We had a great relaxing 4th. We took Ty to the St. Charles parade in the morning and just spent the day relaxing at home before heading to the O’Fallon Heritage Festival for fireworks.
Waiting for the parade!
The festival had a free kids area with face painting (Ty was not interested), bounce house, and obstacle course bounce house.
We had a great long weekend in our old home town. It was fun to be back. We visited our favorite restaurants, splash pad and even saw something new – a wetland in desert.
Reunion trails park – the best splash pad ever! It’s like a free waterpark. We could spend the whole day here.
We got super lucky and Aunt Karissa and Uncle Morgan were able to visit us while we were there. We’re so glad it worked out since we haven’t seen them since Christmas! They visited the Vegas wetlands with us and we snuck them into our hotel for the night. Thanks for making the drive!
Sunday we went to one of our favorite places to hike – Valley of Fire. This was the first time Ty hiked the whole thing – well almost – the last 800 feet he got a shoulder ride from daddy. Ty had so much fun exploring all the “caves” and looking for animals.
left: taking a break in the shade. right: exploring a crevice
Made it to the end – snack time!
getting a ride…
okay ty, smile!
a little tickle will always get a smile!
One of our favorite places to eat in town is Hot ‘N’ Juicy. They serve Louisiana style crawfish, 4 kinds of crab and tons of other seafood all cooked the same way and delicious. The snow crab is my favorite.
Tuesday morning me and Ty flew home to stay for awhile after being gone almost 3 weeks. We had a great time on all our travels and are so thankful for frequent flyer miles.
Glad to be home and time to get ready for the babies. More on that soon.
Week 2: flew to Vegas and drove 6 hours north to visit our good friends, the Wilkinson’s that we met when we both lived in Vegas last year. Daddy had to stay and work, so me and Ty had out own little adventure.
Dirt/rock pile in the backyard that Ty loved playing on.
This place was awesome. There was rides and games for the kids to play, indoor and out. All the kids are on the left end; Ty, Van and Emery. Little Izzie’s not old enough yet.
They are all having so much fun “playing” this game. They thought they were doing something, but we didn’t pay to do any arcade games and they didn’t seem to mind much.
First try at mini golf. Ty really wanted to play and worked really hard on getting that ball in the hole with some unique shots.
Baby Izzie! She was the cutest little baby and always happy. Hope my next babies are that way.
They have awesome trail right in their backyard so we took all the kids for a ride. Ty didn’t want to try the strider bike so he fit his long legs into the trike and pedaled as fast as he could to keep up. I was just so happy that he stuck with it.
No dogs or cats….nope they have chickens and turkeys! I never thought about having chickens without living on a farm, but after tasting their eggs and seeing how much fun Ty had with them, I’m considering looking into it.
A moment of Van and Ty getting along. How cute!
Bridal falls. A mountain waterfall that you can climb up. It was so pretty and the water was ice cold but of course they kids had a ball climbing around and playing in the water.
Finally a picture of me and Britt. I couldn’t believe that we never took a picture together when we both lived in Vegas, especially with as much as we were together, so here you go, I would like you to meet Britt – the wonderful mom to three cute kids – and the only person who has been able to get me to eat veggies and not choke them down.
The morning before we left, Britt took us to her climbing gym. Ty did amazing. For 15 minutes he kept climbing about half way up and then repelling down…
…then I asked him to climb to the top and see what was on the other side of the wall. And up he went!! This is a picture of one proud mama!!! Can you see him at the top. After going to the top one time, every time he came back down, he’d hit the ground with his feet, say “again” and up he’d go. I literally had to coax him out of the place with candy. Apparently we need to find a climbing gym here.
Thank you so much Wilkinson family for your amazing hospitality and food. Pretty sure the four days I was with you I ate more veggies than I did the rest of the month! And it was all delicious. For a lot of their recipes check out Britt’s blog.
Friday we drove back to spend Memorial Day weekend in Vegas with daddy.
Finally home…or at least staying in the state for awhile. We’re headed to Tablerock Lake this weekend, so in this post and the next I’ll share with you what we’ve been up to the past 3 weeks. It wall started with our mother’s day flight out of St. Louis.
Week 1: beach vacation in Fort Lauderdale.
We visited a sea turtle rehabilitation and nature center that was cool. It was really humid that day but we got to see turtles, sharks, stingrays and really big lobsters.
While on the nature walk we spotted this cool lizard!
and then surprised us when he did this!
Ty took our picture…
We also visited the Discovery Children’s museum. It was really neat, they had tons of hands on activities and an Imax movie about butterflies.
They had an orange grove factory center that we put Ty to work on. The bike powered the conveyor belt up and over and let the oranges fall back down into trays. Then you would take the trays to a tractor bike pulling a trailer and ride it to the orange factory and then once inside the factory the oranges would pop back out certain spots on the orange trees for you to “pick” all over again. Ty had a ball here and probably could’ve played here all day.
Hurricane simulator. Ty was afraid to go in until he realized he could control the wind. It was pretty crazy.
the pier
Coaxed him out to play in the waves with daddy – took some quick photos before he was ready to come back to shore. It was pretty rough waves.
look at at that cute beach bum!!
The first night there we went and ate at the Whale’s Rib. We looked up restaurants that had been on that show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives and just knew this place had to be delicious. We were right and visited it again 2 days later. They had the most amazing fried shrimp and whale fries (which are like Irish chips) and Jeremy had perfectly cooked blackened huge scallops.
self portrait.
We were there for a week. Flew home on a Saturday – threw everything in the washer and repacked to fly to Vegas 8:30 Monday morning.
