Wisconsin Dells

***Pictures added 8/19/2012, stole them off Rick's facebook page :)

The gang, minus Grandpa, who is behind the camera.
Julee, Brian, Ben, Carol, Lauren, Me and Reid, Front: Jackson, Noah, Jamie, Katie and Allison

Something about summertime has me wanting to blog "journal" style.  Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of this past weekend's ventures. But you have to hear them anyway.

Two of Ben's little sisters are visting from Utah and they were the first guests to stay in our new guest bedroom. A mattress store here in town is going out of business so I hustled in and got us a deal on a couple of mattresses (for the full sized bed in the guest room and for Reid's future twin size bed). It was so fun to put the guest bedroom together, even if it will only be used a few times a year. Something about the whole process just made me feel so grown up :).

PS  We are having an open house (think house warming party) next week and I'll be sure to take and post pictures of our house tour then.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun having them visit. Reid LOVES having extra people around, so hopefully that means he'll love baby sister's arrival (fingers crossed). He could say Katie's name within hours of her being around. Lauren is a bit more difficult, but he said it later in the day as well.

He was our little shopping buddy on Friday. He's at that stage where he's cute and he knows it. As we walked around the outlet mall he just smiled and giggled and enjoyed everyone admiring him.

Saturday we went down to the Wisconsin Dells. I've heard of the Dells for years now, but this was my first time going there. It's kind of crazy. Imagine a town of 2,700 with the tourist attraction of Vegas. The Dells biggest offering is its water parks. We went to Noah's Ark, which is advertised as the biggest waterpark in the world. Yup, in a town of just 2,700.

There were advantages and disadvantages of going pregnant. Obvious disadvantages were that I missed out on some rides I really would have enjoyed (water parks are more my scene than theme parks). But, you can't really feel bad about how you look in a swimsuit when you are pregnant. So that was nice :).  Plus, it was nice to have my focus be on my boys. I just wanted to do things that would make them smile. And that wasn't too hard.

Reid was IN LOVE!!!

Ben wanted to go on all the "big" rides first thing (before lines got too long). So we did that before lunch. Carol (my mother-in-law) packed us an awesome lunch and my heart melted when Reid put down an oreo in favor of grapes and carrots. I'm not sure how we raised him that way, but I'm not complaining! After lunch we went to the kid play areas. Reid was giggling like crazy down all the little slides. It was fun to find him one he could climb up and go down without any assistance. I think he could have stayed on that one all day.

I foolishly tried to get him to nap afterwards, but there was none of that. We had a cabana right near a little kiddie pool and a giant elephant statue, so he was in heaven just playing around there. Once we gave up on nap time we headed to the lazy river. There were 10 of us floating down it together, so we were quite the crowd. Reid started in my tube, hanging between my feet. Then he climbed all over Ben and had fun being "drug" next to his tube. But he finally settled on Grandpa and pretty much preceded to take a nap. He seemed to have just fallen asleep when we got caught under a water feature that dumped a bunch of water on his head. What a rude awakening! He sounded pretty terrorized, but seemed to recover once he saw his mom get the same treatment.

Near the end of the day, once all the lines were practically extinct, Ben came and took me on all the slides he figured were safe enough for me to go on. We had a lot of fun racing down some pretty quick turns and drops. Total, I did get to go down four slides, so being pregnant wasn't a complete downside.

We had barely made it out of the parking lot by the time Reid fell asleep. He's been pretty tired ever since. But I'm not complaining about that, since the result has been three hour naps for two days in a row!      

My favorite little face in the whole world!