Funny Friday

Happy Friday! :)

Leftover Thursday

"Sleeping". With a sucker in her mouth. :P 

T got this shot at the Farmhouse one night. Very cool!

 

Two lost teeth!

 

Daddy's new toy!

Family portraits by Peanut.

And "hairdos" as well. Look at this well loved Te! She chews on the trunk and has made a hole. Yuck. :P 

Happy Thursday!

The Long Road Home

Well before I finish up the last of these pics I better squeeze these two in...they were from one of the days on the way down. We've got traveling down to a science. Whenever we stopped for lunch I would drop Noni and the girls off at a park or if nothing else a grassy area where they could stretch their legs. Then I would get gas and food, and we would let them eat once we got back on the road so they didn't have to waste any out-of-the-car time with sitting and eating. Noni grabbed these pictures at one such stop. 

 

When we left our Montana friends we only had three hours on the road so that was a nice short day. It's kind of hard to see but I had to take a picture of the insane amount of bugs on our windshield...and this was after being spotlessly cleaned at the previous stop just an hour and twenty minutes before! 

One way to distract Peaches when she got tired of the car was to tell her that we were going swimming when we arrived so now any time she sees a pool she says, "Swimming tonight!"

Not that she did much swimming, but she liked to sit on stairs and splash in the water. :)

 

Last night in a hotel room! This trip made me realize that it really wouldn't be the end of the world if we all have to live in the basement of the Farmhouse while we finish the upstairs...if we have to. :P

Our last day on the road was eight and half hours driving time, but it felt looooong when we all just wanted to be done and home! 

One hilarious thing about the trip was Peaches is in the phase of loud exclamations. Any time she saw a plane, "AIR-PATE!" or train, "CHOO CHOO TRAIN!" or semi, "BIG TRUCK!" she had to yell out and announce it to all of us. If we didn't respond would keep yelling it until someone said, "Yes! We see the big truck!" You can imagine how many "big trucks" we saw on a 4,000 mile road trip! I think she said, "BIG TRUCK!" at least 1,000 times!

Here's a video of her being silly.

 

On the way down we had stopped at a playground that was being built so we weren't able to play on it. They had finished it on July 26th so we made sure to stop there on our way back through. It was a very neat playground! Peaches loved these blue half-ball things on the ground. She wanted to jump off each one.

Unfortunately it was really hot...that flooring was super nice and squishy, but it seemed to absorb the heat really bad! They had these cool kid-sized zip lining swings that the girls just loved!

 

Whee!

Hiding in the cave for shade!

 

Poor baby was SO tired! Long trips are always the hardest on the toddlers. 

They  had neat musical instruments that were like giant wind chimes.

Daddy had gone for gas and food and because of traffic it took longer than planned. Peaches was wiped out and fell asleep mid-meal.

She shifted and I realized she fell asleep mid-bite! She had a big piece of bread in her mouth! Noni was able to dig it out without waking her up because we were afraid she would choke on it! Funny girl!

She was so ready to be done with the car. Thankfully she doesn't cry very often...she gets what Daddy calls, "Slap Happy". I tried to get a video of her being so super silly, but she was starting to get frustrated at her entrapment and I ended up videoing her getting a little ornery. We sure were thankful to get home! :P 

About an hour from home we made one last stop for gas and let the girls get an ice cream bar to celebrate the end of the trip. Some guy was standing there talking to the cashier (maybe the owner??) and paid for our ice cream! SO nice! What a sweet end to the trip! 

Last pic before we made it home!!!

It was such a great vacation! I'm so glad we made the effort and went for it even amidst our crazy moving/farmhouse remodel/school-starting-soon schedule. Thanks Noni, for coming with us and doing all you did to make the trip easier! We love you!

Reunited!

Buggy loves creating. She made this while we were driving and was bummed that we wouldn't let her keep it (in our packed to the gills car) so I took a picture for her.

At our lunch stop Peaches discovered the joy of a merry-go-round!

That was an 8 1/2 hour day on the road so the kids were ready to be out of the car and SO excited when we finally made it to our stop...the house of our good friends who moved away two years ago! They were so happy to be reunited!

 

And so were we! Miss L made us a delicious dinner...it was so nice to have a good home-cooked meal after so many days on the road! She also made a delicious breakfast the next day, and chicken enchiladas for lunch with HOMEMADE tortillas! Yum!

 

We got Peaches to bed on time that night, but the big kids stayed up till 10:30! And then got up super early. Thankfully they were just happy to be with their friends and didn't get cranky from lack of sleep. :P

Boo took my phone and I later found a few selfies and some other "scenery" pics. Haha. :)

We went for a walk and they showed us their little town where they've taken a Pastorate at the baptist church. We let the kids stop and play at the school playground for a while.

We miss this sweet family so much! It was so great to see the place they've made for themselves and how much they love it, and the people, there!

We would have been super sad to leave, but as we were pulling away Buggy sprayed the boys with a leftover can of silly string from the gender reveal so we were able to part laughing. :) Good friends are hard to find so we are thankful we can keep the connection with these dear ones!

The Zoo!

T wanted to see some different country on the way home so instead of going our usual route we took the road less traveled...HWY 83 up through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. There were lots of cornfields, cows, and pump jacks. :) 

 

Day 2 on the road back we stopped for lunch in Garden City, Kansas. We grabbed some burritos and decided to take them to a nearby park. I thought it looked really far out of the way on the map, but it turned out to only be a few miles off the road.

We saw a sign for a zoo while we were pulling in so T looked it up while we were eating and it was free! Peanut had been asking me the whole trip if we could go to a zoo and I told her we just didn't have time to do it...well God must have heard her little prayers and answered them with a resounding yes! I assumed since it was a free zoo...we didn't even see any workers anywhere even though it was very well maintained, that there would just be a few small animals.

I was so surprised to see that they had rhinos, giraffes, lions, tigers, jaguars, panthers, monkeys, sea otters, and a bunch of others!

The lions were scary! They were HUGE and nothing but a baseball backstop-like fence between us!

This picture does not do justice to how big these lions were. Their heads had to have been two feet wide!

I started wondering if maybe it was some kind of breeding zoo because a lot of the animals were listed as endangered (I'd never even heard of some of them) and some animals had two different cages for males and females, and some had babies. One of the animals looked exactly like a guinea pig face, but huge...on the body of an ox. So weird! 

The girls liked these cranes since they were like the one from Kung Fu Panda.

Peaches kept calling them ducks, "They're cranes." I told her more than once, "Yah. Crane. Bye bye DUCKS!" Haha!

She was super excited to find "Mingos" since she loves them!

 

All the fences were the perfect foot and toe holds for her to climb to the tops. I think if we hadn't stopped her she would have gone into several pens. :P 

The sea otters were so cute swimming around!

There was a fun playground at the end of trail.

I thought it was funny that Peaches insisted on ducking to get to the Prairie Dog tunnel. She didn't need to height-wise but she saw her sister's doing it. :)

There was a brand new baby giraffe!

 

We could have stayed there for hours, but we had to get back on the road. What a fun and unexpected stop! 

As soon as we got to the hotel that night it was straight to the pool!

It was a nice pool with a very poor choice of tile! The lighter stuff was SUPER slippery when wet! Thankfully Peanut laughed when she fell. Peaches not so much. :P

Daddy scored big bonus points by finding us a room with bunk beds! They were so excited!

The next day we made it to Montana to visit our friends! Pics from that tomorrow!