Florida!

What do you do when you have a ton of frequent flyer points? Take a trip to Florida of course! We had an amazing time! The highlight of the trip was swimming with the manatees, which we did twice. We also went to the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. That was the best little zoo/park I have ever been to! Here are a few highlights of the trip.

These first few shots are at the Homosassa Spring Wildlife State Park. Hence the closeups of otherwise elusive animals.

 Admit it. If you had seen a bald eagle in front of an American flag, you'd take a picture too. Cheesy or not.

This wood duck was actually wild. We took a boat trip down a river to get to the park, and we saw this guy on the way there. Looks fake doesn't it? But it isn't!

These next ones are from when we went swimming with the manatees. The water in Crystal River is natural spring water, so year round it is 72°. It was about 80° outside when we went swimming, so it wasn't horrible, but we couldn't stay in for more than about 20 minutes at a time or we got too cold. Most everyone else that was there had wetsuits and came in commercial tour boats. We just paddled over in a canoe and used life jackets to keep us a little warmer.

Brianna was tougher than Eli when it came to the cold. He wanted out a lot sooner than she did.

 I know. So attractive in goggles, right?

 It's hard to tell, but there are about 10 manatees in this picture.

 One swimming under our boat.

 This one was curious and followed our canoe for awhile. It's the same one as in the next shot.

The crazy hair picture! One day Brianna had just woken up from her nap and was playing with Eli outside. We snapped a picture because she was being so cute.

 This guy is catching his breakfast.

 Got it! (It's a crab)

Also eating his breakfast.

 Eli saw one of these swimming through the water chasing a fish, and he said, "Wow! It's a ninja bird!" So, forever after any dark bird that we saw was a ninja bird.

 Cameron saw this alligator while he was out hiking one day. It is about 10 feet long!

 This is a blue heron and is one of my favorite photos. I just love the way the colors of the bird match the colors in the background.

Cameron always takes more photos of wildlife than he does of our family. I included every single family picture that he took, and I didn't even include half of the wildlife ones. Silly Cameron. If you have any desire to see some of his other wildlife shots from Florida go to his Flickr page.

Halloween

Last year, right after Halloween, I found a lady bug outfit and a superman outfit at a garage sale for 50¢ each. I figured that would be cheaper than making them myself so I bought them. This year, however, Eli decided that he would rather be Lightning McQueen again. Which is fine with me because I spent a lot of time making that last year! Not only that, but the Superman outfit is still a little on the big side, so I'll see if I can convince him to wear it next year.

Things that go bump in the night...

In honor of Halloween, I thought I would share a spooky story. I don't know that I'll do this every Halloween since I haven't had very many spooky things happen to me in my life, but we'll see.

A little over a year ago, Brianna was still sleeping in our room in a bassinet by our bed, and Eli was sleeping in his own room across the house from us. The crib was still in his room, but since Brianna would be using it soon we were trying to get him to stop thinking of it as "His bed." Thus, on this particular night, he was sleeping on a Thomas The Train air mattress beside the crib.

At some point in the middle of the night, we started to hear Eli cry through the baby monitor. It is not our practice to immediately rush to the aid of a crying toddler, rather we wait a few minutes to see if he will go back to sleep on his own. Right at the time when Cameron and I were fighting over, "It's your turn." "No way, I did it last time, it's your turn." Eli walked into our room... But we could still hear crying through the baby monitor...

At this point Cameron and I experienced the classic movie scene moment. We slowly looked at each other, then simultaneously pulled the covers off and rushed to Eli's room. Upon arriving, we found that Eli's monitor was off! 

In our middle of the night, slightly crazy mode we went through all sorts of scenarios of why we could hear Eli crying through the baby monitor, including something like, "Well, maybe the radio signals stay in the air and in the absence of a stronger signal from the real monitor, we were picking up an old signal."

Don't worry, the next morning when we were more logical we knew that couldn't be the case. We finally concluded that we were picking up a signal from one of our neighbor's monitors. I am not entirely convinced by that explanation, though, simply because we don't have any close neighbors yet. We live in a new development, and there are NO houses on our street yet. There are NO houses behind us since that is occupied by open desert. There are NO houses on the street leading to our street, and the houses that are closest to us have NO children in them.

Happy Halloween!

New Pets!

On our recent trip to Moab, Cameron found two collared lizards. They were teeny babies and he decided that "Eli" needed some pets. Be that as it may, every time Cameron talks about them, he calls them, "My lizards." I have to admit that they are pretty fun even though my first reaction was "No! We are NOT going to take two lizards on a four hour drive home with us when we don't even have a box to put them in."

Here are some picture of Ile (Eli spelled backwards, pronounced eye-lee) and Irby (Bri from Brianna spelled backwards, pronounced erb-ee).

Moab

We took a trip to Moab for Labor day weekend. I thought I'd share a few pictures with you! Not all of these pictures are from Cameron. Some were taken by his brother, sister, and brother-in-law, but I don't remember which.

 

The night before we left, Eli was too excited to sleep. He kept coming out of his room saying that he was packing, but we didn't know what he was up to. The next morning we found this.

 

We found some petroglyphs on a hike to a swimming hole.

 

 This is where we went swimming. It was COLD water, but it was fun!

 

 Eli decided the water was too cold to get in, but he liked throwing in rocks.

 

 

 Group shot! From left to right:

Eli, Cameron, Carrie (Cameron's sister), Courtney (Cameron's sister), Brayden (Courtney's husband), Melody, Holly (Sister-in-law), and Avery (Holly's daughter)

 What a cute family shot! This is Chris's (Cameron's brother) family.

The next day was climbing day! I'm not a very good climber, so I only went up about half of what you see Holly climbing there.

 These guys are the real climbers!

Here is Tate (Chris and Holly's son) just waiting until he is old enough to climb!

 Avery showing Brianna how it's done!

Ok, maybe she needs a little boost!

 Brianna and Tater Tot with Grammy Teena

 Can't go to Moab without rafting!

 

 Taking a hike to double arch!

 Cheese!

He likes caves...

In Memory Of...

I think the universe has it in for my clothes. Skirts in particular. Just before we left to go out of town labor day weekend, Cameron sprayed the house for bugs. We had been having a problem with beetles and ants, but had seen a couple of cockroaches *shudder* too. There was a colony of ants living somewhere in the wall by our garage door and they were coming into the kitchen via a tiny hole at the base of the door so I told Cameron to make sure that he sprayed there, which he did. When we got home, 4 days later, I found that the ants had taken up residence in the master closet, in one of my skirts! Yuck! They were crawling all throughout my skirts but there was one in particuclar that they must have liked better because they set up their colony there. Upon asking Cameron, he said that he ran out of bug spray before he got to our master closet.

 This is the skirt. You can't tell, in this picture, but there are several holes in it now, so in the garbage it goes. I was telling some of my friends about the incident the Saturday after we got home, and one of them responded with something like, "Oh that's horrible! I think I would have cried!" To which I responded, "Well, it was my least favorite skirt. If they were going to pick one to chew holes through, I'm glad it was that one." But, I spoke too soon...

Earlier, on the day that I had the conversation with my friends, I dropped off my FAVORITE skirt at the dry cleaners. I was supposed to pick it up on Tuesday of the following week. On Monday morning, I read that a dry cleaning building had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Don't worry, it was in the evening, no one was there, no one got hurt, and their insurance will be covering everything. But, I didn't think it would affect me at all.  After all, building A burned down, and building B is where I dropped off my skirt.

When I went to pick up my skirt, they told me that they send a lot of their items to building A to be cleaned. Along with my skirt. So yes, my skirt was burned to a crisp in a lightning fire. Less than a week from when another skirt was eaten by ants. I don't have a picture of this skirt. How was I to know it would soon meet a fire-y demise? But to give you an idea of what it looked like...

Kind of like this, but brown and white and not quite as many flowers.

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me I should dress better.

Cameron's Hobby

Anyone that has known us for a long time knows that Cameron loves taking pictures. Usually, his subjects are animals rather than people. When we go on a hike together we come back with five hundred pictures of animals and scenery and maybe twenty pictures of the family. Cameron's most recent camera is one that also takes videos. So now he has been recording the scene by videos and photographs. He recently set up a youtube channel to upload all of his videos to the internet. Here is a link if you are interested.

Cameron's Videos

Be warned! He doesn't taking any videos of anything cute and fluffy unless it is being eaten by something else. Some of these videos are not for the faint of heart. Like the one with a Gila Monster eating a Rabbit. Although, he did edit out most of the bone cracking sounds. There are some videos on there that are kind of cute. For example the one with Black Bear cubs playing in Yellowstone.

Also, since I'm showcasing Cameron, here is a link to the site where he keeps all of his photographs.

Cameron's Photos

Enjoy!