Paper Dresses

Ever since Annalise and I read about the little girl who makes paper dresses with her mom, she has liked to do the same.  We don't do this very often, but it is fun and pretty easy and I have learned to take pictures immediately because they are not comfortable and don't stay on long!

They wanted to make one for Irene, but that will have to wait a while!

Extreme Cooking

Both ends of the spectrum...

Dog Wash

Prime Entertainment

Natalie Turns Five

When Natalie woke up Tuesday morning, she ran to me and said, "I want to put on a beautiful dress!"  I knew the one she wanted and it is not the one she ended up wearing!  But she looked beautiful in this dark green one and had a very happy day.

She told us a few days ago that on her birthday she wanted to go to a restaurant that served drinks in wine glasses.  After I explained to her that restaurants, no matter how fancy, don't give wine glasses to children, I found a wine glass for her to drink from at home for the day. 

Birthday Breakfast

The good stuff!

C & A have been going to a night VBS all week, so we took Natalie out for dinner to Samurai:

She requested icing roses - these turned out better than Annalise's!

Birthday Glow!

(Proof that C & A were there!  Irene was asleep)

I feel almost in denial that she could be five already.  It seems like she was just born, the time slipped by so quickly.   She is smart, sweet, and thoughtful.  As soon as all the gift opening was over, she sat down and made a "Thank You" note for me!  It read "T-H-A-N" which I had spelled out to her, but she didn't ask past the N, I guess she figured that was enough!  She loves to dress up and wear lots of jewelry!  She also loves shoes - which is why her gold sandal is on the table, because we gave her a pair of shoes that she wanted to put on immediately.

11 Months Old

These days, getting Irene to hold still for a picture can be a challenge!

Unless she's sleeping!

This little lady is 11 months old - she crawls, she points, she babbles almost as much as Natalie talks!  She says mama and dada - usually not on cue - and doh, for dog (mostly) - and she really really likes dogs!  She also likes babies and little kids and usually makes this funny inhaling shrieking sound when she sees another baby.  She is not far from walking, it is like a loose tooth - I've learned that it can happen really quick or take a while.

Caleb said something funny about Irene.  He said, "Wouldn't it be funny if Irene had been triplets!"  Funny indeed! 

Wooo Pig Sooie!

After only about 2500 miles, we made it to my parents' house in Arkansas.  Some highlights:

The Lake Erie catch was fried and consumed.

We met Nip and Tuck - my parents' somewhat new dogs.

More fishing!

More more fishing!!!

Hangin' with UB

Lake DeGray

Irene with my folks and very deliberately not looking at the camera. 

 There are big bushes on three of the corners of the driveway and we found nests in all three of them.  One had been abandoned.

Mockingbird eggs!

The parents of these chicks were golden colored.  The mother either had a very short tail or had lost part of it.

 And you're not having fun until you burn something...

This is becoming a tradition!

Two of my cousins came to visit with their kids and both have boys about Annalise's age.  Caleb had a lot of fun playing in muddy water with both of them.  I thought it was funny when Caleb asked one, "So, what do you have at your house that I don't have at mine?"

Lodging

We have some friends who like to "drive through the night" to save on travel expenses - that is not our style! We are all about being frugal, but on the one trip we "drove through" on, we discovered that sleep is pretty important to us.

What we usually do is buy a room through Priceline.  This sometimes works out alright, sometimes flops, and sometimes exceeds our expectations.  Here is how we do it - as we get close to where we'd like to stop we go onto the Priceline website and select the city - they usually offer a list of nearby places to expand the search and sometimes that works for us, but usually we are pretty narrow about where we will stop.  We pick the highest star level available and bid $56.  If the highest star level is a 2, we will bid lower, but usually that is a good guess for a 2 1/2 star hotel.  Typically they reject that bid and we bump up to $61 and add an option.  It is actually a better strategy to select only one area on the first round because you have to add an option on the 2nd bid and that is an easy one to do without lowering the star rating.  We got all our hotels this trip for $61 or under, but that is not always the case.

Our first night we got a Ramada and it was very nice and clean - the breakfast area was meticulously maintained and had a going up into the mountains kind of feel to it.

Our 2nd night we got a Microtel and possibly overpaid - we certainly didn't get an incredible deal, but it still seemed like a good deal because the room didn't have any odor and the desk clerk immediately noticed we had a baby and offered to get us a crib.  Three funny things about this place - one wall was all mirrors, the tv was placed on top of a wardrobe nearly touching the ceiling, and the attentive desk clerk was also simultaneously playing a game on his iPhone while he got the crib and helped us into the room.  Talk about multitasking!  Fortunately it was so late, I was giddy and thought it was all funny.

We stayed in a hotel in Columbus, but that one doesn't fit into this post.

The 3rd place was sort of a dive.  It was a Days Inn and I have stayed in worse places, but we overpaid even the advertised price, the room stank, the carpet was dirty, etc. etc.  The saving grace of this place is that the area had just had an emergence of 17-year cicadas and the kids thought they were really cool.  So we paid for the educational experience!

"Look deep into my eyes..."

Our last night on the road we stopped in Ocala, Florida and with our first bid got a 3 star hotel - The Ocala Hilton.  We had planned to get up early and get home a.s.a.p., but as soon as I looked at their website, I knew that wouldn't happen - they have a resident Clydesdale!

Annalise and Buddy

They also had a hot tub, so we took time to swim and see Buddy.  Buddy had two friends who were Thoroughbreds - evidently old ones, they were all very mild tempered horses.  They have bags of horse treats in the lobby to feed them.

It is probably good the Hilton was last because it left us with a favorable impression of Priceline.  And it was a fun unexpected thing to do at the end of a great trip.

Food

You spend 7 days on the road and you eat a lot of food in that time. We eat breakfast and lunch on the road or sometimes breakfast at a hotel.  I have noticed that a hotel having a "continental breakfast" is not as much of a selling point for me as it once was.  Maneuvering our 6 mouths to feed through the crowd at the waffle maker, listening to at least one kid complain that the orange juice is definitely not "Florida Orange Juice", crowding around a micro sized table...  I digress...  We plan on eating out for supper.  In the past this has meant Cracker Barrel - due to their convenience and predictability, but this trip we made a point to visit the #1 rated restaurant on TripAdvisor and were not disappointed...much.

Some highlights:

Our first night we made an excellent choice in a little placed called The BBQ Grill in Ridgeland, South Carolina.  It was close to the interstate, had a buffet, the food was good, and -best of all- the only tables large enough to accommodate us were in a side room we had to ourselves.

The next day we spent in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Rob had envisioned us catching trout to eat for supper.  He found an out of the way place on the Tennessee side of the park.  It was homey and quiet and the kids thought catching the fish was fun (eating it, not so much).

You got the full experience!

They prepared the fish 3 different ways - blackened, fried, and lemon pepper.  All were really great, their onion rings were extremely good and we were very disappointed that we had no way to keep our leftovers - especially because this culinary experience cost an arm and a leg.  So after chanting to myself "The kids had fun, they'll remember this fondly..."about 18 times I moved on.

A few days later - on the way to Arkansas, we stopped in rural Kentucky at a place called Adam's Breezy Hill Farm.  It was far off the path (far enough to start thinking we'd made a mistake) and when we walked in, I tried to convince Rob to walk back out - it was country posh and there were NO kids.  Rob talked me into staying and I left very happy with our choice.   The kids shared a brick oven pizza made right next to our table.

The guy in white coat behind Natalie is cooking in the brick oven.

and....they had homemade ice cream!

The cost was less than I expected too. :)  It was in beautiful rolling farm land.  I want to go back.

On the way home, Rob got boiled peanuts at his favorite place in Alabama.  Not my favorite, but not the worst thing I've ever eaten.

The last night out, we ate at Jimmy's Sub's in Quincy, Florida.  As far as local...eh, not really its selling point, nor was it's interior, this was a humble looking place on a rough looking street.  But the subs were AMAZING.  Definitely worth risking your safety driving out of the way for.

Caleb with the man himself - Jimmy (on the left, well my left, Caleb's right)

By then, you'd think we'd be full, but when we finally got home, everyone was hungry again.

More Put in Bay

It is so hard to find time for blogging when I don't also want to go to bed! But I want to post about our trip before it becomes such a distant memory I can't remember what we did.

We did do more at Put in Bay than fish!  Here we are playing a game with Rob's Aunt Carol:

And this must have been 10:30 at night because the light is on.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are a lot of golf carts:

Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial:

The view from the top:

I see Canada!

There are a couple of caves you can tour on the island.  Perry's Cave - a low limestone cave that sparked a new phobia for Caleb.  It was not scary, but the ceiling was very low and it was dark and wet.  I didn't even think about it being a creepy place for the kids.

Inside Perry's cave:

A little more fishing:

Irene makes a brief camio appearance:

We though this was funny:

I took the little girls to a nice waterfront park:

Another cave you can tour is the Crystal Cave at Heineman's Winery.  It is actually a giant geode:

You can also tour the winery :

(They also make grape juice.)

Pebble Beach at the state park:

On the way out:

Irene sometimes does this with her fist.  She also makes a threatening sound when she does it.