Camping Trial Run

We made last minute plans to go camping for two nights Memorial Day Weekend.  The weather looked great and we thought it would be a good trial run for our summer road trip.  This was our first camping trip since last summer and first ever two-night camping trip with the kids.  We went about an hour northeast to Squire Creek Park, a small county park we found online on a whim.  It went really well, although by the end of the trip we had a long list of things to replace, buy and organize.  For example, a new can opener, dish towels, measuring cups, better knives, etc. and most importantly extra blankets, which would come in handy on extra cold nights or when someone pees in their sleeping bag at 3am (Grace).

Here's a videos of the kids at the campsite (I hope it doesn't scare any of you away who are planning on camping with us soon).

Click Here for Camping Video

Mother's Day

The day before Mother's Day I got the whole afternoon to myself.  I went shopping, worked on some things for class and bought a new camera lens (to replace the one I dropped in Kauai).  It was wonderful and very productive to be by myself.  Matt even got my my favorite cheesecake to enjoy when I got home.

We spent Mother's Day at the beach on Jetty Island with Eben and Johanna and their two kids Eddison (4) and Charlotte (2).  Grace and Eddison love playing together, Charlotte mostly follows them around and Jake does his own thing.

The island is a quick 5 minute boat ride across the channel, which was a good thing because Jake hated wearing a life jacket and made sure we knew it!  He also, apparently hates sand.  We were at the beach for about 5 hours and Jake refused to put his feet in the sand the entire time, even to go play in the water.  He did seem to have fun just watching the kids play and sitting on Mom or Dad.  The good thing was we didn't worry about him running off, like he usually does.

Grace, on the other hand, loved being at the beach.  She ran around the whole time, playing in the water, building forts, finding bugs and many other things.  She even loved her life jacket and wore it on the beach.

Here's a few pictures, including one right after Matt tried making Jake stand on the sand and one where Jake would not sit down until I wiped a little bit of sand off the chair.

Kauai!!!

Kauai was awesome.  We had three full days and 4 nights.  We went on an hour long helicopter ride (getting to see most of the island); we went on an 8 mile hike to a 300ft tall waterfall; and we lounged on the beach and went snorkeling (where we saw a sea turtle).  We had lots of amazing pictures, I tried to narrow it down to my favorites and ended up with 25.