2011 in photoreview: august part 1

buckle up folks, it's time for a road trip!

on august 2nd we loaded up the car and said goodbye to tennessee.  we stopped by to visit seb's parents for a few days then headed up to my parents where they arranged a family get together to give us a chance to say goodbye. 

here is seb's mom talking with my aunt steph. my aunt steph is a woman with alot of stories in her life. i'm always learning something surprising and interesting about her past that i didn't know before. if i'd had any sense i would have started writing them down years ago.

my brothers and my brother jake's girlfriend tiff. missin them gobs already. 

aunt charlotte savoring some precious last moments with noah, 

checking out some interesting bug on the front porch

family gathering+midwest+summer= pool party!

we chilled with our little cousins, lilly and roric. noah and roric are just seven weeks apart. half of the time i think they should live next to each other so they could be best buds forever. the other half i'm realizing the unstoppable force of terror they could become if they did and thinking visits are good.  lilly  may be a few years older than caleb but he does not care. he loves her to pieces and she is now old enough to be understanding, patient, and even helpful with him. i think the last time she played with him, she even actually enjoyed it.

we enjoyed spending a last few days with our families, knowing it would be a while before we saw them again, but we also  knew we had about 2500 miles left in our journey and needed to get a move on. so we loaded uponce again and headed for kirksville to visit our friends mat and marbree, where we naturally took no pictures. cause i'm a doofus. i guess i could say i was having such a good time visiting my friends that taking a picture didn't occur to me. but then all the friends i did take pictures of would get offended. i'm stuck i guess.

we did manage to take about 6 pictures of a giant moth on the way there. what can i tell you. 

my view from the back seat. we had caleb in the middle bench, noah in the back bench. when noah was awake, one of us would sit with him, and when it was his nap time, the other one would sit with caleb. we had a pretty good system running. a huge crate full of regular books, sticker books, coloring books, etc. an ipad. dvd players. music. a bankers box full of toys. even had a scooter and a ball to play with at parks, which were brilliant ideas that we never remembered to drag out of the car. probably because at the end of each day we felt lucky to be able to string whole sentences together.

i sat there in the back seat thinking, this is how i'm going to spend most of my time for the next two weeks. i think i may have wept a bit. 

noah handled the trip better than i had feared but not as well as i had hoped.  he basically operated in one of three states for the duration of the car trip.

noah with ipad

noah screaming

noah asleep.

we played some tickle or peekaboo games, we invented a game where my hand becomes a spider and pops up from a limited but varied range of spots to get him. we sang a few songs. but when we were in the car, this was basically how he spent his time. 

caleb was definitely better prepared for the car trip as far as patience and entertainment ability went. 

although he tired pretty quickly of me taking pictures of him. and he did have a hard time waiting for it to be his turn to have mom or dad sit with him. it didn't seem fair that due to the nap schedule, noah always got a grown up first.

gotta keep the blood flowing. here we are doing car exercises. 

and we demanded ipad time too, though he frustratingly always chose the simple games i got for noah and ignored the more complex stuff for him. he is a twit. good thing i love him.

we tried to stop plenty of times along the way anytime there was something big enough and kid oriented enough to give them a break from the driving. we easily spent a couple hours at science city in kansas city. it was the kind of place you'd like to just pick up and bring with you. 

then we headed into kansas. the land of windmills, apparently.

not to mention lots and lots of sunflowers. you can't really see it in this picture, but if you didn't know, sunflowers turn through the day to face the sun. that means they're all facing the same direction. beautiful and somehow unsettling at the same time.

kansas was also the land of dinosaurs. or at least it once was. we checked out the sternberg museum of natural history and got up close and personal with some tyrant lizards. 

i believe this is a corythosaurus. caleb will correct me if i'm wrong.

we heeded the warnings. you could lose a finger that way. or your head.

contrary to being scared, i had to keep him from climbing up on the thing. they had a great little kids section with tons of furs, bones, and teeth that were real and touchable. if we lived in hays kansas i dare say we'd be here almost every week. 

i love love love looking at fossils. i could have stayed here all day.

one of caleb's favorite prehistoric creatures is the cretoxyrhina, a shark from the cretaceous time period. he was excited to see real fossils although i could tell he was struggling to look at this brown pile of bones and visualize a shark. i tried to get a good shot but it was so huge, it was pretty impossible. 

we headed on to colby kansas to stay the night and there we got a visitor. uncle james, seb's uncle, came up to have dinner with us and see the kids for a couple of hours.

we were always so grateful to find a playground on the road and this one was conveniently located right down the street from the hotel. 

of course, you have to get there before you're completely wiped out for the day or it doesn't do you much good.

this is caleb telling me that he's sick of standing still while i try to get his picture just right.

good for the grownups to get a little exercise too.

it was good to see uncle james, even if for just a brief moment. but we had to keep moving, so off do colorado we went. in colorado we found, lo and behold...

MORE DINOSAURS. this trip seemed to be developing a theme. 

this isn't dino related, but i loved the house tucked up there on the hills. bet they had an awesome view.

we found a small but pretty cool dino museum. i thought caleb would be terrified but he seemed to get that this one was beyond doing him any harm.

here i am showing caleb that my arm is about the same size as the t-rex arm. pretty cool, i knew they were small, but i wasn't aware just how small.

i also thought it was pretty awesome that noah was comparing his foot to the dino foot even though no one told him that's what it was. he's a smart one.

yay for pteranodons! caleb was in love with dinosaur train and was squealing when he saw this.

the same museum had another cool feature: they were freeing fossils from chunks of rock right there on the premises, and you could watch them tediously chip away for as long as you wanted. 

half of us being 2 and 4, we didn't want to for very long. but it was cool anyway. 

we also visited a museum that was really, really small but that took you on a tour to see dino footprints still sitting out in the hillside.

right smack in the middle of this picture, a bulge of rounded looking rock is supposed to be a dinosaur footprint, or the depression made in mud (now rock) by a foot anyway. pretty cool.

dino bones still sitting in the rock

more dino footprints, the topside this time. they go up and color them in with charcoal to make them more visible.

in colorado we stayed with seb's aunt and uncle, who were so kind and welcoming. i'd only met them briefly at my wedding, and after two days staying with them, i left feeling like i'd known them for years. we were especially grateful that they let us stay with them because the night before we got there caleb woke up at 4am puking in the hotel room, and was still sick when we got there. he slept the majority of our drive there and our first day of visiting and was still sick enough to not keep anything down most of the time we were there. but they still loved on him and made him smile. 

they have grandkids of their own, which explains the giant dinosaur the kids took full advantage of.

caleb liked both the dinosaur and the dog, although he was quite concerned that the dog was going to eat him. i loved the dog, named moose, and those of you who know me know i'm not a dog person and to say that i loved a dog is saying A LOT.

we kept moving, knowing that we had roughly half our trip still ahead of us. some days we stopped with a good restaurant or museum to break things up.  

some days our lunch was crackers and applesauce packets on a roadside pull-off or rest stop. caleb didn't seem to care where we got out of the car just so long as we did.

in some areas even roadside pull-offs had nice views.

we saw a lot of beautiful scenery along the drive which i attempted very poorly to photograph. of course, i was driving, which meant i was taking pictures without even trying to look at the camera or what i was pointing it at. safety first!

i got some awesome bugsplat shots though.

caleb would channel dinosaur train every time we headed for a tunnel or overpass, and holler at the top of his lungs, "TIME TUNNEL! TIME TUNNEL APPROACHING FOLKS! AND THIS ONE WILL TAKE US UNDER THE SEA!" 

it didn't take long before noah was giving it his best shot too.

and then, naturally, we found more dinosaurs.

very, very dusty, uncared for dinosaurs at this particular place.

kinda makes you appreciate the fact that they're long gone. don't think i'd like to look out the window and see one of these headed for the house.

we drove on and on and on.

it seemed to go on forever. 

kind of like this post. 

hey, i told you august would be a doozy, and this was only half of it. needless to say  (but i'm saying it anyway, aren't i?) i'm not getting this year in review finished this month, but i've made enough headway to not feel pathetic about it anymore. 

check in next time for august, part 2! we're dodging bison poo!