Cook and Ama and Rowan, too: July 2013

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Cook the Babysitter (7-13)

Cook did quite of bit of very helpful babysitting this summer. This is his diaper changing gear!

Also, he is signed up to take Red Cross babysitting classes this fall to become a trained and certified babysitter, at which point he has said he will raise his prices. Such an enterprising young man!

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Nebraska (7-13)

We stayed at the Smith cabin on Jeffrey Lake in Nebraska over the 4th of July and got to meet a lot of Chris's relatives. The lake was beautiful and fun! Ama's favorite part was making (and eating) her favorite dessert, the "patriotic scramble," which is red and blue jello with whipped cream in between!! Cook's favorite part of the trip was getting to sail by himself in the little sailboat they had - he did an amazing job figuring how to work it!

We ate at a crazy place called that Amazing Pizza Machine that was huge, fun, and had almost everything you could imagine in it...except no pizza machine??

Rowan had lots of laps to sit on and plenty of watermelon to eat. Grandma Vera's house was beautiful and her porch was a fabulous place to watch the lake, the sunset, the fireworks, the fireflies, etc!!

We went to the Henry Doorley Zoo in Omaha - they had an indoor rainforest with cool trails, caves, a rope bridge, waterfall, and a bat wall where I got pooped on and Cook got peed on. Bats.

The boys got out the little sailboat and Grandpa Curt helped Cook get it going. The girls enjoyed playing in the water around the steps and the dock, and we all took turns going out on the lake in the paddle boat.

Here is a video of Rowan doing her new "falling down" trick in Grandma Vera's living room - I think her favorite part of the trip was having so many playmates and such a large audience for her antics!

Here is a video of Chris and Cook jumping off the rope swing into the lake - the game was to see if they could swing high enough to pull leaves off the tree...

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Kids at Mall of America (7-13)

One day everybody was in kind of a funk and we needed to get out of the house and have a radical change of flow, so I took all the kids to the Mall of America to blow off steam. It ended up being an amazingly fun afternoon, and just what we all needed to reset.

There was a WiiU promotional thing set up where the kids could preview games, and where Cook was in a Mario coin-getting contest and won (of course!) - he got a great hat and bag for a prize. Ama and Rowan got adorable pictures taken at the Mario photo station. Yay! It was really fun!

Also, there was a DJ!

Monday, July 1, 2013

Black Hills Trip with G&G (6-13)

Gma and Gpa took Cook and Ama to the Black Hills for a week, and they pretty much did every single thing you can do there...not sure how they squeezed so much in! They stopped at the Petrified Wood park in Lemmon, SD on the way. Also went to the Reptile Gardens. Cook loved the tortoise and Ama did not.