Vacation

The worst thing about a good vacation is having to blog about it when I get home. We returned this week from a two week cross country trip. I have roughly 600 pictures to week through (and in times like these,  I wish I was better at deleting the bad ones right away instead of waiting until I get them home and on the computer) and that alone is a very daunting task. But, it will never get finished if I don't start, so this is a start!

We decided to drive out to Utah to visit Steven's family, and thought we'd try to see some sights along the way. I was SUPER stressed about being in the car for two VERY long days with all four of my kids. Especially little 19 month old Ella who doesn't like a simple 3 hour car ride very much. I made each kid a special travel pillow case with a pocket on the front and packed the pocket with fun things to do in the car. I also had a tub that I kept up by me that was FULL of car activities. We had card games, travel 'Guess Who' and 'Connect Four', and I-Spy wand, tan grams, beads and pipe cleaners to craft with, travel bingo cards, special new toys, and tons of other stuff I'm not remembering right now. My neighbor found out that we didn't have a portable DVD player, and kindly lent us hers. And we downloaded some movies onto our Kindle for the kids to watch. Surprisingly we didn't hardly have to use the DVD player or Kindle. The kids did SO amazing on the trip. Even little Ella.

I swear it took me about 3 or 4 full days to get our family ready to go and the house cleaned. I packed each kids outfits in gallon size Ziploc bags. This made our life SO easy. Not only did it make packing easier (it's easy to see if you remembered socks for all the kids if you have a pair of underwear, socks, pants, and shirt in each baggie), but it all fit into smaller spaces, and kept us organized while we were there. I also taped to the inside of each suit case what exactly was packed for each kid, that way we wouldn't forget things at each persons house we stayed at. And that was totally worth the time it took to do. It made repacking to come home SO easy!!

Steven was the hero of the trip and did ALL the driving. I think for the two weeks we were gone I drove about 3 hours. Ah, it was SO nice! I think he'd rather drive than try to appease the kids in the back of the van, and I'd rather deal with the kids than drive, so we make a great team. We woke the kids up at 4:30 in the morning the day we left, loaded them in the car and were off. They fell back asleep, giving us a good couple hours of driving before they were really awake and alert.

Along the way we stayed at a pretty run down little motel (that used actual keys for their rooms instead of a key card!)

Fuzzy picture, but the kids didn't care about the dingy Motel. They were just glad to get out of the car!

We saw the Corn Palace

All the decorations on the corn palace were made out of corn. And they change the designs every year.

Trying on hats at the Corn Palace gift shop.

This hat on Landon cracked me up with that fake hair attached on top!!

And we stopped at Wall Drug in South Dakota

Bad picture taking on my part. I cut off the 'W' for Wall Drug. We saw signs all along South Dakota telling us that Wall Drug was only 189 miles away (or whatever). We thought it must be pretty amazing, if they were advertising it so much. We got there, were glad to stretch our legs, but really it was just a big tourist trap.

Mt. Rushmore, and a very charred and post fire Yellowstone. The kids did SO great and it was actually so fun to be in the car together as a family without any distractions. 

Addie lost her tooth right by Mt. Rushmore. It had been barely hanging on, and we convinced her that the tooth fairy pays more if you lose a tooth while on vacation, so she let Steven pull it out.

Ella is doing her trademark pout.

We discoverd that South Dakota was actually quite pretty!!

We also went through some beautiful mountains. My poor midwestern kids were actually kind of freaked out by how high we were getting.

 And at one point, our breaks started smoking from trying to go down the mountain, because we couldn't get the van to down shift. We had to pull over to let the cool down, and we just happened to stop by this beautiful stream .

After about 28 hours of driving, we made it to our friends in Idaho, but that's a post for tomorrow!