Summer Vacation

Here's some pics from our summer road trip! We flew to Denver and spent a couple of days in Colorado, and then drove to Montana to visit Joel's sister Carrie and the rest of the Bock family for a week.  Then we headed to Yellowstone for three days, and then drove back to Denver to catch the flight back home.

nothing like starting your vacation off being stranded at the wrong rental car company!!

Sadie snoozing on gondola ride. The girls "panned for gold" and are examining all their loot. We basically paid $10 for a bag of rocks but it was worth every penny--they've been washing, drying, and polishing these rocks for days!!

mountain slide in Breckenridge--the girls rode on their first chairlift and then took a coaster slide all the way down the mountain

our own personal hot-tubs!

The drive to Montana was great--we never drove more than 4 or 5 hours each day and would stop and take breaks whenever the girls got fussy! Sadie only cried once on the way out there--a real road tripper!It helped though that I sat next to her the whole time and Joel did ALL of the driving! :)

picnic lunch near the Tetons

These next pictures are out of order chronologically but I'm going to save myself the headache of moving them around and just write some captions!

We rented out Carrie's next door neighbor's house--and this was the view out our front door. They live on a cul-de-sac and the girls had so much fun biking and scootering every day! Larkin asked Uncle CJ, "Did you move here because there's no cars?" It was quite a change from the 'burbs!!"

in Texas we find dead snakes on bike rides, and in Montana, elk!

hiking

I love this pic of Willa

rainbow trout with Uncle Ryan

The highlight of their trip was the horse ride!

Willa rode "Hot Rod" and talked about him non-stop for days!

Aunt Lisa

The girls swam in a snow-melt stream and froze their tails off! Here they are warming up with Aunt Carrie and Aunt Jaime

Grandma and Grandpa

even Sadie loved the water

about to strip down to undies and take the plunge!

sandcastle on the Taylor Fork--one of Joel's favorite places that we went

Taylor Fork

Joel and Uncle CJ with a double

Carrie and CJ like to rock climb and they took us out! Joel and the girls climbed and loved it.

Larkin went up very high until I got nervous and told her to get back down!! She was fearless!

Carrie and CJ have their own rafting boat and they took us rafting.  Willa thought the rapids were called "rabbits" and told Uncle CJ, "Let's go find some more bunnies!"

After a week in Montana, we said goodbye to all the relatives and headed to Yellowstone National Park. Joel and I had been there before six years ago when Carrie and CJ got married, but this trip was much different since we were toting around three kiddos!!

We forgot to pack the girls' cameras and they were so mad--so I let them use mine. Willa snapped over 100 pictures in less than 20 minutes--everything was "just so pretty" and she wanted pics of it all. Larkin used Joel's cell phone to capture Willa snapping pics of Yellowstone Lake.

Willa got a great shot of the wood

All the geysers smelled like sulfur, which Larkin said "smelled great." 

Yellowstone Lake

We hiked down to the bottom of the canyon to see the waterfall--Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

geyser flowing into a river

Their favorite place we stayed in Yellowstone were these tiny cabins that you can see behind them. They were super tiny and you had to share a community bathroom, and the girls thought it was so neat that our cabin didn't have a bathroom.

There was an impressive prairie dog population right outside our cabin door and they kept the girls entertained for hours!! They would "feed them" rocks and watch the prairie dogs scurry to catch the rocks.

Joel and Willa headed out to go fishing

bison crossing

Old Faithful

On the way home we stopped for lunch and Sadie was in a great mood--until we put her back into her carseat!! NOT THIS PLACE AGAIN!! The drive home was not as smooth as the way there, but we would do the trip again in a heartbeat. It was great to stop and see so much scenery along the way!

Thanks Carrie and CJ for helping us have such a great trip!!! And thanks too to all the family members that flew/drove out to Montana. It was a family reunion and vacation all rolled into one--and memories that the girls will be talking about for years to come.

Sadie

 It's hard to believe that Sadie is eight months old already! She still is the easiest baby of the three, by far! She's not crawling yet but I bet she will be within the next month. She is still nursing and now eats three meals a day of solids. Her favorite foods are sweet potatoes, butternut squash, yogurt (in moderation-makes her spit up!), pears, and anything sweet. Just this week she's started feeding herself with little chunks of food--although she can't always pick it up because everything slips out of her fingers!

Her hair is coming in blonde, but nowhere near as light as Willa's. I think her eyes are hazel or possibly turning brown--we are constantly looking at her eyes to figure out what color they are. Sometimes they have flecks of brown or green, other times they look gray. So for now I'm going with hazel! She weighs almost 16 pounds, but feels much heavier than that when you've carried her around on your hip all day!

The older girls love love love her and just can't get enough. They squeal when she wears a new outfit, "entertain" her with toys, hugs, and songs, and miss her when they're away from her. The other day my mom watched Sadie while I took the girls to swimming lessons, and they just kept saying, "Mom-the car is so quiet. Sadie is not in her carseat! This is so weird that we're driving without her!"
 
Her schedule is:
7am: wake up, nurse, play
10:00: nap
11:00ish-wake up, nurse, eat solids, play
2 or 3:00-nap for two hours or so
4:00ish-wake up, nurse, eat solids, play again!
7:00-bedtime (she has separation anxiety now and fights bedtime pretty hard!)
midnight-wake up to nurse, fall right back asleep
3:00-nurse again, fall right back to sleep
7:00-wake up

Yes, she's probably nursing too many times in the night, but she's kind of on the skinny side (10th percentile for her weight) so I don't mind. Willa was the same weight and nursed the same at night, and what's a few more months of sleep deprivation anyway when I've made it this far?!

Sadie stays on the picnic blanket--at least for now!

hey mom, the big girls are doing puzzles--where is mine?!

ready for the pool!

One day we were playing music and dancing, then the girls went and grabbed their baby dolls because they noticed that I was dancing with Sadie on my hip. Then they said, "Look! We all three have babies! Take a picture!"

Willa loves to dress up Sadie!

If you look closely you can see Joel fishing with the girls down below!

Larkin and Willa love to eat the puffed cereal that Sadie drops??!

better eat 'em quick!!

Her hair is long enough now to where you have to brush it after bathtime or else it looks like this!

Girls building "spider web" and Sadie's making sure their silk stays nice and wet!

She learned how to scoot backwards on this day--trying to get the heck out of the web!

Willa's recital

 Willa had her first ballet recital a few days after Larkin's graduation. She was so excited about the recital that you would have thought it was her Broadway debut. She kept talking about how the audience was probably going to throw flowers everywhere onto the stage when she finished dancing and that she would grab a bunch of them, and her invitation list for the recital was over 50 people long--"We should invite them too-I bet they can't wait to see my dance!!"

I'm so glad that Willa did ballet because it gave her a place to feel special and shine. I didn't want to put both of the girls in preschool at the same time (money wise would have been expensive and unnecessary!). Willa always looked forward to her ballet day and would talk all week about her teachers and friends.

practicing with a friend

 On the big day she was not nervous at all and did great! The recital was held in a performing arts center that was very impressive. There was stage lighting, curtains, and even a professional videographer so that all the relatives can see Willa's two minutes of fame! I wasn't allowed to take pictures during the show but we did order a copy of the video recording.

The highlight for Willa though was the trophy she received after the show. She fell in love with it (named it "Tropha") and just could not believe that she got such a beautiful trophy. Larkin couldn't believe it either and spent at least an hour crying out of jealousy. 

On the way home from the show we stopped to eat lunch and Willa held it during the whole lunch and showed to every person that walked by.

Over lunch she said, "Mom, I'm never going to let you take ballet because then Dad and Larkin would be jealous of your trophy. I just love this thing."

She slept with Tropha every night for a week!