Our First Day of Vacation

We just got back this week from an over two week vacation up north. We went to my parents' cabin in WI, and then to G and G S's house in KS. We had SUCH a great time. It was wonderful to see so many family and friends. I took a lot of pictures so I'm going to break up our vacation post into a few different days.

Our first day on the road! Jackson and Cooper were troopers in the car. Cooper did amazingly well; he entertained himself very easily. Jackson had a harder time. He'd get bored after awhile and just cry and cry. His favorite game right now is to drop toys, so I'd hand him one and he'd throw it, hand him one, throw it, etc... Then he'd cry. So I made him this tray for the car, I thought it might help.
I hot-glued a bowl to the tray and that helped out a TON. On our drive up Memorial Day I would just throw a bunch of cheerios on his tray and he'd get maybe 2, the rest would go everywhere in the car. The bowl definitely helped. Then I put some velcro and velcroed a few toys to the tray so they'd stay better. It worked well and the first time he played with it, it kept him entertained for probably 30 min! But then the next time I gave the tray to him he just picked the toys off of it and threw them. Oh well.


On our first day of vacation we went to my Aunt Amy and Uncle Jim's house for the day. My grandparents, Uncle Scott, and Uncle Ross all came too, as well as my parents and Laura, Tom, and the kids. We had a great day! Here are my cousins Emma and Evan, along with Cooper eating a snack. Laura and the kids didn't arrive until late afternoon so I don't have too many pictures of them.

They have a really cute chair in their yard so I had fun taking pictures of the kids on it.

Another picture of cutie pie Emma. She is going to be five in November so she's about 6 months younger than Elizabeth.

And of course cutie pie Evan! He turned 2 in February.

Here are my boys!

After playing around in the yard we took a break for cupcakes. Evan enjoyed his:)

My mom got all the kids matching shirts so we attempted to get a picture of them together. Emma took off during this one...

but came back for this one! (Emma, Evan, Ben, Jackson, Elizabeth, and Cooper) It was a job trying to get all of them together as you can probably imagine. We did a lot of photoshoots with groups of kids on this trip as you'll see.

Amy and Jim live on a lake so the kids had lots of fun throwing rocks into it.

Jackson graduated from an army crawl to a "big boy" crawl on our trip! He still does the army crawl if he wants to get somewhere fast, but he's getting better at regular crawling.Some of the adults relaxing on the deck.

At the end of the day Ryan flew back to TX to work for another week before joining us at the cabin, and I drove with my parents to their cabin in WI. I'll post the next set of pictures soon!