Camping...finally!

The kids have been begging to go camping since last fall.  Last weekend we headed out to the Lake (the capital L lake, as in Lake Michigan) planning to camp and play at the beach Thursday thru Saturday.  Our trip got a bit of a rocky start when we showed up at the campground certain they'd have some unreserved spots, and they didn't.  Luckily (and miraculously) we were able to get the last spot at the state park 10 miles north of our original destination.  It was actually kind of fun to try out a new campground and beach.  We stayed at Muskegon State Park.

The most difficult part of beach trips is dragging everything across the big, wide, sandy beach down to the water.  We employed cheap labor though and made it.

 

Here are a few more pictures of us at the beach.  We had a good time, enjoyed having our friends, the McKays, join us the last day, and enjoyed good weather (up until the big thunderstorm that moved across the lake very quickly a half hour before we had planned to leave).  We'll look forward to going back!

     

Mitt in DeWitt

Mitt Romney did a quick stop in our town at our favorite local bakery last week.  I dragged the kids out to see him in sweltering weather and we had a fun time.  It's kind of a big deal for our little town of 10,000ish people.  Even though it was one of three stops in Michigan for the day, our little town's bakery got several pictures in several newspapers (including, we're told, the Wall Street Journal).

Here is Abby posing in line with a tooth-ier grin than usual.  (She had lost her first tooth the day before!)

Here are Abby and Briton dancing while we waited for the big Romney bus to arrive.  It is a very short clip, but they look cute.

Here's Mitt.  We were  fairly close to the stage but with all the people in front of me I couldn't see anything (and wasn't even exactly sure where the stage was).  I could hear fine though so I just listened.  About midway through his speech, I turned my head slightly to the right and, lo and behold, I had a very good view of Mitt.  It turns out the stage was slightly more forward than what I'd thought. I felt pretty silly (even though there was no one there to know and make fun of me:).  That is one of the joys of being short!  It was a fun and unique experience.

Toledo

On Memorial Day, we went to the Toledo Zoo.  It is about a 2 hour drive from our home and the kids had no idea where we were going until we arrived.  It was awesome!  I don't have many pictures (but lots of videos) to document our day, but here are a couple.

I put Hannah on the carousel and she giggled every time her horse went up.  It was very cute.

As you can guess by the glistening faces, it was a very hot day!  It was in the mid to upper 90s, but we still had a lot of fun.  Many of the displays and enclosures were shaded so we weren't very uncomfortable.

Speaking of enclosures, they were beautiful (especially the hippos and the elephants).  The kids' area was great!  There was a "house" with a pets display with birds and guinea pigs (to hold).  The kids' area also had a water play area, and areas to watch bees and leaf-cutter ants.

We'd recommend this zoo to anyone in the area and are glad that our friends D&C recommended it to us!

Here are the kids sitting in front of the otter pool.

Random thing:  We took a different route on our drive home and drove through Jackson.  The fundraiser coupon book from Abby's preschool has several coupons for Jackson area establishments that we never use so we decided to get dinner there with our coupon book.  We contributed less than $3.50 to the Jackson economy and got 2 pizzas and 2 good size ice cream sundaes from 3 different restaurants.  Dinner success!