Where in the world have we been?

It's been a busy few weeks. The kids and I spent some time in Utah (so sorry to all those we weren't able to see; we basically had time for immediate family and grandparents), Peter has been on a trip of his own to be talked of in more detail in the future, and now we're all home and getting adjusted to having Peter home more since school is over!!

Here are a few highlights from our Utah trip...One night after I had put Asher to bed, he kept waking up crying. I went in and, as he pointed to the window, he said, "Scare(d) that." It took me a minute to realize that he was telling me he was scared of the crickets, a sound he's never heard before! And somehow Asher's cute little smile turned into the goofiest grin whenever he's smiling for the camera. You'll see a couple examples of this in the slideshow.


We've loved having a 3-day weekend to get back into the swing of things. We spent nearly the entire weekend playing and enjoying the fact that Peter has no more pressure to get homework done! On Saturday, we headed down to REI for a big sale. We found the kids some great hiking shoes, which came in handy today (more on that in a minute). Since we drove 80+ miles we figured we might as well hop over to Philadelphia since it wasn't much farther. We were able to get into a science center there for free with our science center membership. The kids had fun digging for dinosaur bones, among other things.

Then today we headed out to Bushkill Falls in Pennsylvania for some hiking. Bushkill Falls is a beautiful area with a hiking trail all around gorgeous waterfalls. Every time Peter would start walking ahead of us, Kaia would yell, "Dad, wait! I'm the lead!" Then Kaia began to tell us that we were again looking for the bear's house (which you may remember we looked for when we went hiking a month or two ago). Today Kaia would call the bears from time to time on her "cell phone" to verify where we were meeting up; apparently this was a new cell phone since the one last time was broken. The amazing, incredible, almost unbelievable thing is that the names of these bears were Maile, Peter, Asher, and Kaia!! At one point Kaia pretty much talked nonstop for 10 minutes, telling us about how we were going to the ball with the bears and the sister bear was going to give Kaia some of her Cinderella dresses to keep. Then she said, "Sister bear even dreams about me, Mom." Wow, I was really amazed so I asked what sister bear's dreams of Kaia were about. "She dreams of me being a princess and living in a palace." I see. Well, fortunately, after all our searching we discovered that the bears actually lived in the fudge shop! Of course, Kaia pointed out that they were just pretend bears and she asked if the real bears were coming back soon. Hopefully not. I think it's wonderful how children's imaginations always seem to get really fired up when they're in nature.