First Family Campout

Within our first year of marriage, Ryan and I bought a tent with plans to put it to frequent use. Six years later, it had been used one time. Very sad, I know. This past summer, being the summer of fun, I made a vow that we would go camping, no matter what. Before I knew it, it was a Thursday at the end of August, and we were getting some unusually cool weather. I was about to accept that maybe we just weren't meant to go camping when my friend suggested we put together a last minute camping trip for the weekend. We were in. After spending an afternoon getting things organized, we got a big group of friends to head down to Hocking Hills for some outdoor fun. It was a blast!

We were nervous how the boys would do, but they had a great time, slept well, and didn't get lost in the woods (which is a major concern for our escape-loving boys). They loved having so many of their friends with us and ran and played for the majority of their waking hours.
It was also really fun for the adults to hang out after the kids went to bed. We played Werewolves (one of our favorites) and chatted with everyone till probably 2am. We must have been having a good time to stay up that late since we all knew the kids would be up at dawn (which they were).











The next day we went hiking around Hocking Hills. Before I moved to Ohio I never would have expected to find some of the geography we have seen here. Here we are hiking on the Rock House trail, through one of the caves. It was really cool.



The boys had to wear proper head gear at night. Once they saw we had head lamps they snatched those babies up and claimed them as their own. I was able to confiscate them after the boys went to sleep, though.
In the end, we didn't even use our tent. Come to find out it's only a three man tent so our friend let us borrow their eight man tent, which is a huge difference. We will definitely have to upgrade for any camping next year, and hopefully we'll put that tent to frequent use.

More Summer Fun

I was looking at my pictures on the computer and realized I never posted anything about a few other fun summer outings. Back in the beginning of summer (I think in May) we went down to Dayton to visit the National US Airforce Museum. It was pretty awesome. I believe they have on display almost, if not all, airplanes that have been built. And of course it had displays about every major event in flying history. Here, Grant enjoyed playing while an atomic bomb detonated in the background (wasn't there a commercial like that at one point?).
The boys really loved seeing all the planes, especially the biggest boy of the bunch. Ryan loves his military history so I had to move him along quicker than he probably would have liked in order to keep up the wee ones.
Grant liked the plane that looked like a shark the best. I liked learning about heroic pilots and the personal stories of what some of them went through during war time. There was one exhibit about the "candy man" who would fly over Berlin when it was blockaded and drop little parachutes attached to candy bars for the children who were in the city. I later found out he was from Utah (and LDS). It's a cool story.































This summer we also made good use of our zoo membership and would head up there almost once a week. It's a really great zoo and the boys and I love making a trip of it. All of these pictures are from the new polar bear exhibit, which is one of my favorite. I can't get over how massive and beautiful these animals are. I also can't get over how much I would not like to meet one in a back alley. Well, I would really not like to meet one anywhere without at least 4 inches of glass separating us.

To dunk or not to dunk

Ryan is a dunker. Any type of delicacy that could possibly taste good in milk, Ryan is dunking it. His favorites include graham crackers and cookies, but he also dunks muffins, cake, and even toast (in hot chocolate). Did I mention he dunks grilled cheese sandwiches in his soup. I, on the other hand, love to enjoy the texture of my food and then wash it down with a delicious glass of milk, chunk free.

This need to dunk apparently runs in the blood because the boys have taken right after Ryan's food-sogging ways. The other day I gave Grant a muffin to eat and he said he needed a glass of milk and a fork (Ryan uses a fork to dunk the muffin--more manageable that way). Since Tate is still required to have a lid on his cup, he has not had much experience with true milk dunking. But he gets in on the action whenever we eat something with a dipping sauce involved (ketchup, ranch, etc). Actually, he really just uses his food as a makeshift utensil with which to shovel the dipping sauce into his mouth.


Please note the careful technique of using the tip of the pinky finger as a finger-rest to prevent over-dunking the cookie. The finger-rest ensures that the maximum amount of cookie gets dunked without the dunker getting their fingers wet. It's as much an art as a science, really.

Summer of Fun, part One

At the beginning of May I declared this summer would be called the "Summer of Fun"! Last summer was fun too, but since I wouldn't have a nursing baby this year I knew we could go out more easily and hence have a lot of fun.
We definitely stayed busy as I planned several trips and would go out and enjoy the weather each day. Did I mention I love summer!! If we weren't on a trip, we would split our time between going to a pool, a park, the museum, the zoo, playing with friends, the library or wherever else we could find to go.
With all the traveling, we spent a decent amount of time in the car. You would think the boys would be sick of the car, but they still love to get in there whenever Mom isn't paying attention. Right before we leave to go somewhere and I am grabbing the last minute things, I come to the garage to find them having a good ol' time the car, pushing every button and turning every knob. As you can see in the first picture, I used to keep a stash of gum in the car, but I figured Tate is not quite old enough to handle the three pieces of gum he had shoved in his mouth, so gum is in the house now.
One of our fun summer outings was our trip to the State Fair. I'm not sure why I enjoy a State Fair like I do, I can't remember really going to many as a kid. But with the horse shows, petting zoos, people-watching, and kettle corn, they make for an entertaining time.
Grant enjoyed the kiddie ride as Tate screamed in betrayal. He couldn't understand why he had to watch while older brother had fun. I didn't want to let Tate try a ride for fear he would be ready to get out half way through. I guess next year will be his summer of fun.
One of our favorite parts of the fair are seeing the amazingly huge horses. We try to go the day they are showing the draft horse teams. It's a fun part of the fair that not many people experience. We were in the horse arena with the majority of the people being over 65. But come on, you get to sit there, eat your food, and watch amazingly beautiful horse teams strut their stuff. And to top it off, they have a real-live old lady organ player playing elevator music with a carnival pipe organ. Awesome!
Here are the boys in front of the biggest horse we could find. Sorry you can't see the horse too well, but just know it was huge!! The horse's shoulders were at least 6 feet tall, almost level with Ryan's head! That's a big horse.
Well, that is all for this installment in the Summer of Fun, but expect more to come!

Sweet 6-year anniversary!

Several months ago I got a call informing me of a free Bahama cruise I could have for coming to hear about a travel company's offers. Ryan and I decided to go for it and after a relatively painless hour of high-pressure salesmanship, got our "free" cruise including airfare. Since we've always wanted to go on a cruise but were never willing to lay down the money for one, we considered ourselves pretty lucky to have come across this! Fast forward to last week, we were able to go on our 3 night Caribbean cruise a few days before our 6-yr anniversary. Perfect timing for a child-free getaway!

Can I just say it was pretty much awesome! My mom was also awesome and flew out here to watch the boys for the weekend, all by herself (which is a pretty brave thing to do!). She said they did pretty well (besides the 5am child-crying-in-the-hall episode) and she enjoyed being able to spend time with them.

Ryan and I tried to get our money's worth out of the cruise (we did have to pay the taxes, gratuities, etc). I think we probably did a little bit of everything. Looking back, it may have been beneficial for us to have gotten more sleep, but there was so much to do, we stayed busy most of the day.














One night we decided to join the drunk people for a little karaoke. We sang a duet from Grease, that we accidentally started off an entire octave too high. Ryan ended up having to sing a lot of it in falsetto which was great for comic relief but terrible in pretty much every other way. It must have been memorable because for the rest of the night random people kept coming up to us commenting on our performance. A couple of 30-something ladies said we were "an inspiration". A couple of teenage boys recognized us later on the dance floor and said "that was awesome!!" Nice. I hope we inspired all the rest of those on the ship who can't carry a tune to get up and make fools of themselves. It was really fun though!
Other fun included winning the adult speed climbing competition. I took gold in the women's tournament and Ryan got silver in the men's (though he lost by less than a second to a guy that brought his own climbing shoes on the cruise with him!). We also enjoyed the formal night and I was able to make one of my high school prom dresses modest with a little Shade shirt (you gotta love those!) We were able to get some cute pictures of the two of us all gussied up. And of course I had to add a picture of our favorite towel animal the cleaning staff folded and hung up in our room. It's a monkey, although its face looks unmistakably robot-like.

Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures at the ports: Nassau, Bahamas and Coco Cay (Royal Caribbean's private small island). At both stops we brought our snorkel gear and headed out into the crystal clear ocean waters to snorkel around and check out the sea life. I loved that part of our trip! It was so relaxing!!
Oh, and one other favorite part of the cruise for both of us was unlimited access to delicious food. On the two port days, we wouldn't get around to eating breakfast until 10am. So we would fill up on delicious breakfast foods and then head out to do fun stuff on shore. We would get back to the ship around 4pm, starving, so we would order room service- fruit platter, steak sandwich, Mediterranean chicken salad, etc. Then, our dinner seating was at 6pm, and the food was really good each night, so we would stuff ourselves- Filet Minion, lobster bisque, escargot in butter-herb sauce, roasted duck, etc. And of course, before bed we would find something else to eat, whether it was suckling pig (no joke), pizza, a midnight BBQ, or more room service. Yeah, it was awesome!

And just to make our anniversary even more awesome, we had a Wicked experience yesterday. It rocked! We highly recommend it.


I love anniversaries!! And I love Ryan. Happy six years, and many more to come!

When the Mom is away, the boys will play!

So a week after we got back from our trip to VA, I was packed and off to Girl's Camp for 4 days to be the camp nurse. I'm in the YW presidency in our ward and so I wanted to go and hang out with the girls and plus I thought it would be fun. It was a lot of fun! Being the nurse wasn't too hectic either. I had to teach a few first aid classes and be in charge of several girls prescribed meds. Other than that, most of my nursing duties consisted of passing out Ibprofen, dealing with minor cuts and then mosquito bites. The last day got a little hairy though when one of the girls had heat exhaustion and wasn't recovering. She kept passing out and was starting to have minor seizures. In the end we had to take her to the ER where they pumped her full of fluids and were able to release her about 6 hours later (which is pretty quick for ER standards). I guess I missed all the fun though, because the nurse I left in charge at camp didn't stop moving that night. While I was gone, there was an outbreak of poison ivy, 3 girls burned their fingers in the fire and another girl was starting into heat exhaustion. I felt kind of bad for leaving her with all that when I got back from the hospital until right when I was about to get ready for bed I get a call that a girl had somehow got glow-stick fluid in her eye. 15 minutes of flushing and an eye patch later I sent her to bed and called in for the night. Overall, it was fun time and I enjoyed getting to know some of the girls and leaders I otherwise would not have.

So while I was away, the boys went to babysitters on Wed. and Thurs. and then Ryan was home with them on Fri. and Sat. I was somewhat nervous how that would all go, but Ryan said it went pretty well and they had a fun boy weekend. When I got home on Saturday the boys were really glad to see me, but I could tell Tate wanted his dad more than usual (which is not always the case for this momma's-boy). So it ended up being fun for them and good bonding time.

Since I don't have any pictures from camp I looked on my camera to see what I could add to this post. As I flipped through picture after picture of unknown shots it became clear that someone had quite a fun photo shoot. That someone being our 3 year old and that photo shoot consisting of 90 pictures (yes I counted them)! Grant is usually not allowed free range of the camera, but like I said when mom is away...
Here is a sampling of some of his shots. They range from portrait, to candid, to artistic. I think we may have a budding photographer on our hands :)

Summer Catch Up

We have been having a pretty busy summer so I am going to try to play some catch-up and write a way too long post. For the 4th of July, Ryan took a few days off school and we headed to VA to hang out with my parents. We had a ton of fun and as usual it was hard to leave. Both boys had a blast with their Munga and Papa and Grant was asking when we were going back the day after we got home.

Some of the fun activities included:
Attending a couple 4th of July BBQ's
Shopping (without kids!)
Catching an evening showing of Eclipse with my mom (it was definitely the best of the series)
Eating delicious food... all day
Hanging out with the family
Listening to Ryan and my mom talk politics
and last, but not least
Hitting up the Beach!!

I love going to the beach and since we are hardly able to go now, here are a ton of pictures to commemorate the event. We all had a blast. The boys loved the sand, loved the water, and even loved keeping their hats on (which was a surprise).

We kept the boys nice and covered in their T-shirt suits and hats, and they did not get burned. Ryan and I on the other hand, looked akin to lobsters later that day.

My mom, who is probably not a middle-of-the-day-heat beach person, was a trooper and came with us. She helped keep the boys happy, hydrated and entertained so Ryan and I could actually play out in the water for a bit.

We never made that awesome sand castle but the moat turned out pretty cool.

Ryan had a good grip on the boys to keep the current from getting them (which is surprisingly strong!). And yes, that white farmers-tan skin is what became lobster red later that day.