"Lo, Children Are An Heritage of the LORD: and the Fruit of the Womb is His Reward" - Psalm 127:3

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

A Great Visit, But Not Such A Great Trip Home

My mom and sister and brother in law (and my new niece!) live about 6 hours away from us, in Colorado. Well. Six hours if you don't have to stop and nurse a baby, lol. Anyway, we were greatly anticipating the holiday weekend so we could go down to introduce the babies to each other!

We planned ahead and packed a picnic for our evening meal so the kids could run and play while I nursed the baby.

Everyone enjoyed the chance to stretch.

And I do mean everyone.

I love this picture. It was pretty early in the day after we arrived at 1 am, and the boys were doing a little light reading - 4 Wheeler magazine for my husband, and Bugle (a magazine about elk) for the 2 year old.

We had a lot of fun just sitting and visiting.

Even if they weren't always doing something together, everyone still visited. By the way, this is a good "before" picture of my daughter's hair. In the previous post I showed you her new haircut. She had that done while we were in town visiting.

The two year old was excited about our lunch. He was pretty hungry by the time we sat down to eat. We had a lot of good meals while we were there. Usually, we do more eating out because we don't have so many choices of places to eat around home. This time, we were trying to pinch pennies, and we found out that we enjoyed eating at the house more than we have enjoyed eating out in the past. It was better for visiting, and we could control the menu. Plus, with two nursing babies, and a rambunctious 2 year old, it was just plain easier!

Here's my sister, and our long-awaited niece :) I can't even begin to tell how happy I am for them!

Such a sweet little thing. It's been so long since I've had a sweet baby girl - 18 years! And this one is all sugar and spice too :) Even our boys couldn't get enough of her.

Here's a better view of the quilt she was laying on. My 20 year old son won this in a raffle. He specifically bought a bunch of tickets, hoping to win it for his new little cousin. Now, isn't that sweet? I'm so glad he won!

We brought her the caterpillar. Goodness! It's twice her size!

Of course we had to compare the babies sizes. Wow. They are only 30 days apart, but ours is a whopping 11 pounds 7 ounces now (born 9 lbs 11 oz) and I think my sister said she is now 7 pounds 4 ounces (born 6 pounds). He's probably a good 4 inches longer too!

Awake and alert! When she was awake, she was really focusing on things and would study us and listen. I was surprised at how alert she was. And she has so much hair! - at least twice as much as our baby.

Naptime. I think it's adorable the way kids pose when they are asleep. Our two year old often puts his hands behind his head. Pretty cute!

The younger boys did some swimming while they were there. Our brother in law was kind enough to take them to the pool at Mom's condo. They were able to go twice.

I wasn't sure the two year old would actually get in, but he turned out to be braver than I expected :)

And once he was in, he wanted to stay there. The breeze was cool, and so every time it would blow, he would crouch back down in the water to stay warm ;)

The seven year old loved every minute of it, and drove everybody nuts trying to get them to go with him again.

This is one of the best pictures of my Mom :) We were having fun playing a game.

We played Taboo - where you have to describe a word without saying the words on the list of forbidden words. For instance, you might have to get your team to say "water" without using the words drink, thirsty, ice, tap, wet, and so on. That's an example off the top of my head, so I'm not sure what the forbidden words were. It's a fun game.

My 20 year old was being goofy. That's my necklace on his head.

The baby happily slept through most of the fun. I took this picture to show that he is now sucking his fingers. (No flash because I didn't want to wake him). In this case, it's the middle two fingers, which it often is. He started out with the pinkie and ring fingers, then moved to this, and sometimes uses the first two. He's versatile ;)

When he did wake up, I put both babies in my lap to get a picture of them together. The size discrepancy isn't so noticeable here on my lap. LOVE her little dimples!

He thought it was great when I held her hovering over him. A little playmate! He was talking to her and cooing and smiling :)

Poor little man. The two year old was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the floor as we were packing and loading up to head home. Actually this was mostly because he spent a good portion of the visit with a stomach bug. He was the first to catch it, then my husband came down with it. We thought we were good Monday morning, when it appeared everyone was doing well, so we headed home. The first part of the trip went well, until we got almost half way home and my daughter started feeling ill. We had to pull off the highway quickly about a dozen times for her. Then when we stopped for fuel around 11 pm, the two year old threw up all over himself while strapped in the carseat. Not fun. We got to the town 100 miles from home at 12:30 am, and sent the 20 year old and 18 year old to a hotel for the night. The 20 year old had met us in that town, so thankfully we had a car parked there. The rest of us headed home, only to have to stop 40 miles down the road to feed the baby again. We didn't get home until 3 am, and my husband had to get up two hours later to head to work. They had a long day too - he ended up working 14.5 hours driving a cement mixer. I only had about 4 hours of sleep myself due to feeding the baby again, and getting up for the daycare. By the end of the day we had to drag ourselves into bed. We were very exhausted but I'm glad we went. Most of us had an excellent visit!

Betcha weren't expecting this picture! At the truck stop where the two year old got sick, the seven year old, who is collecting bugs, found this creature. It's the biggest bug I've ever seen in Wyoming. We were thinking it must have hitched a ride since it was at the truck stop, and I'm still pretty sure it did - maybe on a boat. It took some sleuth work to figure out what it was, but according to the good old internet, this is a "giant water bug," otherwise known as a "toe biter." It lives in muddy water, which we're pretty short on here in Wyoming, but it does list it as living here as well. So I'm guessing it got carried in on a boat trailer. Anyway, it will make a nice addition to his collection.

I had to throw in this final picture. I was working on bills with the baby on my lap today. He was sitting up really well, holding his head up on his own without being too wobbly, though it doesn't show well in the photo. He's growing up so fast!

1 comment:

  1. no fun when getting sick on a trip - we had that happen to us once too when meeting up with one of our daughters and her family - we all took turns except my DH.
    Karen
    http://karensquilting.com/blog/

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