Summer Vacation 2010, Part 1

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Suzanne

I mentioned that part of the reason I was taking a blog break was because of our family vacation…that vacation is, sadly, now over, and now it’s time for the reminisicing. Oh, and the getting back to working.

I’m going to be posting about our vacation, and this is going to be some of that self-serving navel gazing that I’m sure some haters of personal blogs abhor. I’m mostly doing this for me, and to share with remote family members, but anyone is welcome to come along on our Summer Vacation Extravaganza recap — you just have to remember that you’ve been warned that it might be boring. Especially because it’s probably going to take me about 2 weeks to do all of it: we have almost 1300 pictures to get through.

Our vacation started on July 3rd.

The hardest part about going on vacation is leaving these two behind:

By this point, the suitcases have alerted the doggies to something of a foreboding nature, and their fears are being realized. Their people are piling into this:

And are getting ready to leave.

Packing for a 2 week vacation and having that entire truckbed was like a miracle compared to previous trips, in which we crammed into my Honda Accord. We had all kinds of stuff with us, and it was awesome.

The truck also rode pretty nicely with the weight in the back.

The boys spent a lot of the trip like this:

(That would be…plugged into one electronic device or another. Playing games or watching movies or listening to music…). They did also spend a lot of time reading, but the electronics made the 3770 miles in the truck much more bearable than any traveling I remember doing as a kid. Plus, we don’t put up with the “are we there yet” questions: we point at the GPS and the GPS tells them if we are there yet or not, and if not: how much longer it’ll be.

Our first major stop was:

OK, not really, but it is where we ate for lunch that first day. Don’t worry, I didn’t take pictures of all of the restaurants we ate at. Just the first one. We tried really hard to limit ourselves to ONE Fast Food restaurant per day. ONE serving of french fries and ONE soft drink per day (and less if we could manage it).

Interestingly, of the fast food joints we did go to, McD’s was consistently the best in terms of customer service (fastest, best at getting our orders correct, etc…). We had terrible luck at Wendy’s, Subway, Pizza Hut (which isn’t fast food, but still, it was horrible), and Burger King was OK, but McD’s always came through for us.

Our actual destination that day was in:

Mark’s Aunt and Uncle live north of Omaha, so we stopped to visit with them, and Mark’s cousin and her family. (A family which grew by one baby girl 2 days after we were there. We were hoping baby would have arrived BEFORE we did. Oh well, we had a good time being entertained by baby’s big sister (who is all of 2 years old…).

Much of the time we were there was spent playing with rubber band guns of various sizes:

(Yes, that is a rubberband gun. Ridiculous, isn’t it?)

Even the big kid got into the rubberband act.They also got to go outside and shoot balloons with BB guns. Oh, and I think they used apples as targets, too.

When we left the next morning, we left behind rubberbands allover the place. I felt badly, but Mark’s Aunt didn’t seem to mind — if we hadn’t left when we did, we might not have escaped (the boys would have gladly spent 2 weeks just shooting rubberbands…), plus she said it made her nostalgic for the days when her son was leaving rubberbands all over the house. (Her son is the young man that just graduated from West Point).

So, that was Day 1 of our big adventure. More tomorrow.

Over the river and through the woods

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Suzanne

OK, so we didn’t go to Grandmother’s house, but I did go away — did you miss me?

I missed all of you, and I’m back now, and Wow! It’s 2009! How did that happen?

When last I posted, I was lamenting the fact that the boys weren’t going to get to go skiing. Well, turns out they did go skiing that day and had a marvelous time. And then Suzanne tried not to have a cow because they drove home in the dark and in the snow, and took about an hour longer than they should have.

Mark’s 25 year old ski boot cracked and he said he thought about calling me and saying “Guess what got broken?”

I told him that if he HAD made that phone call with that kind of question right off the bat, I might have had to kill him.

Our little mini-vacation took us norht (yes, it was colder there, but…we were inside so it was OK). We went to the Mall of America, shopped on the way up on Monday, spent Tuesday at the amusement park in the mall, then came home on Wednesday. We actually had a nice time (and I scored some pretty good stuff on SALE).

Joe discovered how much he really loves roller coasters, and Will discovered that one of the roller coasters wasn’t that bad and that it was really fun to make MOM go on it and sit across from her and watch her face (and listen to her scream). It’s kind of a weird coaster — you sit in a 4 person car that spins as it is hurtling along the track. No big dips, no loops (I do NOT do upside down…), and so Will thought it was OK.

One of the highlights of my day was meeting up with Mary for lunch. I had met her in person before, and when I knew we were going to make the trip, I e-mailed and asked her if she was available. I actually thought I was going to go downtown to meet her, but then our plans ended up changing, and she was willing to take the light rail out to the mall to meet me. It worked out nicely and we had a great time. She MADE me buy some stuff at the bead store. I didn’t even know there WAS a bead store.

penguin beads Over the river and through the woods

Over the river and through the woods

It’s too dark in here to get very good pictures, but I think you can see how (a) adorable the penguin beads are (they stand about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch tall) and (b) how pretty the glass beads are. I might try to take better pictures tomorrow in the light.

Don’t know what I’m going to do with them, probably just look at them for awhile.

I was going to babble about some other stuff tonight, but then I got sidetracked looking for something in my browsing history and…it’s now midnight and I really ought to be in bed so…

I’ll babble more tomorrow!

Suzanne

Too cute

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Suzanne

One of the main highlights of our vacation was getting to meet this cutie-pie — my 5 month old niece Hannah. (Apologies for the picture, Mark’s camera was on a goofy setting early in the trip, resulting in some grainy indoor pictures). She was such a trooper on this trip. She spent a lot of the time in a carrier strapped to either her Mom or her Dad. And during the trip, my brilliant sister managed to dress Hannah in a whole bunch of the cute clothes that I had bought. The shirt she’s wearing here, for example. As you can probably guess from the drool on her face, she’s working on teeth. If you ever got your fingers near her mouth, she grabbed them and started sucking/chewing on them. About the funniest thing was her interest in food. She hasn’t started eating solids yet, but boy howdy is she interested. She’d track your fork from your plate to your mouth and would try grabbing for everything.

My boys were never that interested in solid food. And once we started baby food, they weren’t that keen on moving to big people food. I was worried we were going to be feeding them pureed mush for ever. Thankfully, they’ve turned out to be pretty good eaters. There are a lot of things they don’t like, but remarkably, they eat them anyway. I’m pretty sure that when I was their age I would have just refused to eat the food.

This one is Hannah’s big brother, Colin. He’s helping Grampa Carl steer the boat. Sort of. I think this was more of a picture opportunity than anything else. His wardrobe seemed to consist mostly of shirts with sharks on them. And of course, his Bruce the Shark hat. He is 2.5 and he is so sweet with his sister. If she got moved, he wanted to know where she was. And the kisses — he gave her lots of kisses. I’m sure she’ll annoy him once she is mobile and trying to play with his toys, but for now, he seems pretty thrilled to be a big brother.

Spending time with Hannah and Colin, while fun, reminded me that I really am glad to be done with having small kids. They were a lot of work! Will and Joe aren’t old enough to be allowed to just roam around a theme park on their own, but at least I wasn’t worried about keeping my eyes on them every second. I’m also pretty sure that I wouldn’t have wanted to spend 3500 miles in a car with Will and JOe when they were 2.5, we would have definitely sprung for those plane tickets. In fact, I guess we did — our first trip with them to Florida was at that age. Oddly, I am unable to find those pictures. I know they were digital, but….where are they????

I’m sort of rambling now, and really ought to just wrap this up and try to get something done. Monday was super-productive, yesterday: not so much. But today’s another day!

Later -
Suzanne

Things We Did Not Complain About

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Suzanne

Shortly before we left, I was at the library, talking to my sister-in-law and to the library director (who has grown-up children). She was telling us that when her kids were younger and they’d take family trips, they took along a journal. If you wanted to complain about something, you couldn’t do it out loud: complaints had to be written in the journal.

We decided to give this idea a try, and quite frankly it was fabulous. For one thing, everyone thought really hard about whether or not whatever they wanted to complain about was worth writing in the journal for posterity. And it injected a lot of humor into situations to have someone ask “do you need the journal?” or to be simply told “Tell it to the journal!”

There was a bit of cheating: some of us were heard to say things like “My back hurts. Not that I’m complaining!” And at one point, Mark had to dictate his entry (he was driving at the time and needed to complain about his sore backside.

One of the things we didn’t complain about was the price of gas. We spent about $400 for gas (3500 miles!), averaging about 33 miles to the gallon. A lot of money, but still quite a bit less than 4 plane tickets, and we would have had to rent a car while we were down there anyway.

OK, we might have complained a little bit at the gas station where it was $4.20/gallon, but mostly, gas prices seemed to be right around $4/gallon.

Mark did the bulk of the driving, so I can’t complain about having to do much driving. I did do a lot of knitting. A lot. 3500 miles turns out to be about 58 hours in the car.

First up is this baby sweater:

It’s knit in one piece, still needs to be blocked, the side seams sewn together, and ribbons attached to the front for a closure. It’s made out of washable wool, and the color is much prettier. I should have waited to take a better picture in better light.

Next, we have this dishcloth. I needed the yarn needle in order to bury ends on the sweater, so we went to a Wal-Mart in Kentucky. I had to get some Peaches and Creme cotton yarn while I was there, so I could make this:

This next oen looks like a big old lump of nothing right now, but trust me, it’s going to be another felted bag. I got the circular base done, plus 14 rows up the sides done.

And lastly, another dishcloth started:

So there you have it: knitting my way to Florida and back. Much more portable than trying to bind a queen-size quilt in the front seat.

Oh! Something else I didn’t have to complain about: my feet!!! My new Keen sandals are amazingly awesome. They have changed my life, and I need to save my pennies to buy more styles.

On Friday, I switched to socks and my nearly brand-new Nikes. After about two hours of those, my feet were killing me. We were minutes away from our 4 hour/4 mile hike through Mammoth Cave, and I made Mark go back to the car to get my Keen’s so I could switch. The relief was almost instantaneous. He thought I was nuts, but it is the absolute truth.

Now, time to tackle some of the mammoth lists I’ve got going, it’s nice to be home, but Wow, I have a LOT to do.

Suzanne

Dude. Put on a shirt.

Posted on July 13, 2008 by Suzanne

I’m probably going to jump around as far as what I tell you about regarding our trip, and just tell you snippets, rather than a chronological rundown of events.

There were a couple of must-dos on our collective list, and Seaworld was one of them. (My 2 year old nephew is a huge shark fan). We did that on Saturday the 5th, and since it was the 4th of July weekend, everybody and their brother was there. Well, I was with my sister, but you get the picture.

I knew it was going to be hot. What I didn’t know was that everyone and their brother (or sister) was going to be half-naked. Good lord there was a lot of skin showing. Skin that should have stayed hidden.

Dudes. Put your shirts back on. Or if you are going to wear a bikini, do us the favor of standing up straight, so your belly rolls aren’t quite so prominent.

(My sister and I, and the rest of our families kept our shirts on.)

We got to see Shamu and his pals. The most incredible part of the show with Shamu was the humans, I thought. The ones that went under and stayed under for a really long time before they came shooting out of the water with their killer whale pals.

As much as we enjoyed Shamu, I thought the dolphin show was more interesting. Maybe because they always have a bunch of bottlenose dolphins doing tricks, and they are a little more “high-flying” than the killer whales.

And yes, I know that technically Shamu and his pals are dolphins, too.

We tried to get a picture of the shark-lover and his older cousins, but he wasn’t too interested.

We have several priceless pictures of him frowning. Will, on the right, doesn’t look very happy either.

I am happy to report that because I kept my shirt on most of the time (as well as a lot of sunscreen), I only suffered minor sunburning once (because I forgot to reapply after a dip in the Gulf). In fact, I think the only person that did burn was my sister, who also forgot to reapply after a swim.

Next time: knitting my way to Florida and back.

Suzanne