Just a reminder

Hey peeps! Just a reminder that I'm now blogging at http://thejoyoftoday.blogspot.com. Hope to see you there!

Moving

Billy and Green is officially packing up and moving!

Would you be so kind as to change your links, subscriptions, and the like? And then come visit me at my new home!

http://thejoyoftoday.blogspot.com

I Heart Faces- "Crazy, Silly, Funny Faces"

This week's photo challenge theme at I Heart Faces is "Crazy, Silly, Funny Faces". Not hard to come by when you live with Jack. ;)

Vacation pics- Part 3

I promise this will be the last of my long and drawn out series of vacation posts. (If you've actually read through all three of these posts you must really really love us.)

So we got to our campground at Lake Tahoe, intending to spend five nights there. The weather was sunny and low 80's during the day. Perfect. At night? High 30's. Not perfect.

We bundled up, zipped sleeping bags together, and Jace and I each took one of the big kids to snuggle with. The four of us were fine, but our poor Maizie Jay was waking up with a runny nose and icicles for fingers. And because I bundled her up so much, she couldn't roll over or really even move at all while she was sleeping. She was not a happy camper. (Pun totally intended.)

So after our Eagle Falls hike, we drove into Tahoe City to check out hotels. And in yet another total change of plans, we checked into a great little place for the next three nights at a very reasonable rate. (All in all we canceled nine nights worth of reservations for this vacation, and got all but $20 refunded. We were very thankful for that!)

This was the view from our room. Right on Lake Boulevard, and right across the street from our favorite ice cream shop. :)

I love this bike path. I only got to ride my bike once while we were there, but it was so worth it. I was smiling the entire time.
Future cyclist:
Fun with a bathroom mirror:

Playing at the beach:


We had so much fun in our little four-man raft:
Beach bums:

Our second hike at Tahoe was a 2 miler to Eagle Lake:




Our destination:

We found a secluded little spot to have our lunch. It was so pretty there!

We'll always we remember where we were the day Michael Jackson died:

Finally we hit the road again and headed for home. This little girl was not happy about being woken up for a potty break:

But her crankiness was quickly forgotten when she saw her baby sister:


Maizie was such a trooper:


And that concludes our marathon vacation post! It's safe to say we have fallen in love with Lake Tahoe and can't wait to go back again. Anyone want to join us???

I Heart Faces- My Story in Photos: The Summer Edition

I Heart Faces is hosting another week of "My Story in Photos", this time highlighting things your family loves to do in the summer. Without a doubt, my favorite thing to do in the summer is spend the day at the lake. I love being outside, and have a basic philosophy that if you put me in water, I'm happy. Combine the water and the great outdoors with some good food and fun friends, and you've got a perfect day!

We got to spend one such perfect day with some friends of ours this weekend at our favorite local lake. My sister and her friends ended up totally crashing our family date, but it turns out we kinda like those guys, so a good time was still had by all. ;)

Jace and the ladies playing at the splash pad. Maizie got her new legs this month, and she was toddling all around just loving the water.

Some nice people at a nearby picnic table offered us a bunch of their leftover birthday cake. Um...yes please.

Mr. Caleb, slowing down for a quick snuggle:

Delaney Leigh, talking on Daddy's phone. If memory serves, she was calling Seattle to talk to Princess Boy about reading books:

My girl:

My boy:

My baby:

I love how tiny she looks tucked under her daddy's arm:

Eating dinner:

Roasting marshmallows over the coals:
I could just grab this little watermelon...

...and eat her right up.

Friends.

Vacation pics- Part 2

Thanks for your encouraging comments on my last vacation post. :) Camping with little people is definitely different than camping pre-little-people, but we still love it. We just have to adjust our expectations a lot. It doesn't really make for the kind of vacation that's super relaxing. But still lots of fun. :)

Our idea to take a road trip this summer came into being this spring when we were making the five-hour drive back from my hometown, and talking as we often do about how much we love road trips and how much we look forward to when our kids are old enough to take on a road trip. And then it just kind of donned on us, "Why not now?"

So we brainstormed all the easiest snacks and meals to eat on the road, packed lots of books, brought the training potty in case of an emergency, remembered to take lots of breaks, and held on very loosely to our "plans".

And really, I think their little ages were almost kind of perfect, because at this age they're so easily enthused. Our vacation was just one long string of adventures, and as long as Mom and Dad kept a good attitude, our kids would for the most part follow suit.

So here are some more photos that Hubby rescued off my hard drive. :)

I neglected to include these photos of the Painted Hills in my last post. We stopped to see these on Day #2 of our drive to Tahoe. They were amazing. This is the type of thing I love about road trips. We totally weren't planning to stop here; just happened to see the sign and said, "Hey, lets go there!" It put us twelve miles and at least an hour off our course but it was so worth it!

For all you science nerds:
Some time past the Painted Hills we drove by this tree that was absolutely in the middle of nowhere. So. Random.

We finally made it to Tahoe! It is so beautiful there.

Exploring the beach at our campground. It was gorgeous and not at all crowded. There were even a few big trees on the beach so we could put Maizie's pack'n'play in the shade. Perfect.

Our first day in Tahoe we drove around the lake a bit and did some sightseeing. We had our lunch at this great little playground:

My kids have seriously never been filthier:

Each day we would do something fun and active in the morning, have lunch, and then spend the rest of the afternoon at the beach. So our second day there we did a 3 mile hike down to Vikingsholm and Eagle Falls. Our kids were definitely pooped by the end of that hike! But oh it was pretty:

Maizie Jay asleep in the Ergo:

Vikingsholm:

You had to pay for a tour and we weren't interested. So I snapped a couple pictures through the glass:

Right as we started up toward the waterfall Delaney had to go to the bathroom, so Jace said he would take her and catch up with us. In the meantime, Jack and Maizie and I took a wrong turn and hiked half a mile in the wrong direction. OOPS! Fortunately we caught up with Jace and D fairly easily.

Nothing like hiking your heart out in the totally wrong direction:

Stopping for a rest to let Jace and D catch up with us. (It took me a looong time to consider that I'd taken a wrong turn.)

We finally made it to Eagle Falls:

Laughing baby

I'm still waiting for all my files to be transferred off of my hard drive. In the meantime I pulled some files off Jace's camera so I would have something to play with on my new puter, and found this cute video of Maizie laughing.

If the laundry pile in the background impresses you, please know it was only in its beginning stages at that time. Who has time for laundry when there are babies to be tickled?!

The boy turns five

A trip to the zoo with your whole family...

plus a ride on the zoo train...

plus your requested birthday dinner of chicken nuggets, organic spaghetti-o's, corn on the cob, and watermelon...

plus presents...

plus lots of people who really love you...

plus one "forgotten" gift waiting outside for you...

plus a monster truck ice cream cake made with love by your mother...

...equals one happy five-year-old.

Happy birthday my sweet Jack!
We love you so much!!!

Jack's flowers

My computer finally puked yesterday. It's been ill for quite some time now. I'd really love to finish posting our vacation photos, but when you add my computer problems to the fact that I feel like there are a bazillion things going on right now that are of higher priority than blogging (like keeping my head above the laundry pile), I start thinking that maybe those vacation pics will be up by Christmas. *shrug* So be it.

For now my Tahoe photos are on my other hard drive waiting to be extracted (fingers crossed), and I've been spending the last hour playing around on the new laptop Jace brought home for me this morning, and trying to figure out if I like it.

(It comes as no surprise to me that my hubby replaced my computer less than 24 hours after it crashed. You have to understand that used computers fly in and out of our home at an astonishing rate. Computers and old cars. Always coming and going.)

So I took some pictures of Jack's flowers. He really wanted to plant flowers in our garden this year so I let him pick out any seed packet he wanted. He chose dwarf zinnias, which was funny to me because out of an entire wall of flower seeds, he picked exactly the kind that I would have picked. I like them because they're cute, bright, and cheerful, and he likes them because they start with a "z". :)

Vacation pics- Part 1

It's taking me a long time to edit all our vacation photos, so I'm just going to post them as I finish.

I refer to this whole vacation as our "Plan C" vacation. We originally had ten nights worth of reservations made for a trip to Yellowstone (tent camping there and all along the way), but poor weather forecasts led us to cancel all those reservations the day before we left, and make new ones. New destination: Lake Tahoe. Yay for Plan B! But in spite of ten days worth of new reservations, we ended up sticking to our plans for only three of those ten days. Yay for Plan C!

We had a goal of leaving town by 10:00, but due to some packing procrastination and our excitement over a visit from our friends Alan and Kacey, we didn't get on the road until 2:00. That type of delay equals every husband's nightmare, but Jace did a great job controlling his anxiety. Ahhh...off to a good start:

Road tripping with three small children requires lots of stops to stretch legs, eat snacks, and go potty. (Did I mention that Delaney potty trained herself four days before our departure? That made things interesting.) Our first stop was an elementary school playground:




Our late start meant we wouldn't arrive at our pre-planned destination until 9pm. (Think three cranky kids and Daddy pitching our ginormous tent in the dark.) At 5:30 we passed a little campground just outside Prineville that had availability, and saw our opportunity to avoid some stress. It was the prettiest little campground, and our site backed to a lake view. Thank you Lord!

"Scootering":
Hot dogs and macaroni. A very standard camping meal.


The best part of camping is hanging out around the fire with my honey:
Cuddle bugs:
Fun with the camera while we quietly wait for Dad and Delaney to wake up:

I love this boy:
Day two started without a hitch, and we were back on the open road:
Day two ended with a hitch when we realized we were supposed to camp in this weather:
We decided a hotel room would better suit us that evening.
By day three the weather had cleared up. We had lunch at a park before driving the final stretch to Lake Tahoe:

Playing tag is a fun way to burn off energy: