First "Real" Vacation

Well, we've been up north and such as a family, however, we just got back from our first real family vacation. I actually started planning this about 4 years ago when I first heard about Sesame Place in Langhorne, PA (outside of Philadelphia). It's like Disney only a theme park with Sesame characters and the entire park is made for little kids! I figured this would be the perfect year to go since the boys are 2 and 4.

The drive was 10 hours long (which I wasn't looking forward to) and I figured that if we're going to drive that far, we're going to stay for awhile. I found a steal at a hotel outside the city in New Jersey. We had 5 full days to enjoy the city. The first two days we were at Sesame Place. To sum it up, Mark said it perfectly, "The first day at Sesame Place with the kids made my whole year." The kids enjoyed every minute of it, especially meeting Elmo for the first time. Even I was excited to meet all the characters.



After we had out fun at Sesame Place we spent 3 days doing "kid stuff" in the city. I wouldn't have thought that Philadelphia would be a good place for kids, but I was wrong! We spent one day playing at the Adventure Aquarium. We pet sharks, sting rays, and starfish. We even walked through a tunnel with sharks swimming over us. The next day we spent 4 hours (yes, count them, 1, 2, 3, 4 hours) at the Please Touch Museum. This museum was so much fun! We played in a life sized car garage, city (complete with hospital, construction site, and grocery store), water room, music room, and everyone's favorite Alice in Wonderland. Our last day didn't disappoint either. We toured quickly through the Franklin Institute (which is a child's hands-on museum teaching them about all of Ben Franklin's inventions). Julian's favorite was the planterium show and Mark liked the Sky Bike. We left there and toured the city on top of a double-decker bus. The first for all the boys!




We had tons of fun, and made great memories!

No More Excuses!!

That's right. I have no more excuses as to why I can't keep up on this blog. I'm not working for awhile and the kids are getting bigger and less needy. Wow, I never thought the day would come.
We're enjoying our summer. Of course, it's going by too quickly, as usual. We spent 5 days up in Oscoda at my dad's condo with him, Marilyn, Tim, and Stephen. It was pretty crowded in there, but thank goodness the weather cooperated and we spent most of the time outside. Julian and I had fun jumping the waves of Lake Huron and all the boys had a great time building sand castles. On the fourth we partied at our yearly condo association picnic/bbq. Lots of fun playing games and eating. The boys got their first chance to play with water balloons. The boys also got to finally enjoy sparklers and pop 'ems too. Liam got his first taste of a smores and whoa did he love it! The night was capped off with the annual city's fireworks. It just so happens that they go off on our beach, so we just have to step out onto the deck. It's perfect!!!
Right before we went to Oscoda we went to B.'s house (a good friend) who just happened to have a very small pool. It's one of those blue blow up Intex pools. Anyways it was really small, which was perfect for the boys, and just big enought that Mark and I could go in and enjoy ourselves. It also came with a filter which was awesome because we were so sick of dumping water and letting pools air dry. We went home that night and began our internet search for one. Of course, being late in June, pool season was coming to an end and we couldn't find the size we wanted. We happend to go to Toys R Us that night and they had two different kinds on clearance. One was a 10ftX30" and the other was 12ftX36" for a dollar more. Since it's always been my dream to have a pool, I begged Mark for the bigger one and got my way (as usual.....love ya babe).
As soon as we got home from vacation Mark about melted to a puddle putting that pool up for us. Trust me, we have already gotten our money out of it. We've been in it practically everyday. I even got to sit outside with a book and then lay in the pool for a full hour one day when the boys were taking a nap. Talk about luxury!
That's pretty much all that we've been doing for now. Mark's back at work for the next couple of weeks teaching a summer school class. Can't wait for that to be over with. August is already jam packed. Can't wait to share all the fun things we have planned!