Bella, Gabe and Josiah

Reserving cabins around here is hard. You have to plan months in advance and even then, they're usually occupied the weekend you want them (which is why we ended up camping on a Sunday night...). So when one of Pat's coworkers asked if we wanted his cabin reservation for last weekend, we jumped on it, even though Gramps was sick, Uncle Seth was trying to do a 20 mile mountain run, I was recovering from being sick and we hadn't even completely unpacked from camping 4 days earlier... The mosquitos were terrible and it started raining Saturday evening, but even then, we had a wonderful time. Between waking up early with the sun and running around playing, both boys were exhausted. Gabe even asked me if he could take a nap, which says something... He also asked if "Mommy give mosquito a spanking?" Bella took these two: This cabin had a little sandbar in the river, so we took the trucks down and played in the sand. Pat and I went on a walk and found a beach that I'

Last week was a rough week. The weather was beautiful and all anyone wanted to do was be outside, but instead I managed to get a stomach bug. I spent the third hottest day in recorded history stuck on the couch, hardly able to move. Luckily I only had one day like that, but it was a full five more days before I had recovered from that one bad day. Needless to say, enjoying the beautiful sunny weather was not high on my priority list, as I was just trying to function... Luckily other people planned ahead a little better than we did. Gabe's daycare took all of the kids to the beach for the afternoon. You know your kid has had a good day when you pick him up and he looks like this... A friend is moving and giving away piles of toys that her kids don't need anymore, so we stopped by to see if there was anything Gabe would like. He picked out these three helicopters and he's still carrying them around everywhere he goes and talking about how "Ben's mommy give Gabey heli

Last weekend we went camping. It ended up being a Sunday night trip, which isn't ideal when you have jobs and all, but that was when the cabin was available, so that's when we went. This was Gabe's first camping trip. Pat, Bella and I went up to a cabin a few days after I found out I was pregnant, but that was the last time. Since Katilyn, Seth and Bryson are all in town for awhile, we figured it would be fun to all go together. Plus, we could put both boys to bed and actually talk, versus one of us having to leave so we could get someone to bed, which is what happens on a normal day. Gabe was in charge of gathering the wood. It's a good thing that Daddy was helping him or we'd probably still be loading wood... Once we got to the cabin, Pat, Seth and Gramps worked on unloading the cars while Katilyn, Gram, Bella and I took the boys to the river to throw rocks. The boys tried to unload the firewood too. Then we all hung out by the campfire for the evening. Well, most

There's no better way to spend your birthday than running a 7 mile race that goes straight up into the mountains, right??? Actually, it would have been a much better plan if Pat and I hadn't hiked straight up a mountain the day before. I've run that route several times and it is brutal, but I can run it. But on Saturday, it was bad. Basically, we ended up hiking up most of it, which meant that Katilyn and I got to do a lot of talking! Plus, we got to see the waterfalls at the end. When we turned around, we ran down the whole thing just fine. It was just the stupid uphill. I'm going to have to run it again soon to prove to myself that I really can do it... It's safe to say that I was pretty wiped out for the rest of the day. Plus, we had a showing, so the house had to be spotless, and Bella came home, so we sat at my parents house for most of the afternoon. Then we all went to our house where Pat made us a lovely birthday dinner and the little boys tried to see if th

On Friday, Pat and I decided to spend the day together. Pat was off of work, Gabe was at daycare and Bella was still gone, so I took off work so that we could go hike a mountain. Funny, we don't seen to have much time to spend the whole day just the two of us... Not a bad place to stop for lunch... Katilyn and Seth were hiking the next mountain, so we made sure to wave. It was a whole lot of up, but once we got to the top it was amazing! It's a good thing that it takes less time to go down then up, because we were on a bit of a time crunch in order to get all the way down the mountain to pick up Gabe... Also, by the time we got down, we were pretty worn out, so we picked up Gabe and got some pizza. The he insisted on visiting the bear and he was too cute to say no to. It was a pretty great day!