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.

She's free!

We decided to finally move Alia to her "big girl" bed. We tried to hold this transition off as long as possible because Avery was a nightmare at bedtime in his toddler bed. It took months (okay years) to get him to actually stay in his bed. She did an amazing job this summer whenever we traveled, sleeping in beds without bars so we thought we would give it a try. She has actually stayed in bed and gone to sleep each night. The other day during nap, she came out and said, "Mom I have to go to the bathroom and then I'm going to lay back down because I'm super tired." And she did just that! I am surprised and relived that transitioning her to a real bed has gone so well.


Not to worry, we wouldn't take the bed from the dogs and make them sleep on the floor! Scott made a few quick modifications on the crib and they were set. We got a lot of use out of this free crib!

Georgia Camping Adventure

Since having kids we have only tent camped once. It was fun but didn't turn out quite as we had hoped. You can read about it here. Now that the kids are a bit older we thought that we would give camping a second try. Thankfully, when we moved to Georgia, my sweet sister bought us this book. It was the perfect book for us to find a nice place to camp and explore. After a quick flip though we found our place. The camp seemed perfect, less than 2 hours away, on a lake and free! The only catch is that it was rustic, no water, no flush toilets, and no power.



This was our site. The Spanish moss gave it a fun creepy feeling, like the swamp monster episode of Scooby Doo.



We had a beautiful site and our very own swamp monster! Look carefully. Avery and Alia were very excited to see a wild alligator.



I'm pretty sure he wanted to eat Maia because he kept swimming by and watching her. Luckily he stayed in the water. We have heard of bears attacking people in tents and started to wonder if this guy was waiting for us to go to bed to get us. Luckily we were not the casualty of the first ever alligator tent attack.



There were actually two alligators. Here Brandee and Alia check out the little one.



And here is the big one.

We picked this campground not only because it was free and on the lake but because it was only a couple miles from one of Georgia's most unfamous state parks "The Grand Canyon of Georgia" (Providence canyon state park). In Georgia, that means the big ditch that was caused by farmers not being able to keep our barren soil from eroding. After 150 years of uncontrolled erosion you have this.



That's a big ditch.

It was actually a ton of fun. The washout was 150' deep and created 9 separate slot canyons. We spent the afternoon exploring a couple of them.



We had a lot of fun exploring all of the nooks and crannies of the canyon. Alia kept running around looking up saying "Oh, coooooaaaal" It was fun watching them explore.



After a brief rest, we were ready for more exploring.

After all of that exploring we came back, made a fire, ate dinner and made a bunch of smores.



For future reference, 3 jumbo smores are too many for a 2 or 5 year old.



This is how to take a bath when at camp. Alia loved it. We kept them up late thinking that they would be so tired that they would fall asleep fast. The 3 smores had a bit more influence than we thought. They bounced off the tent walls for what seemed like hours. Tent camping was fun though. We had a full moon and fell asleep to the sound of two owls calling to each other.

I think camping is back on our agenda, especially now that fall is here and being outside feels so good. Georgia just got a little cooler.

Fun sandal time

Several months ago I was looking for a pair of sandals for the summer and came across these.



My Luna sandals instantly became my only summer footwear. I loved them but felt bad for everyone else that had to either wear shoes or flip flops. I was working on making my own shoes for an upcoming race (long story) and had some extra material. At the same time my dad gave me some super soft deer hides (thanks dad). I decided that I wouldn't be the only one to enjoy these fine sandals. First, I made Alia a pair because she runs with us every night and didn't really have a good running shoe.





I made her a cute pink pair and she loves them.

Not to be left out, Brandee received two pairs. The first one was ok, just an average brown, but I went all out on the second pair and made them purple.



Comfortable, versatile and stylish. Enjoy your sandals girls.

Avery was sad to not get a pair because I ran out of material. Luckily he loves his zebra shoes and didn't feel too bad. I'm planning on using Brandee's brown sandals and converting them into a bright yellow pair for him.



Avery and I having fun with his zebra shoes on.

Creepy Crawly Things

It seems lately that we have run into a lot of slithery, slimy, creepy things.

We enjoyed a movie at our outdoor theater the other night and to pass the time before the movie, we were able to see The Reptile Guy.


We decided to make our own snakes out of old wine corks. No, we do not drink that much wine- we found them in the recycling bin at Whole Foods.







I found him when I was weeding.


Avery spotted this caterpillar on our walk. A bird dropped him and Avery saw him fall. We also saw a salamander, but didn't get a picture. Avery tried to pick him up but he was really sticky.