Is baking soda good for your complexion?

Cora thought she'd find out.

Ruby in a blanket

Travels, Part VII

On our way home we made one more stop, in Bozeman, MT, to see Ray's Uncle Sam. We had a nice visit with him. The girls enjoyed having an hour out of the car. They also really like Sam's dog.

That pretty much sums up the whole trip. It was a lot of fun. The girls traveled amazingly well. We were all very grateful to get home.

Travels, Part VI

Baby Animal Day

If you've never been to a baby animal day, it is a fairly simple concept: lots of baby animals that you can pet and look at. I was surprised how many people were there. It appears to be very popular. Cora loved it, she petted most of the different animals and pointed at all of them.

This picture of Ruby pretty much sums up how she felt about Baby Animal Day. Note that her hands are not available to pet any baby animals and she has a look of complete disinterest on her face. The one thing that did spark some interest in Ruby was this:
Those of you who know how Ray feels about snakes will appreciate with me the humor of that moment. When I told Ray that Ruby loved looking at the snakes he said, "She was just trying to figure out how to kill them." Then added in a very worried tone of voice, "She didn't pet a snake, did she?"

(No, she didn't pet one. The snakes were mostly not being petted, just looked at, although they did have one that they would set around people's shoulders if they wanted to have a picture with a snake. I didn't think I should push it that far, I knew Ray would have enough trouble with the girls looking at snakes.)

Wagon Rides

As part of Baby Animal Day there were wagon rides.

Before looking at the next picture you should know that it was preceded by Ray, who was taking the photo, saying, "Say 'pickled pig snouts'." And followed, when someone (I think Roy) commented on that being a funny thing to say, with Ray saying, "Well, it got some good smiles."

Good smiles. Right.

Uncle Craig and Uncle Roy both got to drive wagons. Cora helped Uncle Roy.









Beth and Patrick didn't make it onto the same wagon as the rest of us. Here is their wagon, they are in the very back:

Travels, Part V

Our family with Grandma and Grandpa. Please pay no attention to our "we've been in the car for hours" look.

Patrick, Beth, and James with Grandma and Grandpa

Lil with Grandma and Grandpa. (James was sneaking onto Lil's lap, you can see his head appearing over Grandma's shoulder.)

Cynthia, Kyrene, and Craig with Grandma and Grandpa. I love how cute this picture turned out with Craig making a face at Kyrene. I think he was trying to get her to smile.


Dinner at Aunt Luanna and Uncle Gerry's house:
Great Aunt Julie happened across these bugs and thought the kids might like them. She was right. Once they sorted out which one belonged to whom, they played with them all night. They spent quite a long time rolling the bugs across the coffee table to Uncle Roy and whoever else was sitting over there. The bugs also gave me a chance to get a picture of the four cousins together.

More pictures of playing with bugs. On the left, if you look closely through the table, you can see James giving Kyrene a hug. On the right, I loved Cora's expression as she's waiting to catch her bug.











Uncle Craig playing with James:

Travels, Part IV

Friday morning we decided to take a small detour on the way home and stop to see my grandparents. Ray has only met my grandparents once and that was three years ago. The girls had never been there. For those who don't know my grandparents, Grandpa is 96 and Grandma is 93. Craig, Cynthia, Kyrene, Beth, Patrick, James, Lil, and Roy were all there visiting, too. This is the part of the trip where I may have taken an excess number of pictures, but that is all a matter of opinion. :-)










Grandpa still knows how to make all small children his friends. Who doesn't love M&Ms? Even Ruby would sneak over to grab a few before running away.

Cora helped herself to a seat on Grandma's lap, more than once. I think Grandma loved having all the kids there. She just sat and watched them most of the time.












Aunt Lil is always a favorite:
I thought this picture of Craig with Kyrene turned out darling.










The kids were also fascinated by Grandpa's singing fish.

Travels, Part III

Also in the park, near the playground, was this moose and mouse statue. The girls loved it.
There are five moose and mouse statues throughout downtown Coeur d'Alene. This one in the park was the girls' favorite, because it was lying down so they could reach it. All the rest of the "life-size" moose statues had the moose standing. (The signs said the statues were life-size, I guess it's a mini-moose.) Anyway, all I knew was that the moose statues had something to do with a children's book. Out of curiosity, I found the library, which did have the book, so I could read it. It is called "Mudgy and Millie" and is the story of a moose and mouse playing hide and seek in Coeur d'Alene. The author is a local, so it is a HUGE deal there. That book--along with stuffed moose, mouse finger puppets, and a lot of other Mudgy and Millie paraphernalia--was for sale in every store in the town, I think. Basically, the moose statues are placed everywhere the moose stops while looking for his mouse friend who was hiding in his antlers the whole time. (Sorry if I just ruined the whole book for you.)

While we were at the library we went to story time. It was way better than our local story time. There were tons of kids. They read three or four books, sang songs, did wiggle activities, and had bubbles. They also had a coloring activity that went along with the books, but we didn't stay for that.

We also did a lot of walking around the donwtown area. It is a very pretty town, at least what we saw of it. We visited the Museum of North Idaho, which I found very interesting.

Since Ray was in his conference all day he didn't get to see much of the town. He did go walking with us one evening, around the lake:

Ruby was fascinated by all the birds we saw. There were geese, ducks, seagulls, and lots of other birds I didn't know the names for. Ruby loved them all. Cora was more interested in the squirrels and dogs she saw running around.

All in all, it was a nice stay. The last day was the worst for the girls and me. We had to be checked out of the hotel by noon, which wasn't that big a deal if the weather had cooperated. We got all of our stuff stuck in the car and then went out to the park. We played for a while, then found some lunch. While we were eating it started to hail, then it rained. We didn't have anywhere to go this time. I walked around inside a little (very little) shopping center for about an hour, trying to get the girls to fall asleep in the stroller, didn't work. I think every single shop owner had to come coo over the girls. When I was excessively tired of the shopping center and walking, we went back to the resort to wait for Ray. We just had to hang out in the lobby for two hours with tons of people going past and nowhere for the girls to play, it was not fun. The rain finally broke just as Ray got there. I was so ornery I probably put a major damper on Ray's mood. He'd had a great day since he got to visit Grand Coulee Dam. Dam engineers get really excited about things like that.

Luckily the girls fell asleep in the car as we left Coeur d'Alene. We had a fairly nice drive to Missoula, MT, where we spent the night. A normal hotel was pretty disappointing after the resort we had been staying in. :-)

Travels, Part II

I did a little research before leaving and discovered that very near the resort is a large park with an extremely cool playground:
My intention was to spend the greater part of every day there. Alas, thanks to the rain, that was not possible. But we did sneak over to play when the rain let up a little.













Lots of slides. The white-ish slide was fast. Cora didn't like it so much. Ruby, on the other hand, likes every slide she ever meets, but is not so fond of swings. I think Cora could swing all day.










I took lots of other pictures of different things in the playground, but I don't think I'll overload you with them all. The girls loved it. If the weather hadn't been so rotten, we would have spent a lot more time there.

Travels, Part I

The first week of May we took a trip to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Ray had a Dam Safety Conference to attend for work. The girls and I went along for fun (since a nine hour drive with two toddlers is LOADS of fun). On the way home we took a slight detour to visit my grandparents. Since I took lots of pictures, I'm going to split it up into several posts over the next several days.

To start with, here are our accomodations:












The Coeur d'Alene Golf and Spa Resort, situated right on Lake Coeur d'Alene. The room was by far the best room I have ever stayed in. As you can see, there was a sitting area with a fireplace which was slightly lower than the sleeping area. The bathroom was huge and had a phone by the toilet, how random is that? Every room in the resort had a doorbell. Every light had a dimmer switch, including the bathroom (am I the only one who finds that odd?). There was also a balcony:














Here is the view from the big picture window:
Beautiful, yes?

Here is a photo of the resort:
If you look closely (or click on the picture to make it bigger) you can see a red dot about half-way up. That was our room.

I was a little worried about having two toddlers in such a nice place. It seemed inevitable that they would destroy something expensive. They didn't. The resort was actually quite family friendly. While I would never stay there on my own dime (since it was a work trip for Ray, the company paid for the room), it was an amazing place to stay. Every evening someone would stop by to ask if we would like "turn-down service." I'm not really sure what turn-down service is (can you tell I don't normally stay in places this nice?) and I assumed it might cost extra so I always said no.

Having such a large room was awesome. It gave the girls a bit more space to play in than a normal hotel room. Which, as it turned out, was great since we spent a lot of our time inside while it rained. (That was a bummer.)

Thigh Boots

Mommy's Hat

Why would ANYONE think I have BOYS?

When you're married to a dam* engineer:

He just can't help himself.


*Don't worry, it's spelled correctly. Having heard this joke so many times from the engineer himself, it's starting to rub off on me.

One hour...

in an extremely crowded, excessively loud, ridiculously hot room, with the crowd consisting mostly of children under five, all for this:
That's it, that's all I got. As you can see, Ruby was not too thrilled about sitting on Clifford's lap, so the photo op was extra short. Good thing Clifford was holding on tight because she was fighting to get away.




Luckily, a friend of mine was there and snapped a couple of photos of my girls so you can see that Ruby was fine meeting Clifford. Both girls gave him five and petted him.
But once they were on his lap it all went downhill for Ruby. Here she is contemplating the situation, realizing that Mommy is NOT the one holding on to her any longer:
You can also see my arm trying to snap a picture before it went downhill. My camera just isn't fast enough. Cora was fine with it all. I was annoyed that they skipped the story, it was Story Time, after all. (They skipped it because there were so many kids there, but how long does a kid's story really take?)

I feel sorry for Clifford. If I was hot in that room, he must have been roasting!