amazement!  So we asked Rylynn how she did it and she said, "I don't know, I just got on and it clicked!"  So she made us promise we would take off her training wheels the next morning to see if she could ride her bike as easily.

Garrett got up early and took them off before work and then left.  When Rylynn woke up the first thing she did was run to the garage.  She jumped on her big bike and cruised around just as easily as the night before!  I couldn't believe it.  So basically we were robbed of the big moment of teaching our first child to ride a bike.  She took care of that all on her own.  That's our Rylynn.  I don't know why I was suprised by this event considering she is my child who at two years of age insisted on picking out her own clothes AND dressing herself no matter how long it took!

Camping and the 4th

All winter long my kids have been begging to go camping!  Every time they asked, I would say, "we will go in the summer when it's warm."  So Garrett got a massive tent for Father's Day and we were all set for camping over the 4th.  Little did we know it would be more like camping in the winter than summer camping!  It was cold and rainy for most of the trip, but we still had fun.

Here is the massive tent with three rooms!  We love it, and it definitely proved to be waterproof; thank goodness!

Everyone had their own bed, but somehow in the morning we still all ended up in the same bed.  Did I mention it was cold?  We had lots of snuggling to warm up.

This was the beautiful river we camped along.  It was in Northern Idaho.  On our trip we saw two moose, several deer, a huge herd of Elk, and of course lots of fish jumping in the rivers.

Daddy and Carter even caught a few of them!

The second day cleared up a bit and we were able to go for a hike up to this beautiful waterfall.

Our trip was made so much more fun by these awesome people!  Thank you Slacks for enduring the rain and cold with us!  Erin cooked us some amazing dutch oven goodness the first night.  I think that was the only time I didn't care that it was raining.

Just off to the side of the waterfall there was a little cave area and then a huge cliff that the kids loved climbing.

Rylynn was the first one up and had no fear!

All the girls at the top of the cliff.

Beckett and I stayed down by the waterfall and cheered on all the climbers.  Don't we all look awesome?  That's what camping in the rain does for ya.  Lots of dirty wet kids and puffy, frizzy hair:)

All it takes to keep Carter happy is a body of water and some rocks for throwing.

We ended up going back earlier than we had planned due to the weather and Beckett's numurous blow- outs.  That definitely made camping in the rain so much more fun!  Needless to say, we ran out of clothes pretty quickly.  It was nice to sleep in a warm bed on Saturday night.  On the fourth, we went to a bbq at cousin Stacey's house.  We roasted marshmellows and had s'mores and watched the fireworks up on the hill over Liberty Lake.  It was lots of fun, but unfortunately I forgot to bring the camera!  I am so thankful for this country and the freedoms I enjoy.  I just hope we don't forget as a country who gave us those freedoms: In GOD we Trust!!