the grand adventure home

ugh, i really should not be on the computer right now, much less updating my blog.  i need to be reviewing the lesson for youth group tonight, finishing laundry, reading homework with dd#1, "30 day shredding"  and scrubbing bathrooms since babysitters will be here tonight.... oh well. priorities, right?  

so real quick, last post of vacation:

my mom rode back with us which filled every seat belt available in our nerdy cargo topped mini-van hot ride.  my husband is an AMAZING packer and managed to fit an incredible amount of stuff into the cargo topper, but still there was very little space inside the van.  we decided not to push it as hard on the way back and planned to stop two nights instead of just one. 

some highlights and memories of the trip:

apparently we were supposed to holler out each major scenic sight as my mom was too engrossed in either her book or her grand kids and stated that she had missed several on the first day ;)  WE (hubs and i) however saw each one as we were able to stay in the front seat and not have to climb to the back every 3 minutes to deal with children's needs.  YAY for having Grandma D with on the trip! : p

first stop - rest area somewhere past Stevens Pass

map reader...

"What's new Scooby Doo? We're coming after you, we're gonna solve that myster-y..."

lunch stop, Eastern WA

on both nights we went swimming at the hotel

my view of miss baby... thanks baby Ian for sharing your mirror with us! it was very much appreciated :)

aahhhh, it was so peaceful in the van during these times

more peaceful moments

bendaroos from Grandma D = fun times :)

this cookie sheet was THE best thing (i think) that i took along.  different magnet sets along with the cookie sheet were a big hit for miss J

pretty much an awesome trip! the first day was GORGEOUS weather, the second day, not so much.  it rained pretty much the whole day and that put a bit of a damper on our plans to picnic at rest areas.  our stops included a Walmart parking lot and a McDonalds.  our hotels were awesome and we met some really neat people the second night who were on a mission trip in Wyoming.  the last day through South Dakota was filled with motorcycles and RV's (hauling trailers with motorcycles) since it was Sturgis week.  i have NEVER seen so many vehicles in South Dakota at one time in my life!  craziness.  but kind of entertaining too ;)

so ends the road trip vacation posts.  looking forward to doing this many many more times!

still {hearting} my family

i really need to speed up these posts if i want to actually catch up to the present time. 

so on to the next vacation segment.  more family time.  we stayed at my mom's condo, the girls were spoiled rotten as is a grandma's prerogative and i would have it no other way, it was a great time.

she got her quilt! it is amazingly beautiful, thanks grandma d!

so big! the 13th grandchild to use this neeeearrrly 50 year old high chair :)

relaxing with a healthy snack.  thanks aunt yvonne.

miss baby turned 8 months while we were there... my mommy brain no longer allows me to remember milestones since this was more than one week ago ;) 

this was a saturday that the van dalen kids were avoiding chores at home.... bottoms permanently glued to the couch watching scooby doo.

beautiful sunday!

bubbles



the old trike



breakfast of champions... cap'n crunch berries and waffles (sugar anyone?)
i think my dd #1's face is showing signs of sugar overload

my beautiful sisters

ready to travel with the traveling gnome :)

I still {heart} my family

an evening at Birch Bay...

tradition is that when someone from "a far" is visiting there is a bbq at Birch Bay.  this creates an easy way for everyone to see the visitors and less "visits" to make by the visitors as well.  (win-win situation, yay!)

almost everyone was able to make it to this particular evening which was awesome.  weather was gorgeous too.  tons of yummy food and even better company. 

i {heart} my family

we were able to spend a lot of time with my family as well on our vacation, which is kind of a big reason for going ;)  i have a bunch of pictures so i will break it down a bit...

time with the van dalens:

we hung out at my sister's house several times....  the girls loved it there and the chance to run around outside and get really really dirty ;) 

they met Paris the bunny... (apparently the other bunny, Fred was having some ahem, health issues, and was relegated to his cage)

and general merriment abounded...

the last night we were there my brother in law took them out in the loader to pick blackberries.... yum! (hmmm my sis promised to make some yummy concoction with those berries, wondering if she ever did???)  wild blackberries everywhere is another thing i miss about my hometown.

 

i {heart} vacation

back to a vacation post... 

well the "grand adventure" really is over.  now it's lots of fun visiting with family and friends.   many of these events i did not get pictures of because i was too lazy  so busy having fun reconnecting with awesome people doing awesome things. ;)

we did manage to get some pictures and of course Grandma D contributed a few [hundred] as well.   ;)

i will start with our visits with dear friends...

we got to see Jason and Darlene and crew several times.... a quick meeting at Lynden City Park of which I didn't take any pictures,  dinner and hanging out at their house a couple times. (which is now their "old" house and have since moved!) 

we got to see Mike and Amy and their twins who are only a few days apart in age from our oldest... 

and our couples Bible study group we were in (which has expanded greatly with children and vans since we left, lol) had a BBQ/bonfire at Jon and Shelly's farm.

friends not pictured were:

a day trip to Seattle to meet up with Brad and Steph and their little pumpkin about the same age as our miss baby.  shopping at Southcenter mall (which has my fave store H&M! yay!) and lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. 

a morning at the Bender Fields park with Kara and her crew, which got rained out, since Kara claimed she was going to melt ;) (j/k! i know she won't melt in the rain since we have spent many a rainy day outside growing up together)

It is such a blessing to be able to connect with friends and be able to still connect after the years and miles separate!

Next up:  family time in Lynden :)

grand adventure, day 2.

it seems life got in the way again and interrupted my plan of "catching up" on blog posts.  pricing items for a garage sale we are holding this weekend took over my "spare" time.  i'm not a big fan of preparing for a garage sale.  it was an emotional thing to do this time (getting rid of all that little baby stuff, sniff sniff) but i *know* it is just stuff.  sentimental stuff.  but still just stuff.  i pray that someone else can enjoy a new little babe, fresh from God in those precious clothes and make use of it.  (in other words, i hope i sell it all and all this stress and time spent pricing it will be worth it!)

ANYHOO... on to day 2. 

it started with a bang at 1:30am.... but first i need to back up a little. 

when we finally got into our hotel room that first night, our eldest DD was complaining of a stiff neck and was not herself at all.  she even opted not to go swimming at the pool.  i gave her some ibuprofen and we all just went to bed.  allll in the same little room.  our original reservation, at our original hotel was for a two room suite.  well, the hotel that we were moved to had no such thing.  so a "two queen" room it would be.  and as i said in my last post, it turned out to be quite providential that the change was made. 

back to 1:30am.  i woke up.  bright light shining into the room.  dd#2 must have gone to the bathroom and not turned off the light.  i went to turn it off and when i came back to the main room i smelled a not-so-nice smell.  (cause ya know, 6 people sleeping in one room should smell like roses, right?)  it smelled like puke. i whisper to chad.... "honey, are you awake? it smells like puke in here"  he has superior night vision and got up to check each of our sleeping babes.  he signaled it was the oldest.  i went to investigate.  GROSS.  everywhere.  in her hair, down the side of the bed, on the side of the pack-n-play miss baby was sleeping in, like projectile, everywhere. GAG, GAG, GROSS.  (i don't deal well with puke) and our oldest was sleeping through it all.  so chad got her up and had the super fun job of trying to wash it out of her hair.  meanwhile i had the super fun job of trying to clean up the bed and floor without waking the rest of the family. we put everything out in the hall and called down to the front desk to notify them there was a large mass of stinky towels and bed linens in the hallway and that we could use a few more fresh towels. we all went back to sleep eventually and decided we would not try to make it on the road by a certain time that day.  i never would have smelled that she puked if we were not all put in the same room.  kudos to the hotel staff not only for having to clean up that nasty pile of smelly stuff but for making sure we woke up to a huge pile of fresh clean towels outside our door. :)

fast forward a few hours.  our oldest does not want to get back in the car. her only driving force is that we will see grandma d soon.  we make a stop at the local wally world to pick up motion sickness medicine and more ibuprofen.  we hit the road again (about 2 hours later than we would have liked) pretty much figuring that we would be finding a hotel in Spokane but we would see how the day went.  

aside from the rough start, day 2 turned out to be pretty stress free. we had one "bathroom issue" which required a change of clothes, but our stops seemed to be more effective and traveling went really smoothly and by lunch our oldest was a bit more perky. 

above pictures from our lunch stop, gorgeous, hot sunny day!

at our "snack time" stop at the last rest area in Montana we met some extremely tame rodents of some kind (i heard someone call them lemmings, but i'm pretty sure they were some type of chipmunk or squirrel).  the oldest was freaked out by them (in her defense, one of them did come up behind her and smacked her on her back) but we had fun feeding them crackers and cheese.  even miss baby thought they were pretty interesting. (see below)

we got to spokane around dinner time and we let the kids vote on if they wanted to keep going.  the thought that they could see grandma d that very night swayed them to continue on.  once we got to ellensburg we changed them into their pj's and put in the movie Wall-E and they promptly fell asleep.  now listening to this movie from the front seat and not seeing the picture is insanely boring.  there are no words for like the first hour.  just little robot noises.  snnoooooze.  which is exactly what chad and i both wanted to do.  but we couldn't.  must. keep. driving.  we didn't want to stop to switch drivers and risk waking the sleeping beasts angels, so we had to literally rub our faces to keep awake. chad and i love road trips partly because of the opportunity to talk about whatever comes to mind.  nothing was coming to mind. empty, tired, minds.

we made it of course, cause my hubby is superman.  12:30am we rolled in to Lynden in our super cool cargo-topped van. ;)  woot woot!  ahhh, home sweet home. (away from home anyway)

I {heart} I-90 West

My heart leaps when we get on I-90 West.  It's the road that leads to home.  It leads to the family and friends we left behind 8 years ago.  

At the beginning of August we embarked on a road trip with all our kiddo's, a "super duper cool" cargo topper on our van, and dubbed ourselves the "van griswalds."   There were a lot of people that really looked at us like we were nuts to be driving halfway across the country with 4 kids at the ages they are at.  We looked at it as a grand adventure, full of memory making opportunities.  And it was just that.

Here is part 1 of this grand adventure... the trip out.

day 1:

We left at 5am (well okay it was 5:15... pretty standard for us to leave 15 minutes later than what we say) it was in a huge downpour, which thoroughly woke up our kids.  The rain ended shortly and we watched the sunrise which shed light on the fact that our trip would NOT go as planned, as we planned.  (we kind of had an "idea" ie: plan of how things would go, but we expected that things would not go as we planned.  clear as mud, right?)  We "planned" for them to go back to sleep until our first stop in Chamberlain, SD.   The reality is that plan completely backfired (see what happens when you make plans?!?)  They did not go back to sleep (well, except for miss baby, cause she is just so darn sweet and good like that, ha!)  By the time we got to Chamberlain, SD for our "planned" first stop, we had stopped 3 times.  Once for a diaper leakage issue and once to re-arrange the carseat positions... miss j was being an absolute pest in the backseat by the older girls.

                                                                 

At our stop we had yummy cinnamon rolls and chocolate milk for breakfast overlooking the Missouri River.

did some exploring

                                                        













Then hit the road again in our super sweet ride as seen above. 

Our lunch stop was at a rest area near Spearfish, SD, before getting on "212" (the road with pretty much NO services, including bathrooms).

On 212 we stopped a couple times for bathroom type emergencies and DD#2 was able to learn the art of squatting on the side of a road, of course the one vehicle that probably drives that desolate gravel road we stopped on happens to come by as DD was finishing up. she says in horror: "mom, i really hope they didn't see me!"  the vehicle that drove up behind us just sat there in front of us for a bit even though we were all back in and waiting to get back on the road.  sort of freaked us out a bit.  and of course the sheriff drove by too.  nice.

the second stop on 212 consisted of something i can't believe i am actually going to post on this blog.  miss baby is going to really be angry with me for this someday.  (come to think of it, DD#2 won't be super happy with me either for the above story)  anyhoo, we are driving along and all is peaceful. i hear miss baby smacking her lips and turn to look at what she is doing to be making that noise.  she looks as though she is eating something and i can see something on her hands.  i wonder who gave her a cracker without me looking??? hmmm, she can't have crackers yet.  i get out of my seat to look closer. upon closer inspection the dirty truth is revealed.   "PULL OVER RIGHT NOW!" i exclaim.  miss baby is eating what has squished out the of side of her diaper. (i can't even bring myself to say the words, ugh)  i wipe her down including the inside of her mouth and change her while hubby works on cleaning the car seat.  another sheriff pulls over and asks if everything is okay.  "oh, yes, just fine" with fake smiles planted on our faces "just need to change a diaper"  lie. lie. lie.  not fine.  gross. gross. gross.

day 1 continues.  the kids are getting a bit restless.  miss j is uncomfortable in her car seat and only takes a short nap.  montana seems to never end. (and it won't for day 1 as our hotel reservation is in bozeman)  all in all they are super troopers and seem to be enjoying the ride and of course all the "new" stuff we packed along for them to do while traveling.  the weather is fabulous, no traffic, and our van is driving nice and smooth with no breakdowns.

we arrive in bozeman at about 8:30 mountain time.  (if my math is right that means 16 hours of traveling for day 1)  our hotel has overbooked and has no room for us.  super. thanks.   but they got us a room at the best western next door.  that turned out to be providential.  which i will tell you why on "part 2 of the grand adventure: day 2"  ;)

stay tuned....

(sorry about the odd spacing, don't know why it's doing that, but i'm sick of trying to fix it since this post has taken up my whole morning!)