He speaks!

Tanner has his own special language and he is becoming quite fluent in it. He has picked up a few English words as well so I'm not too worried yet that we have a speech problem. He's behind in his speech, but at least we're making some progress. I love when he tells me stories in his language, complete with hand gestures and dramatic facial expressions. Also he does know one important word for when the camera comes out. Cheese!

Back in our beautiful mountains

Yay summer is here! Which means we go hiking. Our hiking may a bit more limited this year. Tanner and Natalie have put on a bit of weight. It's all muscle! But it's heavy muscle. On Saturday, before Sydney's gymnastics meet, we decided to take a stroll up to Donut Falls. This is the easiest hike on our list of family hikes, but it's a good workout when you're lugging around a kid on your back. So we'll be sticking with fairly easy hikes this summer I think.

Josh is such a gentleman and always takes the heavy little guy. Isn't he a cutie?

I stocked up on Lunchables a couple weeks when they were on sale. We're all set for a few hiking lunches.

The biggest difference between this year and last is that the twins are walking! So they gave us a break on the way down.

Gymnastics

Sydney had her first gymnastics meet a couple weeks ago. It was actually called a mini meet. Sadly, I wasn't there. It was right during nap time for Tanner and Natalie and taking 2 ornery 2-year-olds to a gymnastics meet where they would just want to go play on all of the equipment sounded like a bad idea. So, since I usually take Sydney to her class every week, Josh went to the mini meet so he could get a chance to watch her skills. She's getting so good I think! She just recently advanced from the Tots class to Level 1 which she's very excited about. It's so fun to see the progress she's made. She likes to come home and show Tanner and Natalie what she can do and then they do somersaults to show her what they can do.

Natalie's dark side

Short history: Natalie and Sydney have bunkbeds (thanks Nick and Kim!) and Tanner has a crib and regular bed in his room. Natalie takes naps and sleeps in her bunkbed. Tanner takes his nap in the crib (so he doesn't get out) and sleeps in his bed at night. This worked for a little while....

Now Natalie and Tanner have learned how to climb up to Sydney's top bunk. Natalie won't leave the ceiling fan alone (it doesn't get turned on anymore), and won't leave Sydney alone at night, wanting to sleep on the top bunk. Tanner won't sleep in his bed preferring the crib (not sure why). So we put Natalie in Tanner's bed the last few nights.

So last night, Tanner is crying in his crib, and I go in to see what's up. Natalie gives me this little smirk like 'I can't wait to see your face'. She had emptied Tanner's drawer of clothes INTO THE CRIB. Not just that. Her shoes, books, diapers, stuffed animals, etc. You name it, she's trying to fill up the crib with anything she can reach. Tanner was gripping the end of his grib like the stuff was boiling lava. I couldn't stop laughing, taking things out and attempting to tell Nanners that it wasn't cool and she shouldn't do it. She smirks again, starts laughing, and I just bust out laughing. I still can't stop when I tried to tell Lisa what happened, or even now while I'm typing.

While we were away...

So while we're on the cruise, hoping for the best (i.e. the kids won't start any upheaval, etc), everything went well. It sounds like the kids were as spoiled as we were. We sure love our parents!

Paul and Mo (Lisa's parents) sent us pictures like this:






My parents sent this video:

Cruising the Bahamas

A couple weeks ago Josh and I enjoyed another fabulous getaway to some white sandy beaches. This time we visited the Bahamas. Josh found a great deal for a 4-night cruise on the Majesty of the Seas. Doesn't it look majestic? It was a much needed trip away and it's so true that absence makes the heart grow stronger. I missed the kids a lot more on this trip but I absolutely loved spending lots of care-free time with my hubby. :)
So our cruise departed out of Miami. I'd never been there before but we didn't see much of it besides the airport.

Here we are about to sail off. Bye-bye Miami!

Here's our towel elephant our stateroom attendant made us. The staterooms were especially small on this ship but we didn't care. You basically just sleep in there anyways. And I sleep really well on ships. I think it's the subtle rocking all night that makes me sleep like a baby and wake up really rested.

A lot of people don't like the assigned seating that Royal Caribbean does but I actually really like it. It gives us a chance to make friends, which was especially fun this time because we kept running into them on our excursions.

This is Luke and Sonia who live in Florida.

This is Calvin and Kristen. We couldn't remember Kristen's name on the first night so we suggested we call her Hobbes. I told her about his the next day and she liked the nickname. So it stuck and we called her Hobbes most of the time on the trip.

Even though you can eat for free pretty much all day and night on the ship we decided to try out Johnny Rockets once just for kicks. Calvin and Hobbes said it was worth the $5 cover charge and I have to agree. It really was quite delicious. It was also a fun little diner styled in red leather and chrome like in the 50's and the employees would come out and dance for us every once in a while.

Day 2 of our cruise was Nassau. We decided to do a beach break on Blackbeard's Cay. It was beautiful! We just swam around in the crystal clear waters and laid out on the beach chairs. The white sand just makes the water look so amazing.

It turned out Calvin and Hobbes were also going to Blackbeard's to swim with the stingrays. We saw a couple of "wild" stingrays while we were out swimming too but Josh and I were too late to get in on the actual stingray excursion.

After relaxing on the beach we wandered around Nassau for a bit and did a little shopping.

Here we are at dinner that evening.

Coco Cay was our second stop on the cruise. This is Royal Caribbean's private Island. I think it was our favorite stop. We didn't book any excursions but we did rent floating beach mats and floated around the ocean. This was actually not good because the sun was very intense but it felt so good floating in the cool water that we didn't notice the heat too much. That resulted in a sunburn. We also found Calvin and Hobbes again and they showed us the ways of geocaching. We'd never done this before and it was pretty fun! Like a little treasure hunt. We're planning to take this up as a new family hobby. I'm so glad we joined them on the nature trail which took us to the other side of the island because it was nearly deserted there. We found a stunning beach with hardly anyone on it. You could walk out for probably a hundred yards into the ocean and still be waist deep. It was awesome.

Our final stop was in Key West. Due to our sunburns and the lack of beaches in Key West we decided to stay out of the sun a little bit that day.

We spent the first little while wandering around the town looking at all the beautiful houses and historic buildings.

The very first thing we did was call home and make sure the kids were behaving well for their grandparents.

We visited Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. And once again we ran into Calvin and Hobbes. I think they were stalking us. :) Ripley's was weird but there was air conditioning. I am not used to humidity so I was extremely happy to go somewhere cool and indoors for a bit. We did a little shopping afterwards and I had some killer Key Lime pie. I also got some Key Lime juice. I don't know if this is better than the regular lime juice I buy in the grocery store. I haven't actually made a key lime pie out of it yet.

Here is us sitting in the shade of a bush.

And back to the ship. Overall this was a wonderful trip and I highly recommend this cruise. Especially if you can get a good deal on flights to Miami. Thanks again to my parents and Josh's parents for watching the kids for us! And kudos to any of you who actually read this entire post. That was long!