Memorial Day Adventure

Yesterday Darren and I went kayaking with some friends on the Coosa River. We had a great time. It's been a while since we did anything like this so I did kind of freak out when we turned over. I didn't mind getting in the water, my freak out was more about the rocks that I could feel around my legs and the waves crashing around my head. I did manage to get myself together pretty quickly to remember the cardinal rule about keeping your feet up so they don't get caught in the rocks. I made it to the kayak several minutes before Darren and I kept yelling at him to swim faster. When he got to me he told me that it was kind of hard to swim fast holding on to both of our paddles. Uh-oh. The very eloquent and experienced (sarcasm) teenager that gave us our two minute training session told us to make sure we grab our paddles when we turn over. Let me tell ya, grabbing my paddle was the last thing on my mind when we turned over. I'm so thankful that Darren was on the ball and didn't just take care of himself, but me also. Hmm, that scenario sounds very familiar. :) We really did have a great time and it was good to do something adventurous. Darren said we need to do stuff like this more often so we don't become old "fuddy duds." If you live in the area and are interested you can find out more info at http://coosariveradventures.com/. It's a lot of fun and surprisingly inexpensive.

Beach Trip

We went to the beach a couple of weeks ago and this is the first chance I've had to write about it. I don't know about you, but I have the hardest time recovering from vacation. No matter how hard I try to leave our home nice and neat, it never happens...and then I have to come home and do what seems like a ton of laundry on top of the mess we left. Now that I have that out of the way, I can talk about the wonderful trip we had. I must admit that it didn't start off great. We left in flash flood rain and later learned that some areas that we traveled through did actually flood and one person was even killed when his car was swept off the road. Thankfully, we just encountered lots of heavy rain and only for about the first hour of the trip. We arrived at Santa Rosa just in time for Nate to eat lunch and have a nice long nap...yeah, right. He wasn't real excited about napping and that was understandable since he wasn't in his normal environment, but he usually settles down pretty quickly. 99% of the time I just walk away and literally within one minute he is quiet. But today he decided that he wanted out and was trying his best to climb of the pack-n-play, so I didn't want to leave him. After several attempts to get him to settle down I finally decided that it was a lost cause and we should just go to the beach. Why is this a big deal? This was the first day of his entire life that he didn't have a nap...and he survived without a major meltdown...and so did I. Thankfully this was just a one time occurrence and he slept great the rest of the trip. When we got to the beach we were a little worried because the flag was out for dangerous marine life. There were lots of these weird jellyfish and crabs in the water. Thankfully the jellyfish did not sting and the crabs would gladly get out of your way.





This was the biggest crab we caught. It's usually fun to catch them, but there were so many of them that it wasn't even challenging.

It was actually kind of fun to chase them and watch them scurry away...

and bury themselves in the sand.

Other than the "dangerous marine life" the beach was beautiful and the weather was great the entire trip. Nate loved the beach. He loved sitting on the edge of the water and sticking his fingers in all of the holes in the sand. Most days we went to the beach twice and when we would ask Nate if he was ready to go the beach he would say "wa wa" (water) and walk over to his bike trailer to let us know that he was ready to go.

Nate rubs his bellybutton when he's sleepy and you can tell that it's almost nap time in the picture below. If he can't get to it, you better be ready for a melt down. I had all of these cute winter one piece PJs that he only wore a couple of times since he couldn't get to his bellybutton. I liked the cute PJs, but I like sleep a lot more. He's going to have some minor surgery mid June (I'll post about that later) and they are going to do an incision in his bellybutton. I don't know how we are going to keep his hands off of his bellybutton.

Speaking of naps, check out this bed head.

Here are a couple of sweet pictures I took late one afternoon.

Baby Cows

Almost every afternoon we ride out in the pasture to check on our "baby cows." Nate loves the baby cows. We have seven, but we had five for quite a while so when we ask Nate how many baby cows we have he says "Five!" Before Nate was born, most of the calves were solid black because our bull was solid black (boring!). Now our bull has a white face so most of the calves have some white on their faces. Now we can name them and get attached to them... before sending them off to slaughter.

Brownie


A la mode


Pinkie


Diddy

Thing 1

Thing 2

Patches

Watering Plants...and Nate

This is what happened one afternoon while we were watering plants. Darren knew that this hose had a lot of holes in it and used it intentionally to see what Nate's reaction would be. As you can see, he had a great time. He was soaked from head to toe. Check out his tummy in the bottom picture.

Planting Tomatoes

This afternoon Darren and Nate planted a few tomato plants. Nate was in heaven - he was outside playing in the dirt.

Digging the hole - hole is one of Nate's favorite new words. Every time I ask him about planting the tomatoes, he says hole, hole.

Getting ready to plant



Putting the tomato in the hole

The finished product

Easter

Happy Easter! It was such a beautiful day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus!

Dyeing Easter Eggs

This morning we went to my parents to dye Easter eggs. My mom has a picnic table on her screened-in porch that has been egg dyeing central for years. It's great because we don't have to worry if we make a little bit of a mess - or a really big mess like Nate did today. I really didn't know if Nate was old enough to really enjoy dyeing eggs, but I thought we would give it a try. I'm so glad we did, because he LOVED it. From the moment he dropped the dye tablets into the cups, he was totally captivated. He loved dropping the eggs into the cups. By the end there was almost as much dye on the table as in the cups. He also loved banging the eggs together. His hands were covered in dye and I was beginning to wonder if it was going to wash off, but we finally got it all during bath time.