Stone Mountain Park

Fall has been gorgeous here so we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and visit one of the largest pieces of granite we could find. Stone Mountain is 825 feet of solid granite from the base to the top and it is 5 miles in circumference. Underground, the granite goes down 9 miles. Driving into the park we were all impressed by the enormity of this mountain. It was beautiful. We took a cable car to the top of the mountain to enjoy the views and then we hiked the 1.2 miles back down the back side of the mountain. The carvings on the side of the mountain are the largest in the world and they are of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, the three Confederate leaders of the Civil War. The entire carving is the length of 3 football fields and it took over 30 years to complete for various reasons. The original carver left the project after a few years and went on to carve Mt Rushmore. There is a lot of history to the Mountain and great read if you have the interest or the time.



Besides the mountain, there are a lot of activities around the park. Here we are enjoying a train ride around the mountain.


There is a farmyard with sheep and goats that the children can pet and brush. In this same area there is a plantation with 19 historic buildings that you can tour. Avery really enjoyed seeing how people lived a long time ago. He was especially enthralled with the bed pans.


We enjoyed our first 4-d movie. Alia was scared for most of it and hid her face in my chest. Avery loved every moment of it.


In the Great Barn shooting balls at Scott and Alia.


Alia loves horses and keeps telling me she wants to ride a pink one. There was way too much to do there. We enjoyed all of the "exciting" attractions but want to go back to do more sightseeing.

Birthday Adventure

It was Brandee's birthday this weekend and I couldn't have been more excited. You see, unbeknownst to her, I had been planning a treasure hunt for the past month and a half in secret. For those of you that know me, you know that I can't lie and I can't keep secrets well, so this was really hard for me to do. Saturday morning Brandee woke up to this.
A locked box and an envelope


Inside the envelope was a foam brush, a partial GPS coordinate and a puzzle. The puzzle lead her to find this.


She didn't know it yet but it was a magnetic box that was sealed with super magnets and impossible to open without the special super, super magnet (which she didn't have yet). She eventually gave up trying to pry the box open with the paint brush and worked on figuring out where the key went. Avery helped her and she found the GPS with a note "You have mail".


The obvious place to find mail. Now she had her magnet and coordinates plus a piece from the kids memory game.

She now had three options but still didn't know what to do with the magnet so she went hunting for the flower match.


And eventually found it with another clue on the back side that said "today is your day but tomorrow is the key"

She went back to the magnetic box and eventually put together that the magnet opened it. Avery helped decode the picture.


Which was a picture of Paco, our cookie jar with an orange mohawk


Paco had a garage remote in it. The remote opened the garage door to reveal a hanging key. This key opened one of the doors on the kids sorting game. Inside was a note and a vile of brown liquid.


Hmmmmm, brown liquid and a picture.


Cousin to hazel? Another dead end

She then punched in the GPS coordinates while she thought about the other clues she had. The GPS coordinates brought her the a park where she found a ball of wax magnetized to the bench. The ball of wax actually had a key cast into the inside of it. Avery was the destruction expert and had smashed the wax open in no time. The key in the wax was to one of our bike locks which had a picture of Lightning Mcqueen attached to it. They luckily remembered that Avery had a Lightning Mcqueen car in the toy shelf.



Another key?! This one was to our fire box with a blank piece of paper?


Blank paper, paint brush, brown liquid. Well lets see what happens.


Its an 8. The iodine reacted with some starch that I used to paint on the blank paper.

Ok, back to the other clues. "Cousin to hazel". Hazel with a picture of a nut. Yep Hazelnut, who is the cousin? Filberts. It just so happens that we have a beany thing called Filbert.


Say hi to Filbert. His note gave Brandee the order of the clues that will open the combination.


Brandee is a master CSI and had no trouble figuring the numbers out. When she opened up the canister she found some chocolate, a cute love note, and a picture that Alia painted for her.

Then we celebrated with some birthday cake.


This year it was a crazy made up cake that was a combination of almond and pecan flour with 85% dark chocolate frosting and a chocolate custard filling.

Going for a ride

We bought this balance bike for Avery when he turned 3.


He has transitioned to a bigger bike and is riding without training wheels. The balance bike really did teach him how to balance. Once he got used to the bigger bike, he was off and riding.




Now it's Alia's turn to learn how to ride a bike.


In the beginning of the video she says, "It's kinda scary!"

Friends Weekend

We had our annual friends weekend in Milwaukee last weekend. It ended up being a fun trip in the end but as with most things we do, things didn't go exactly as planned. We spent several months looking for the perfect place to all get together. After all that time this is what we found.



When we arrived, things just didn't look like the pictures. This is what we found.



Ok, not really, but we did reserve the wrong place and when we showed up we were quite surprised. The house was about half the size of the one we reserved and freezing cold. The place also reeked. Fortunately, we were there in enough time to get the heat on and air the place out. Our friends arrived and we talked and goofed around into the wee hours of the morning.

October in WI means fall colors. We were lucky on Saturday to be treated to a sunny 75 degree day with beautiful fall colors. We took a walk, did some geocaching, and played on the lake.



Alia and Avery loved the paddle boat. They wanted us to go out more and more but the paddlers could only paddle so much.



Alia was looking cute before her nap. When she woke up she told me that she was hungry. I asked her what she wanted to eat and she told me.



Yep a tomato. I grabbed a tomato and started to cut it for her when she said that she wanted to eat it whole. I thought, right, she will never eat a whole tomato, but she did.



The kids had a blast playing together



The whole crew. The house actually worked quite well for us and we all had a great time. Until next year.