Creative Travel

Car trips with little one's can be challenging. Despite all of my efforts, we still endured a good bit of "are we there yet's?" If anyone has any ideas of ways to occupy little people on long trips, I'm all ears!!!!

In an attempt to make the 6 hour drive to San Diego as pleasant as possible, I tried to be creative and pull together some activities to occupy them.

To give the boys a visual idea of how far we had come and how far we had to go, I put together this:After each hour in the car, I would move over the clip and we'd pull out a new treat and activity.

Hour 1: eating Cheerios necklaces they had made the day before and playing with lacing cards.

Hour 2: munching on grapes and a new-to-us music CD from the library

Hour 3: a run and play stop in Yuma followed by a chapter from The House at Pooh Corner

Hour 4: beach bags to play with and swedish fish to munch on. The beach bags consisted of a ziplock filled with a bit of sand, a couple of shells, a swedish fish and blue hair gel. The concept was great, but I either needed to use plastic or rubber fish or shouldn't have put it together the day before. The poor swedish fish had practically discintegrated before they had a chance to play around with it. I will probably try this activity at home some other time when we are studying the beach again!

Hour 5: Pretty uneventful, since they fell asleep! (Mommy got some reading done!)

Hour 6: Fruit leather and The Tale of Peter Rabbit on tape.

On our return trip, I just rotated thru any activity I could think of. Everybody was pretty crabby, so success was limited.

The big hit on the way home was the car trays. I taped a pieces of paper to the inside of two cookie trays. The boys loved resting this on their laps and coloring. I also gave them little star stickers. This little bit of fine motor skill practice occupied them for a good 20 minutes. When they tired of that, I pulled out match box cars and they played with those on the tray. The trays will be a "must" on every car trip from here on out!

Beach Time

After having such a wonderful time last year in Oceanside, we decided to return! Mima and Pa flew over and joined us for a wonderful 5 days!

Of course it was not all blissful. Traveling with three little kids isn't the easiest thing. I find my definition of a vacation is changing. It is a lot of work for mom and dad. (Oh the things, you take for granted when you are a kid and even more so when you are a young adult...) All in all, it was a fun trip though and now that we are back in our own beds and well rested, only the good memories remain!

Our condo is right next to the beach and we took advantage of that many times each day!

One morning we toured several boats at the Maritime Museum. In my attempt to pack light, I only brought my ergo and on the boats, it would have been a lot less stressful, if Keegan, my wild-child, had been safely strapped to someone's back... Aside from running around after Keegan, we had so much fun exploring the old sailing boats and 1970's Russian sub. This will definitely be something I'll want to repeat in 5 years or so when the boys are older!

Anchor's Away!

Xander "steering" the ship!

Playing pirates!

My awesome MIL, with Trey on her back!

We enjoyed Sea World on our last day there. Fun, but exhausting! (Sidenote: I LOVE to have the boys match and usually try to at least not clash with them. It was hilarious however to find out that ALL of us adults had planned to wear red that day. Rich was mortified. And to be honest, it was a bit much for me too, but it made keeping track of everybody much easier!)

Getting ready to see Shamu!

Keegan was too tired by this point, to even want to go on a ride...

Mima and Xander enjoying a break from the sun as we watched our first ever 4-d movie! (See, I'm not a total no-TV nazi...)

Bathtime

The second to last night before the Millers left for California, Evangeline and Treyton had their first "real" bath in the big bathtub! Of course, in the interest of embarassing them later, we had to snap a picture!

We miss them all so very much and Christmas cannot come fast enough!

Half-Birthday

My little Trey is a big 6 month old now! He is bigger than both of this brothers were at this age. I've even had to pull out the 12 month clothes. sniff, sniff...

Trey is a little man on the move. Both Keegan and Xander learned how to sit when they were 5 months old and loved sitting and playing with toys. Trey has no interest in sitting and would rather get down on his belly and move. He scoots and rolls - quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if he is crawling soon. He's received the nickname, 'Rolly Poly' because he rolls so much.

He also started pounding solids a week ago. After resisting his dive-bomb attempts to get at our food for the past several weeks, I broke down. He LOVES to eat!

So I'm in the thick of making baby food and getting my freezer stocked!

6 month stats:
Trey: 18lbs/6oz, 27.5in tall
Keegan: 17lbs/14oz, 27.25in tall
Xander: 17lbs/9oz, 26.5in tall

Bath-tizing, etc

I've mentioned before that my boys LOVE to play church. It is the highlight of their week and I now understand most kids fixations with "playing school". We don't have school, but we do have church.

It is so much fun to see what stands out to a four year old each week.

Last month it was this:
(Any guesses as to what he is doing?)

A couple of weeks ago it was this:

He proceeded to "bath-tize" anyone who was willing. David, one of the single guys at our church, was at our house that Sunday after the baptism and was one of the few chosen (willing) ones! As the days progressed he became much less particular with his wording and decided to skip the extensive testimonies as he preferred to keep control of the mic... This video was taken a couple of days later and he was just having fun making Rich repeat whatever nonsense he wanted to say.
On the baptism note, it is so interesting to see how each person's baptism effects me. This most recent one really touched me as a parent. I felt so unbelievably blessed to know that my young boys were watching those three young people profess their faith before the whole church!
And finally, I found him doing this last week.

I was at a loss to recognize the significance... He was pretending that the "doggy ears" were his headphones, since all of the guitar players always have large headphones on when playing... :)