Every day after we drop Owen off at his sports camp and turn into our subdivision, Katie wants to go to the playground. It’s usually at least 85° and godawful humid by then, so I say no. But today was gorgeous so we stopped.
Year: 2015
Painting in the bath!
Owen likes showers better these days, but I convinced him to take a bath with Katie this morning…by promising a new treat: fingerpaint soap (gotta love the dollar bins at Target!). They had a blast.
I had each one fill their hand with their respective colors (pink and blue) and then had them rub hands…to get a light purple! Owen knew about mixing colors but he still thought it was super cool. Katie was amazed! Some days it’s the little things. 🙂
Me and my new friend.
Right now, my goal is to walk a mile a day. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s an extra mile more than I’ve been doing so it’s something!
“Look! We’re up there!”
She loves seeing us on the video monitor at Sam’s Club. 🙂
And then minutes later, a chocolate face from a sample granola bar.
She loves carrying this guitar around.
Daddy cuddle time
Cirque Italia (Water Circus)
We surprised the kids with tickets to a water circus. We were driving around beforehand running errands and they saw the big tents and they knew it was a circus!
Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it would be from being called a WATER circus…it was pretty much your basic circus acts with a few of them done inside a ring of falling water. I didn’t really even take any pictures. It was also REALLY warm inside the tent and we were there an hour early, so it was a loooong afternoon of sitting on uncomfortable seats in an unfriendly temperature. There were some neat acts and the kids enjoyed it, but it certainly didn’t compare to the Big Apple Circus we saw last year.
Sunday Swim Lessons
She’s getting better at floating!
Owen getting a lesson on the backstroke from a new instructor:
This is what happens when left to her own devices:
“I’ve got a tutu!”
She loves mama’s shoes.
July (and vacation) pictures are online!
>>> July pictures are now online at Shutterfly!
Guess who was the only one who slept?
Yes, the entire way home…Owen was the only kid who napped.
Appropriate road trip music.
About two hours into our trip home, this came on XM.
If it doesn’t ring a bell…it’s the theme song from National Lampoon’s Vacation:
Watering plants with Gramma turns into this.
Glitter ballerinas with Grauntie Marge
Grauntie Marge got Katie these cool mess-free glitter ballerinas for her birthday. I didn’t believe any glitter could be mess-free, but these really truly were! Katie was only interested for about 10 minutes, so we’ll try again once we get home!
Riding bikes on the last day!
We had high hopes of having the kids practice riding their bikes on vacation since Gramma Jean and Grandpa David have a great driveway and live on the corner of two (basically) flat roads…but we were so busy that we didn’t get to it until our very last night. Uncle Rob was tasked to help out!
Tom said they actually did pretty good…but they still need LOTS of practice. At the rate we’re going, they might be able to ride without training wheels by high school.
Sorting Stones
I finally got around to sorting the bucket of stones from our beach trip…
Unfortunately…not all the stones were legit. I blame Tom, who was grabbing lots of random fossils, LOL. (They’re neat and all, but they’re no Petoskey stones!)
Only the bottommost piles were actual Petoskey stones (broken up into partial Petoskeys, good Petoskeys, and excellent Petoskeys). 🙂
Kisses from Grandma
Local Petoskey stones!
Why did we go all the way to Petoskey when we found all these in the front yard landscaping in the last 30 minutes?! 🙂 I swear we found them all last year.
The kids even found some rocks for their new collections (yes, they’re apparently starting rock collections now).
An Elsa braid!
Katie wanted Elsa hair so Gramma did the best he could since Katie doesn’t really have enough hair for a French braid. Katie was thrilled!
Kaliseum Daredevils
We took the kids to Kalkaska today for open swim…and boy did they have a blast! Owen was excited to go down the slide again (mom fail: I may have forgotten to mention he did it for the very first time when he was there earlier this vacation). I LOVE the faces he makes. 🙂
My favorite:
You see his harem standing by watching him, right? 🙂
Katie really wanted to go down the slide but she was too little…or so we thought. The lifeguard came up and told Tom she could go down as long as he was at the bottom to catch her. So Owen took her up:
There were other kids going up and they were getting too close to them on the stairs so Owen put his hand out to stop/block them and protect Katie. And then he guided her into the slide while he made sure to keep everyone back. Awwww, I know. 🙂
Here she comes!
Caught her!
Her reaction? She LOVED it and wanted to go again! (But she was done after the second time!)
I still can’t believe it—Owen was 6.5 when he finally went down the slide…and Katie was 3! You can tell who the family daredevil is!
Enjoying a cool Michigan morning.
And then Papa and Grannie came over to say goodbye…and brought nutty donuts!
Purple shirts!
Grannie bought Owen a purple shirt to match Papa’s. They weren’t exact but they were close enough for them. 🙂
And with the purple birthday girl!
More Sorry!
Katie’s last 3rd birthday party!
We celebrated Katie’s birthday at the Ramada again this year. She didn’t want to go in the pool, though—choosing the playground instead.
Of course Owen wanted to swim!
Caught mid-jump!
She finally decided she wanted to swim!
We FINALLY got her to jump in the pool again!
Owen also received a few gifts…Papa and Grannie gave him a roll of quarters to use in the hotel game room!
He shared his quarters with his sister!
A great time was had by all…
Beach, grandparents, stones, and sand!
One of the two things* I wanted to do on this vacation was look for Petoskey stones in a target-rich environment…so we headed to Petoskey State Park! The kids were super excited to go to the beach and Grannie and Papa met us there! Unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures because I forgot the waterproof camera and didn’t want my expensive phone out in the sand and water!
Eating lunch after the grandparents left:
The stone hunting was fairly pathetic as we were obviously in a well-populated and well-picked-over area right on the main beach…plus we were in knee-deep wavy water trying to dredge stones from the bottom. This was all we found after about four combined hours of searching:
But the kids were having fun!
So we talked to a park ranger who told us where there was better stone hunting…so Tom went to scope it out. He came back about a half hour later with full pockets…so we packed stuff in the car then took off walking down the beach. It was quite a walk but it was the place to be—we filled about 2-3″ of a 5-gallon bucket in another two hours!
Unfortunately, Owen lost his goggles (even after I specifically told him to put them around his neck) and we hadn’t thought we’d be gone that long so we didn’t reapply sunscreen…so Owen’s face was pretty red and both kids had a little too much pink. 🙁
But! Both kids were amazing while we were out there—they stayed close, Owen mostly played in the water and Katie mostly played in the sand running between me and Tom (we were about 20-30 yards apart), and they listened well and weren’t cranky!
Of course, I’d forgotten how much I hate the beach—sand, sand, and more sand in every crevice of the kids’ bodies. Ugh. I pulled Katie’s bottoms off and literally a half cup of sand fell out (in addition to what was stuck to her). We were all done at that point (we’d been in the sun for six hours!) and had just trudged (guessing) 1/4 mile back along the beach to the car (with me carrying 20# of stones and Tom carrying Katie on his shoulders) and we just didn’t have the energy to go get them showered.
Within two minutes of starting the car:
Within 25 minutes:
So overall it was a good day…even though we can already tell we’ll be sore tomorrow. 🙂
*The other was to see the start of the canoe marathon.
Campfire and fireworks!
Thanks to the magic of a little packet from the fireworks shop, this is how we do campfires on vacation… 🙂
Katie’s first sparkler. She was…intrigued. She didn’t love it and she didn’t hate it.
And then the fireworks! It was a wild crapshoot because we didn’t know what 90% of them were supposed to do…we just stood back and watched…and we had a few close calls with things whizzing by us and up and into the neighbors yard. EEK! But the kids loved it!
Well, they thought some of them were a little loud. 🙂
Of course we did the pooping dog again!
And we still have a bunch left that we hope to get to before we go home!
This is why Gramma can’t have clean windows.
Katie’s mini fashion show!
The Besons brought four bins of size 4T clothes for Katie…so Grannie Lin and I just had to sort through everything to see what there was (and what might possibly be left for the grandmas to buy!). 🙂 Of course there were some fancy dresses in there, which Katie spied IMMEDIATELY and had to try on. So we got a mini fashion show…
Fish Hatchery 2015
Katie liked to feed the fish one single pellet at a time.
Katie caught a fish! She didn’t want to look at it, and after one she was DONE.
Owen caught three fish…in about 10 minutes. 🙂
Post-Christmas Bratfest
The family came back for lunch today, and Timmy graced us with about 15 different varieties of brats from his store, Beson’s Market (Bay City). Talk about yum. 🙂
The leftovers after 15 people were in a meat coma:
Maggie getting some love from the cousins.
Gramma Jean got out the water balloons and BOY did the kids have fun!
Nick is 11 and Owen is 6—and Nick has maybe a half inch on Owen. This is what they did when we told them to stand next to each other. 🙂
