The Lakehouse (Mass Trip Part 3)

Man was it hot while we were there!  We get over 100 every summer in Utah, but that's nothing compared to 100s with insane humidity!  Luckily for us, we had a cool lake to beat the heat with.  (and we did because the lake house is not air conditioned...)

 Peach, sporting the adorable swim suit Nanie and Gampie got her for Easter.

 Showing me one of her latest finds- an old rusty nail.

 Jay's little sister, K has become quite the swimmer since I've met her.

 Exploring the tubes.

 Siblings sitting in a kayak together.  The Frog loved taking these out with mom or dad.

I took this to show off The Frog's amazing farmer tan.

 Peach LOVES the water.  Her favorite thing to do is splash- even though she mostly just gets herself in the face.

 K again.  (side note, isn't she so lucky to look good with wet hair?  I, on the other hand, look bald...)

Jay's older bro, Uncle Joe.

 You know it's hot if Nanie will get in the water :)

We all got to go tubing too.  Though The Frog didn't love the tubing part, he really liked riding in the boat.

 Gampie, K, and Jay all got to go at the same time!

 The Frog LOVED trying to find frogs and salamanders- though once he discovered the salamanders, he refused to walk into the lake through the shallow part because he was afraid he'd step on some.  He opted for jumping off the dock instead (which I, sadly, have no pictures of)

 A frog I found for The Frog.  Unlike his Uncle, though, I would not pick it up for him :)

 Look at this crazy scary spider hanging out on the dock.  Gives me the heebie jeebies.

 Some gorgeous lilies Joe planted.

 One of the neighboring lake houses has a really cool inflatable "raft" that The Frog liked to call "the bouncy raft" because he liked jumping on it and making people fall off.  (at least he thought he was making people fall off :) )  It was too far for him to swim there, though Jay liked to swim.   So Jay would pull The Frog in a kayak.  Well one day, The Frog fell asleep in the kayak on the swim back.  He stayed asleep there for quite awhile.  So cute!

 Showing off his latest salamander catch.

 The Frog did such a great job swimming, I couldn't believe it!  He would jump off the raft all the time and even swim under the raft.  (which I would NEVER do- too many spiders...)

 On the drive home from the lake house I always can't help but snicker at these two town names: Athol and Belchertown.  Makes me giggle even now :)

Berry Picking and Maine Lobstah (Mass trip part 2)

Though we spent most of our free time at Jay's parents' lake house, we also went blueberry picking at a nearby farm. 

  The Frog loved it and even though he picked a LOT of berries, when we were leaving the field I noticed he had left his bucket in one of the rows.

Me: Where's your bucket?
The Frog:  It's over there (pointing waaaaaay down at the other end of the row)
Me: Well we need to go get it.
The Frog: But I ate them all! (running after Nanie)

 So, I went to retrieve the bucket and sure enough, it was completely empty.

 Jay's little sister, K, showing off the haul.  Jay's mom made the best blueberry pie that night.  Seriously, the crust was EVEN better than my grandmas!  (and that's saying something!)

 They also had a few animals we could feed.  This particular goat was very friendly.

And no post is complete with a display of Peach's cuteness.

Another day we drove up to Maine and got lobstah rolls at this great place that had a playground outside for the kids!  Honestly, I think they were more interested in the surrounding forested area and all the great climbing rocks.

Happy 40th Anniversary! (Mass Trip Part 1)

Our family made our annual trip out to Mass to visit Nanie and Gampie this July.  We feel so lucky that Jay's job is flexible enough to allow us to stay for 2 weeks!  As always, we had a great time.  I can't believe it, but I FORGOT MY CAMERA.  Luckily, his parents let me use theirs.  I didn't have enough time to figure out the manual settings until midway through the trip, and for some reason, many of the photos got corrupted, but I'll share some that survived. 

Jay's parents celebrated their 40th anniversary this year and so he and his older sister decided to throw them a celebration.  We planned it for when our family was going to be out visiting them.

 Instead of a guest book that they would flip through once and never again, we decided it would be fun to have people write well-wishes on river rocks and place them in a vase as a home decor reminder.

I don't have any pictures of the final result, but I think it looks really great!

Kids' table:

 Jay's older sister made the beautiful cake herself!

 Jay's parents got married at the courthouse, so we thought it would be fun to have them cut the cake for us :)

 I'm realizing now that most of the pictures were taken before or after the event since Jay and I spent most of the time being reminded why we never take our kids to restaurants...

Someone brought this lovely bouquet (stuck full of $5 and $10 bills), I just had to take a picture :)

CA Cousins!

We had SUCH a great time visiting our California cousins!  So much so that we forgot to take pictures more than a couple of times...  My brother took the kids for rides on his long board. 

  I started taking pictures, my 5-year-old niece says to me, "I can take pictures!  I know how."  And promptly took over my camera.  I'm actually very impressed by many of them!

 I love that you can tell she took them because of the angle of the adults:

 I loved seeing The Frog in one of his cousin's pink and purple helmet.

Even though the parents stayed up late, talking every night, I hadn't had so much sleep in a long time because The Frog slept with the girls and so he'd wake them up at the crack of dawn every morning, instead of me.  They all ate toast together and then played in their room until I was woken up by Peach around 7.  It was AWESOME.  Also, either Peach slept all night, or I just couldn't hear her because she didn't wake up in the middle of the night even ONCE while we were there.  That alone was a huge incentive for me to move in permanently :)

 On the 4th of July, we had a super fun pool-party/BBQ at my sister-in-law's parents' house.  Everyone had a blast!

 Cousin kisses!

 In case anyone is wondering, yes this did end up in the pool at one point, thanks to I'll-give-you-one-guess-who.  Luckily, it floats!

 Peach absolutely loves swinging (as opposed to The Fearless Frog who doesn't).

 The Frog kept letting her run into him and they both thought it was completely hilarious.

Thanks so much bro!  We hope you all had as much fun as we did!  You'll have to be careful giving us such a good time, or we might try to come again sooner than you're ready to have us! :)

On the Road to CA

We took a road trip to visit my brother's family in Southern California.  We had SUCH a blast, but the trip out there was admittedly a bit more exciting than we bargained for...

 Peach gearing up for her first road trip ever!

 We brought our iPad for The Frog, thinking he would be all set watching movies the whole time, but surprisingly, he didn't want to watch ANY.  I think he gets car-sick like his dad...  Luckily, he did amazingly well on the long drive.

 He learned how to wash the windows and insisted on doing it at every gas station.

We slept over in Las Vegas the first night- Holiday Inn.  It was a great price and the pool was clean and fairly empty, BUT when Peach crawled around on the carpeted floor in our room, her hands and the tops of her feet were instantly BLACK.  YUCK!  It made it really hard to be there since we couldn't let her play on the floor after that and she didn't yet have the sense not to fall off the beds.  But the REAL adventure started the next day.

When we got to the place in CA where they make sure you're not bringing any produce-- all the stop and go, and WICKED heat (above 100) caused our car to vapor lock (at least that's what we think it was since our car was low on gas) so we had to be pushed to the side of the road to let us cool down.  LUCKILY our car started again after about 15 minutes and we made it to the next exit to fill up, which just happened to be the place we planned to stop at.  We noticed that our battery light was on, which was weird since we had replaced our battery within the last 3 years.

Since we made it to our rest stop- Calico Ghost Town- we just parked and decided to deal with it later.

 Even though there was a train to ride and a mine to "tour", we found the place to be non-eventful and definitely not geared for families.  The whole place was basically a bunch of trinkets shops- sooo not our thing.  Not to mention we had to pay to get into the place and then we had to pay AGAIN to ride the train and again to go in the mine.  And did I mention it was wicked hot?  We had originally planned to eat lunch there, but after checking out our 3 options, we opted to go back on the road and find something else.  Yeah, we left very grumpy, hungry, sweaty, and out $20- it was sooo not worth it.  I'm very glad we at least didn't have to pay an entrance fee for the kids.

 Jack was really mad we couldn't take the (really really slow, short) train ride again.

  You can see how hot we are by the glistening skin and bright red cheeks.

Once we got back in the even hotter car, we discovered our AC wasn't working.  So we went back to the gas station, where I had to BUY a cup of ice (for putting down shirts of course), tried to find the healthiest, kid-friendly foods I could to make us to the next place where we could actually eat something appetizing, in an air-conditioned environment.

THEN we just got on the onramp and I realized I didn't know where my phone was (a typical Libby maneuver).  Jay pulls over on the onramp and we look all over the car.  Nowhere.  Jay takes off running (in the heat) back to the gas station to see if we drove off with it on the roof or something.  I say a prayer and I instantly find it!  (I can't even tell you how many times I've had this work.  Seriously...)  I call Jay and he runs back.

Did I mention that my husband's the best!

The kids were VERY upset and so I opted to sit in the back of our Civic, squished between two carseats, to try to keep them somewhat abated.  This is Jay's attempt at taking a picture without looking, while driving :)

We finally get back to civilization and see a McDonald's sign, thinking a play-place would be great about now.  We go in, no play place. :(  At least there was air-conditioning!

Back in the car, I call my sister-in-law and ask her if she knows a good mechanic we can get our car checked-out by when we get there.  Luckily they have a fantastic one, who they trust, and he specializes in Hondas.  We give him a call to try to make an appt and he asks us what's going on.  He tells us there's something wrong with our alternator and we should pull over as soon as we can because there's no way were going to make it all the way, given the amount of time we've already been driving on our battery.  (AND we've been having the fan on full-blast).

Right after we get off the phone with him, our blinkers/windows/every auxiliary requiring electricity stops working.  We have to stop in San Bernardino, the next city.  Thank GOODNESS for iPhones!  We were able to look up a place, while driving, call them and make sure we could get fixed RIGHT NOW, and also get directions to the place.  We are SO lucky we made it there because our car died 5 minutes after pulling in.  We also found out that we picked the only auto-repair shop in town with AC.  I can't tell you how lucky we are.  We ended up going to Eddie's Auto Care.  I have to give them a shout out because they were SO awesome.  Once they discovered the problem- one of our belts broke- and they figured out how long it was going to take- and they noticed that we had two small kids that would have to wait in the small waiting area, the owner (Eddie) gave us his car to drive to a Chuckie Cheese so we would have something for our kids to do.  Seriously people!!  How nice is that?!  We are so grateful to those people for making a potentially terrible experience, just a minor inconvenience.  If your car ever breaks down around there, I highly recommend them :)

After that, we got to our destination with AC and no traffic (truly a miracle!)  We feel so lucky that things worked out so well, despite everything!