Summer 2010 Pictures

Sorry to those who read my blog that I have been so bad about posting lately. It's been a busy summer and I've been bad about posting about all our busy activities. I won't give a lot of commentary, but I do want to get some pictures out. The last month review in pictures. Enjoy!

In July, we went to one of my favorite camp ground for 5 days, the Mohican State Park. It's my favorite because there is a lot to do right at the park including the pool and a river that runs through the park. The kids love to play in the river and you can also tube down the river. This year our site was really close to the pool and the play ground. This made it much easier and I could even see the play ground from the campsite so the older ones could go over by themselves.

Mammaw, Alissa and Alayna. Brad and Alayna came up and camped some too.

Testing out the tubes. We were getting ready to go on the tubing experience of our lives!

Alayna and Brad



We went to see some area sights. This is an overlook.

We also went to see this castle. The kids thought it was cool. It was a resort.

Up in the tower!

There was a dragon, but Alissa wasn't quite sure that petting it was a good idea!

Playing in the river. Shortly after this picture Leah flipped about a crawdad that she saw in the water.

Caleb and Dad decided to catch a crawdad with his net.

Leah thought it was so cool when it was in the net!

Even Dasher loved the river. He loved swimming in it, too bad his swimming skills are less than impressive!

One evening we all went to the camp store for Ice cream.

Leah and Caleb always have to pick the most colorful ice creams!

There was a bike path right across from our campsites. It gave hours of entertainment and at least on wreck.

Lots of fun at the pool. Leah jumping in. She has become quite the water bug considering at the beginning of the summer she was scared to put her head in.

Leah getting ready to snorkel. She is good at swimming underwater because of this.

Alissa's favorite pool activity is to find a ladder and climb it and jump off about 100x.



At the end of July beginning of September, we made a trip up to my Dad's house for a visit. This was the last visit we had with Aunt Alexis, Emily, Chris and Sami until next summer. The kids love playing with their cousins. All the cousins were together since Adam, Steph, Noah, Rachel and Nathaniel also came up. This was also the weekend that we ran the dreaded 5 mile race.

Emily is giving all the cousins tattoos.

Beautiful!

Chris and Caleb keep busy doing the boy thing, playing in the dirt! What a mess!


Last week, we did our last summer camping trip to Lake Erie. We left on Wednesday and came back Sunday. It was a nice little get away and the kids had a lot of fun. We tried to do some special things.

The evening we arrived we took a bike ride out to see the Lake.

One day we went to place that had a house built on the hill, a prehistoric forest, and mini golf.

This house was so strange. It is a illusion. It even appears that the water is flowing up hill.

The kids thought it was fun to run through the house. It made me motion sick. It felt like the house was moving even though it wasn't.

Our walk through the prehistoric forest. It was filled with dinosaur statues. The kids thought it was pretty neat, but we went through fast since the mosquitoes were so bad even though it was 11.

They had a place where the kids could dig for fossils.

Minuature Golf Time.

This was Alissa's first time playing.

Alissa thought we were crazy trying to get her to put the ball in the alligator's mouth!

Lots of fun at the Lake Erie Beach.

Yes, Caleb decided to make a sand Angel! He was covered with sand afterward.

One of the days we were there the waves got pretty big. Alissa didn't like them, but Caleb and Leah wanted to go wave jumping. Leah was the wave chaser!

Alissa preferred running from the waves!

We went to visit the light house nearby.

The waves were really big that evening and really crashing up on the rocks. The kids wanted to go where they waves would splash them, but we had to make sure they stayed back.

Lots of big rocks to climb on.

When I was young, my family would go to Lake Erie every year. It was our big summer vacation. We decided to visit the park that I used to go to as a kid. It was a half hour drive from our camp ground. It was so different! It isn't the same park now. It is now a marsh and bird sanctuary. The don't have a public beach at all now and they have let the beach grow up with weeds and trees. It was still fun to go and see.

There was no swimming on the beach, but the kids loved it because all the shells had washed up on shore and since it's not well visited there were a ton of shells to choose from.

The kids took their shoes off and started filling them with shells.

By the breakers it was actually a moutian of shells. This whole thing is just shells. You were just stepping all over them. The actually found some really big and neat looking shells. This part of the trip was probably Leah's favorite. She wanted to go back the next day.

The marsh had a really nice board walk through an area of it. It was made to do bird watching, but with our loud group we were not going to see any birds! The still had a good time walking/running on the "bridge".

This week/weekend is our town's street fair. Leah's dance class got to perform in it last night. It was a long wait and Leah worried about forgetting her dance since it had been awhile she last performed, but it was cute and she did fine.

After the dance performance, we let the kids go and ride some rides. It was Alissa's first time on these types of rides. I won't even go into how over priced this experience was!

Leah choose to go down the big slide.

Caleb picked the dinosuars instead. Doesn't he look excited! :) When he came off he thought it was so great, but I couldn't get him to do anyting to show that while he was on it.

Alissa loved this one!