Vacation Part 2!

The day after we arrived we were all pretty pooped but we didn't want to waste any time. So we headed off to the park.

 Cait did her best on the monkey bars but did not have enough strength to make it through.

Right on her butt!

Jayden claimed he could not do the monkey bars but after he was bribed with money *cough cough titi Nay!*, he suddenly was able to make it across.

Once we were done we took a nature walk behind the park. There were lots of trees planted from all over the world. I had fabulous intentions of labeling the trees from their respective places on my pictures. Somehow they never went beyond intentions though.

We found an upside picture which we thought was interesting.

 And finally there was a memorial set up for all of our war heroes. We salute you!

To be continued...

Vacation Part 1!

*I am breaking up our vacation into several blog posts due to the massive amount of pictures I have.

We went on our first vacation as a family of four during spring break. It was so much fun!!

I had this grand plan to incorporate geography into our trip. A little bit of history too. We were going to stop at half the states on our route to collect postcards one way and we would stop at the other half to collect them on the way back. We would take pictures, put a stamp on little passports that I intended to create, and I would read to them a little about each state that we passed. Sweet right?

Well that went to hell in a handbasket when we all caught a stomach virus before I could put together anything past my plan! It was a rough few days in our house. Four human beings. With a stomach virus. In one bathroom.

Cait was struck with it first. She went to bed perfectly fine. Suddenly Juan and I heard the unmistakable sound of vomit. This was only a few days before we were supposed to leave. We hoped it was food poisoning, cleaned up the mess (well Juan took care of the mess while I cleaned up Caitlin), and she fell asleep. Fine, a little hiccup, but nothing that would cancel our vacation starting Wednesday.

20 minutes later she puked again. 20 minutes after that, again. She continued puking every 20 minutes for 4 hours. Well, crap.

 

We brought her to the ER and learned that she had a stomach virus. The nurse said she had been seeing a lot of it lately.

"Is it contagious?" I asked, knowing damn well it was, but hoping, praying, begging, that she would say otherwise.

She just looked at me and lied straight through her teeth. "We'll see." I knew I was in trouble when she smiled.

Damn.

She sent us off with anti nausea meds and wished us the best.

When Jayden, Juan, and I started feeling off the next day I knew what to expect. I will skip the horrid details because this isn't that kind of blog. Luckily we were on the mend within 36hours. 12 hours later we were packed and ready to go!

It started off like this:

 

 We drove until they looked like this:

We stopped to rest and suddenly they were wide awake, excited to be spending the night in a hotel.

The next morning we left before the sun rose. Jayden was too excited to rest in the car but Cait napped a few times.

 

And finally we arrived in the sunshine state!

To be continued...

The past couple of weeks of Caitlin's Little Learners class went like this:

 She graduated from her Little Learners class!

 

Jayden has been building lego sets. He loves all things lego and does an awesome job following directions to put together and take apart his sets.

There is a new baby in our family! The kids have a brand new, long awaited, beautiful baby girl cousin and Juan & I have a new niece. This meant we had to take a trip to Build A Bear to create something fabulous for her.

In science Jayden is currently learning about measuring solids, liquids, and gases. Naturally we had to make a batch of nutella chocolate chip cookies since we are learning about measurements.

 

The kids have been fascinated with learning Spanish lately. Caitlin's favorite word? "Cooooooooooooooooooooooooooonchale!" She really stretches out that "o" to the max. Thanks a lot daddy! To help them learn more productive words, I found some free videos online called Salsa. It is a series of videos with puppets that Caitlin loves. Jayden does not though, so I will have to find something else for him.

 We finally picked up Jayden's karate uniform and he looks completely adorable in it!