day 3 into day 4 ~

well day three ended with us leaving the zoo and heading to our camp site.

we decided to camp at lake manawa state park.

it was very nice and we got lucky and found a great spot. the view from our camp areas was great. we were right on the water.

there were sailboats and all kinds of different boats out on the lake. it was so fun to sit and watch and it was gorgeous at sunset.once we got there we decided to pitch our new tent. we were excited to try it out and see how it worked. this was the kids first time camping.while we set up the tent, the boys played with their new baseball mitts. they were so excited!! they are really into baseball right now.cullan striking a pose!kael mid catch. they were so cute!

after we got everything settled it was time to get ready for dinner.

not quiet sure why, but it looks like grandma G is chucking some V-8 !!! dinner was delicious. then we all just kind of sat back and relaxed. the boys were having fun throwing rocks into the water and watching the ducks. my favorite camping fellas!

i thought it would be nice to get a picture of garran and i with this wonderful sunset. as usual this is what happens when i am holding a camera out and trying to get a picture of myself.

MY EYES ARE CLOSED!!

garran always picks on me about it. so for the next picture at the last minute he did this...

wonderful picture i know..i actually look scary.even though my eyes are open on their own finally still a scary picture of me. i look very swollen!so i gave up and just got a picture of him... ahh so cute!! he's great!

the next morning we were packing up camp and i had gone to the restroom to brush my teeth and freshen up a bit. when i came back this is what i walked up on .....

i started dying laughing. the look on her face and a bat in her hand. all i could think of was that she had had enough!

the next morning started day 4 and we decided to do some sight seeing.

we decided to make a stop by the omaha temple. we had never been there. it was beautiful.i loved the stain glass. it was just gorgeous.while we were there, we tried to get a family picture. this was as close as we got. pretty typical of our family. im looking down at kael. he just did not make it in the shot =)while we were there, we went to the visitors center and took a tour. we learned all about the pioneers and their trek through omaha. we learned a lot and had a great time. the guide was very informative and i found out all kinds of things i had not know before. im glad we made time to stop by.

day four ended with us having lunch with garrans parents and parting ways. we were off to spend the rest of the week at my moms house. more pictures to come!!

stay tuned......

day 3~

day three started at...

HENRY DOORLEY ZOO!

i was a little worried about this day. the kids are still pretty young and i knew it would be a lot of walking and things like this. we got there around 9 and stayed till about 4. i was amazed. i thought the kids did really well and for the most part really enjoyed the animals!

here we are starting our zoo trip in the desert! the kids were ready to see everything. briea was just enjoying her nap!

of course kael starts our trip off with some humor. there were some pumas fighting over a tree branch. kael put one of his little hands on his hips and started pointing his other finger saying "hey pigs stop fighting...NO-NO-NO!!" garran and i got a good laugh out of it. this is him being very upset about the whole situation.garran found a little friend and decided to show him a little love!

after we left the desert, we were off to the monkey house. how appropriate. i think we could have stayed there all day!~

kael thought it was so cool that this big guy was sitting there checking him out. kael was talking to him and smiling. this big guy just looked back and would touch the glass here and there. these orangutans were so funny. they would stick their hands out trying to get you to give them food. obviously not allowed. however still funny to see them use their fingers in a gesture like "come here please, give me food!"cullan was surprisingly interested in all the monkey bones. he kept calling them his dinosaur bones but he stood and looked at each one for awhile.

we also went to the aquarium part of the zoo. this part was awesome!

here is this penguin just hanging out!

the next part was so cool. they had a tunnel you could walk through and see all these turtles, sharks, sting rays and tons of fish swimming all around you. im sure im forgetting some things that we saw but the boys were amazed. they thought the sting rays and sharks were pretty cool. (these pictures are in the tunnel. i know it is kind of hard to tell)

there were so many sharks! it was very cool. we stayed there for a while to look at everything.

then off to see some more animals!

this pretty tiger was just hanging out, enjoying his day.we were going to go into see all the butterflies in the butterfly garden but they did not allow strollers or wagons. ARGG! so we decided to skip that one but grandma and grandpa got their picture taken in the butterfly chair!

you know that if there is a train...WE MUST RIDE IT! so we brought tickets for the train that went all around the zoo. we got to see all kinds of fun things like elephants, zebras, giraffes, i could go on and on.

daddy and our briea girl waiting for the train ride to start!cullan and grandma! grandma looks like she is really concentrating on whatever animal we were passing at the moment. =)

grandpa and kael. (can you tell we saved the train ride for close to the end of the day. grandpa and kael are starting to look like sitting down on the train is a good way to rest for a minute)

our last stop of the day was the rain forest!

we got to see some pretty birds.kael and daddy got to cross a cool bridge!last but not least our own little monkeys got to practice swinging from some vines! i am still hearing about the tree swing!it was a great day! i think that everyone had fun. thanks again to grandma and grandpa g for coming along and having fun! a special thanks to my parents also who made it a lot easier by finding a great hotel for us. that made such a huge difference. we are so grateful that we were able to stay there and get some good nights of sleep for our busy days!

(ps. sorry again about all my pictures but i have 340 something from our week away. so i am trying to only post a few and not seriously kill you with picture overload!!!)

day 2~

day two was ...

the children's museum.

it was supposed to be the zoo but it was raining.

the kids absolutely loved it. there was so much there for them to do. i know this post has a lot of pictures but i actually had to scale back. if you are ever in omaha, this is a great place to visit.

when we first got there, there was a chair that you could sit on and it would start playing music because of the weight of your body. it was really cool and the boys like it a lot.
once we got inside we went straight to the ball room. oh my goodness this was so much fun. they had all these tubes and you could put balls in and then they would go all over the room through the tubes and they would end up in the middle of the room. the picture above is one of the ways you could push the balls through the tubes.
the balls would drop every few minutes and all the kids would wait underneath it. it was so funny to watch.cullan thought this was pretty cool. these tubes had air shooting out of them and you could put balls over it and they would float. cullan even got two going at one time.
kael man was amazed! he would get his floating and then hit it like a baseball. it was so fun because it did not matter. this place was great for kids. there were balls flying everywhere!
like i said perfect for my kids. you had to jump on this pump to get the balls up into the tubes to get to the center drop area!

next we went to the play-pretend area. it had a mini grocery store, small house, water station, fire station and an old time fire truck that the kids could play on. plus they had tons of dress up clothes. SO MUCH FUN!--k-man driving the fire truck!
cullan stayed at this station forever. how cute is he. he kept calling himself "fighter fighter cullan" he seriously played on the firetruck for about 30 minutes. he would not leave until we finally told him it was really time to share the outfit with the other kids. we did not rush him before that because they had quiet a few fireman outfits.

after all this fun we went to what i called the creative center.

they had all kinds of hands on stuff that your kids could do.

there was finger painting. kael had so much fun. i'm sad i cant find his picture right now. i think it is out in the van somewhere. everyone that worked there was so friendly and totally got that kids MAKE A MESS! it was great.

they also had a stage area where kids could put on plays. so if you are going to have a stage you have to have a place to do your stage makeup. my boys ended up looking like war paint!

he is such a big boy. he did this all by himself.
kael thought it was great that it was OK to paint on his face. not very often is that ok when we are out in public.

then we did some dancing. i don't know if i mentioned that garrans parents were on this trip with us, but they were. it was so great having them there. it was nice to have their company but also nice to have an extra set of eyes watching your kiddos or holding your 3 month old when going to a crazy place like this!

anyways on to the dance room. this room was completely black. it had a sensor and a huge screen. they had fun music playing and you would dance and your body would be in all different colors and shapes on the screen. cullan loved it, kael was a little unsure.

in this picture garran, cullan and grandma G are dancing. can you make them out? cullan is the one with his foot up in the air =)
we ended the day with a carousel ride. you can see grandma g off to the left. her back is kind of to us and then garran and cullan are to the right. the boys had so much fun and so did we. although i think the adults were tired and ready to go long before the kiddos were.

thanks grandma and grandpa G for coming with us and having fun!!

omaha...somewhere in middle america~

sorry i could not help but throw that in for the blog post title.
so this past week we decided to go on vacation.

we had been planning it for a while and we had a bunch of fun.

i will apologize now. i will be posting quite a few blogs in the next couple of days, just so that i can document all the fun stuff we did on our vacation.

the first thing we did was load all the kiddos up and travel to omaha nebraska!

some of you might be thinking, "wow that sounds like a fun place."

it was!! there are all kinds of great things to do there. so get ready. if you read this often enough you will see all the great stuff that we did.

so here we go with the first day!

we got to the hotel and after a little confusion with our hotel rooms we got everything worked out and under control.

(i wanted to post a picture because i loved the colors in our hotel room. i thought they were really cute.)

because we got there about four we decided to take the kids swimming for a little while and get out some of those wiggles from the car. they had a great time.

the kiddos in their swim suits waiting pretty patiently to go swimming!i had to post one of just briea. i have been waiting forever to put her in this suit. i just love it. seriously she is so stinking cute!!

after we went swimming we decided to go and get a bit to eat. boy things just got comical from there.

we were sitting at the table of the restaurant and kael let out this trucker man sized beltch. we all spun our heads around, amazed that that sound came out of this little boy. kael laughed and said "excuse me". we were all trying not to laugh but half the restaurant looked.

then briea was getting fussy and garran went to pick her up at of her car seat. garrans dad said, "she has something on her pants". you guessed it DIAPER EXPLOSION!!!

so we got that all cleaned up and i look over and cullan is sound asleep at the table. we played pretty hard at the pool. i had even said that i thought that kaels huge burp might be due to the fact that he kept swallowing pool water, even after being told a number of times not to.

finally our food came and we were all enjoying our meals. kael very sweetly looks up at us and says "i dont feel good". we just said oh ok, well when we get back to the hotel you can lay down. he did not really say to much and so we continued on with our meal. the waitress brought some to go boxes for us and all of a sudden kael started to cough. we all knew what was next. garrans mom grabbed a to go box just in time and kael filled it up. at this point we decided that no one was very hungry anymore. we thanked the waitress, paid the bill and left. we got back to the hotel and called it an evening. lucky for us, kaels throwing up was due to drinking the pool water and not the flu or anything like that.

stay tuned for day two and more fun adventures!

hang on~

you are going to be bombarded with posts...im still working on pictures.. this is just a warning!

BE PREPARED!

annoying~

first i have to start of with two things about this post.

1) of all the times i wished i had my camera this was one.

2) for my friend mandy, im pretty sure this qualifies under the "what the" award category!!

ok so the other night i had a million things on my to do list for the upcoming week this week and all the activity. i had been running errands and knew that garran and the kids had already had dinner, so i pulled into to a drive thru to pick something up quick.

right off the bat i notice something annoying. there is a forty-ish year old guy with his very obvious 20-ish year old girlfriend in the drive thru one car ahead of me, however they thought it would be funny to drive through backwards!!

ok..this must be another tell of my age. i probably would have laughed about this ten years ago, but now, not so much.

the guy was so annoying. besides going through backwards the drive thru arched around the restaurant and he had to keep backing up and going forward a million times because he kept running up on the curb. he almost hit the lady in front of me at least three or four times.

of course in true classy fashion, while waiting for their food they made out. since they decided to go backwards..it was like a show for everyone waiting in line. lets just say my order was pretty small. not a huge appetite after that!