Indiana!

while we were at the beach, i did all our laundry before we left. we got home from the beach saturday early evening, unpacked matt's stuff, then the kids and i headed out sunday morning around 4am to meet my parents, andrea and eli at andrea's house near statesville...we arrived at my cousin michelle's house at 10:15pm that night....long day!! we were exhausted when we got there, but we still stayed up talking for awhile, after we got the kids settled of course.

my slackness in photo taking shines brightly in these random photos i have from the trip, but i still wanted to post the memories!

we visited my grandpa and grandma (mutti's parents) while we were there.

claire and her great grandma nichter

mutt's favorite animal, she told me i needed to get a picture of them...i remembered!!

during our visit we visited the zoo. i remember this zoo from when i was really little. do preschools take field trips? either way, different places triggered old memories here, like the ponys, i remember riding them when i was little...well, probably not the exact same ponys!

eli, the animal lover, said if he saw one more animal he was gonna...zzzzz...
so sweet.

wyatt seems to like zebras and giraffes right now.

our own monkey!

ready to head back to michelle's after a fun day at the zoo.

on the way back, we were hoping the kids would take a nap (it was a little less than a hour drive)...it took a while because claire kept interupting our serenade to get eli to go to sleep. it's almost as if she knew we had hoped it would work on her as well! you can hear her protest as soon as we start singing. the other funny thing about this video, is that i thought i had claire on the video, but i have michelle the whole time, you can hear claire, but you just see michelle giggling!! :)

(...i just realized another funny thing...toward the end of the video, you can hear wyatt saying "cheese" a few times!! because he can see that i have the camera pointing back there!! little ones are too cute and funny!!)

a relaxing morning at michelle's...i think this may have been the only relaxing morning there! otherwise we were always trying to get ready to go somewhere. michelle was so sweet to let us stay with her, and she helped us so much with the kids. thanks michelle!

claire passing the time on the trip to the lake.

this particular day we headed to the lake with michelle, my cousin angie and her two kiddos gracie and austin. we always hear stories about them going to the lake, and were always sad that we never got to do that sort of thing with them, so we are getting to go with them!!!

two lil cuties! (well, ree is too, but she's not quite as small!)

wyatt and austin...playing with something...?

me, claire, eli, ree and gracie. i apparently thought i wasn't going to make it all the way into the picture...
...i was wrong.