July 5, 2006

Happy Day after the 4th of July!

This was the weekend of vacations around here. Grammie and Pop-pop went to Detroit for a wedding. My parents are on a 6 week long odyssey traveling the north-east and up into the Maritime provences. Last I heard, they were in New York. Crissy and her little boys took a train to Grandma's house and Ariel went with her parents to Texas. My family's vacation was somewhat more local, we went up to Breckenridge for the weekend.

We left Saturday morning, and on the way up the hill, we stopped in Silver Plume and rode the Georgetown train and did the option silver mine tour. The boys likes it, but it was a bit long and Adam especially got antsy.

Sunday morning, we rode our bikes to Frisco (well, Jeremy and I rode, the boys sat in the trailer). We found a nice park in Frisco and the boys played. And Jeremy and I discovered that if he rides his cross-bike pulling a 70 lbs trailer, we are just about equalized. Good to know for future rides. In the afternoon, we went down to Breckenridge and got caught in a rainstorm. We hid out in Starbucks for nearly an hour until Jeremy ran back and got the car. In the evening we took a little walk outside to the beaver pond, only to discover that it was no more. But we had seen one on the road, so we drove over to that one and saw two beavers. The boys got to see them too, but just barely. We kept telling them to be quiet so the beavers wouldn't hide and Adam finally said, "I can't be quiet!" After the boys went to bed, I went back down to the pond and took over 100 pictures. Hey, I've never seen a beaver in the wild before, either!

On Monday, given the weather pattern, we decided we should do our outdoor activity as early as possible. We took a 50 minute "hike" around the top of the hill. Sadly for us, we forgot to pack bug stray, and non-whining children. Adam didn't like the pack, Alex didn't like walking and we all got tons of skeeter bites. On the way back down, I tried to duplicate my dad's Bertina hiking stories for Alex, making them age appropriate by changing Bertina's 1950 horror movie adventures to a squirrel named Milkweed who went on a hike with his friend Squirrel Nutkin. That worked, and Alex told us more squirrel stories all afternoon. After our hike, we went down to Breckenridge to see the Art festival, but got caught in another downpour. This time we were at the mini-mall with a bookstore.

Originally we had planned to do some summit county 4th activities, but with the weather we decided to head back early on Tuesday. I took Alex to the firework show in town. He stayed up until 9:45 and was a good camper until the show started. It was much larger and much louder than he had anticipated and he immediately asked to go home. We stayed for the show (and I took another 70 pictures) and he almost enjoyed it (huddled behind my back) until the grand finale, which WAS a bit bright and loud.

Pictures from this weekend can be found here.

7:00 Drop off, Ariel was asleep in her carseat.

9:00 Ariel finally woke up.

9:05 I changed a poopy

9:10 Bottle. I put Ariel in the exosaucer to get ready to go and Alex told me Ariel had another tooth. I have no idea what Alex actually saw, but Ariel does indeed have another tooth, the upper right center.

9:40 We walked to the library. And didn't stop at Starbucks. I had Alex ride in the stroller because we had left to late to walk at his snail pace. Ariel dozed a bit in the bjorn.

10:15 Storytime at the library. Today the library lady read a book that scared Alex so much that he had to get up and come over to me. Something about swamp monsters. Alex is very sensitive.

11:00 Walk home. Ariel dozed again.

11:40 Got home.

11:55 I tried to feed Ariel lunch, but alas there was no baby food. And I didn't have any sweet pototoes for Adam either, so I just gave Ariel a bottle. We sat on the front porch so we could watch the roofing truck loading shingles accross the street.

12:15 Ariel played while the boys had a picnic lunch.

I'm going to make a wild guess here that the "my first doll" is a gift from Grandma.


Ariel is a chewing machine.


The boys had PB&J, apples, raisins and squeezey yogurt:


12:45 Ariel went down for a crib nap.

1:15 I got Adam down for a nap too.

2:00 I read Alex more of the library book we had just gotten. It's a Beaverly Cleary book and it's almost a chapter book. It's about 4 year old twins and Alex has a whole lot in common with both of them.

2:45 Adam and Ariel both woke up.

2:50 Ariel had a bottle

3:00 We walked to the grocery store for dinner (no, I still haven't gotten my act together enough to meal plan). We got shrimp for dinner (cajun shrimp, cheese grits, green beans, spinach/tomato salad).

4:00 Got home. Ariel sat on the floor and played quietly with toys.

4:30 Pick up.