Day Trips!

This last friday and saturday we planned some daytrips with our close friends Matt & Nicky. Matt and Nicky are so close to us and we really love spending time with them. Matt and Jason met at church when I was on bedrest with the twins. And he and Nicky were married last August 14th, 2009. The super funny thing is that Matt and Jason are like long-lost twins (personality wise) and Nicky and I are a lot alike in our likes/dislikes/opinions. I think its so funny how we married the same type of person too.

Anyway, we wanted to keep our budget low but do some fun tourist things in our own state. So friday morning (June 18th) we drove to the Cave of the Mounds near Mt Horeb, WI. The story is that they were blasting some hills on a farmer's property for sandstone (?) and when they blasted they were supposed to wait 3 days for the rubble to settle. Well they heard sounds like glass breaking and they waited a few hours and went in to explore and found they had uncovered this huge cave. It was originally filled with water when North America was covered in ocean and the water made these pockets in the earth as the earth changed. So as the water receded, it formed these caves. And the stalactites (from the ceiling) and stalagmites (from the ground) are formed from dripping water from the underground water. It takes something like 50 years to make a marshmallow size stalactite. So you can imagine how old some of the really large ones are. We even saw the fossil of a huge squid in the wall of the cave from prehistoric times. The cave is a constant 50 degrees and very dark. They turned the lights off so we could see total darkness (aaron wasn't thrilled). N&C enjoyed it as much as I think a 3 year old would.
We had lunch and drove home, put the kids to bed and had a bonfire with Matt & Nicky that night.
Saturday morning we went to Green Bay to Bay Beach. It's a little amusement park run by the city of Green Bay. The rides are generally 1 ticket each and 1 ticket costs .25 cents. An awesome deal! So the kids had their first merry go round and other rides.

Matt & Jason

You can hear Aaron was ready for a nap and done waiting in the stroller...


How Aaron spent 90% of the time... Is that the look of boredom, or what?

Thank heavens he is a content lil guy...
Nicholas was in heaven with these car rides.
Celia can hold her own around the curves. Just like her momma.


This slide made me really worry! Once they went down 1x I knew it was okay. Then Jason asked if Aaron and I would like to go down.... uh. no.
Sorry the camera didn't focus so well...

We had lunch there and then went to Jason's parent's house (a 15 min or so drive north) for a great early dinner. The kids really liked visiting and seeing their beach too (they live on Green Bay right near the Door County county line). It was a quick visit cause we headed home soon after. We stopped at Aunt Brenda's house to visit her but she was out. Aunt Brenda (Jason's oldest sister) had a stroke in May and so we just ask that everyone keep praying for their family and the recovery/adjustment from this stroke.
The kids fell asleep in the car on the way home so we transferred them to their beds and then we had another bonfire together (adults) and made lots of smores. A great weekend!