The Grueling Second Half

So you're probably feeling exhausted just from reading about all our fun, but that was only the first week!

Week 2 in Salt Lake with the LeBarons was just as busy and enjoyable. More playing with cousins, more good food, and more great activities. We were able to spend Friday night at the Sundance cabin, complete with a mini-reunion with 2 of Flori's college roommates. Melissa Laurence and Marci Stewart came with their families for dinner and a visit. It was so fun to catch up and so fun to watch the kids playing together and starting up their own friendships.





We also met up with a few other families during the week--our Curtis cousins and friends from Indiana, the Waltons and Lundbergs. We saw the musical "Little Women", which the girls all loved, and had a blast jumping on the tramploline and playing dress-ups with Nanny's collection.



The highlight was the LeBaron family carnival at John and Krista's house. Each family was in charge of a game or event and it was a fantastic success!! We made lots of memories with face painting, throwing water balloons at the uncles, and trying to keep the little ones from dipping their carrot sticks in the wading pool!

A Vacation from our Van-cation

When Maddie was little, she used to say 'van-cation' and so we still call it that sometimes. But really, no words can describe the fun, crazy, fun, exhausting, fun, busy 2 weeks in July that was our summer vacation!
We started out with our first ever DIRECT FLIGHT from Charlotte to SLC, and it was great not to worry about changing planes and spending the whole stinking day traveling. So in just 2 days in Salt Lake, we saw all the LeBaron cousins, ate dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse, saw "The Curious Savage" at the Hale Center Theater, and said goodbye to Maggie, Justin, and Gracie (who are moving to Colorado for grad school).

Next we headed up to Idaho Falls for a full week of excitement! Grandma Idaho's garden was a favorite (as always) and we enjoyed lots of fresh peas, broccoli, raspberries, strawberries and carrots.

We had an international fair with all the cousins, where we ate foods and learned songs and games from other countries.



We had a pretend camp out at Jon and Melinda's--making s'mores in their fire pit and sleeping out in the tent trailer. We had go-cart rides, bike rides, slip and slide, sno-cones, and homemade ice cream. We went swimming, shopping for new school outfits, played at the park, visited great Grandma Baker and did some cool art projects.



We said goodbye to Megan, Justin and Maggie (also going to Grad school at IU--Go IU!!), and to Susan and Andrew (headed to Knoxville, TN for grad school). The grand finale to the week was going out on the boat with just Grandma and Grandpa Idaho--we had them all to ourselves! The girls were great sports--they all tried tubing behind the boat and didn't flinch too badly at the freezing mountain-runoff water.

The madness of July

The next several days should be a flurry of blogtivity.

Having done everything fun there is to do in the span of one month, we'll try to tackle this in bite size pieces. Thankfully, August has been fairly uneventful, so we'll be focusing on July.

Our travels took us to Raleigh to visit our friends, the Clerkins, for a whopping-good 4th celebration. When we returned to Charlotte, Flori and I took advantage of some great babysitting (thanks Mary and Seth) to stay at the VanLandingham B&B, here in Charlotte. Beautifully restored, the estate also had some lovely gardens.