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First day of school!
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July 13, 2012 (14th actually!)

Yeah! We are moving!!! After 1 1/2 hours of moving very slowly. We are on the road again!
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July 13, 2012

So we started our vacation with miles of backed up traffic and now at 12:30am on early Saturday morning, we are once again stuck in backed up traffic driving through Virginia. Thank goodness the kids are sleeping and the radio is playing good music. Love "Louisiana Saturday Night." We have been in traffic since 11:15pm and we are finally seeing that it's due to construction. UGH. Will we ever merge??
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June 22, 2012

We woke up around 6:45 on Friday morning and got the girls up and moving. They had to have all of their things packed up and ready to go by 7:30 so that we could get to breakfast by 7:40. We were late. Oh well. We had a tent full of girls who weren't able to get anything accomplished by themselves. Sarah and Grace had already had some help from Berly, our leader.

We ate breakfast and headed back to camp to break down camp. Berly had a leaders meeting so I took over delegating jobs to the girls to get our unit in order. We did well! Some of the girls swept out the tents, some cleaned the latrines, others picked up the unit. Our unit was in ship shape order and after that we worked on some butterfly activities in order to earn our buggy try-it.

At that point, it was time to eat lunch. We ate our last lunch and headed up to flag for Water Games! The girls had a ball at water games. They got to play a variety of games and even got to swim in the pool for a short swim. At the end of water games, we lined up for flag, said our good-byes and headed out. It was so funny to hear Grace. She said she didn't want to leave and wanted to live at camp! This was after she cried before lunch and said she was done with camp! I was so glad she and sister enjoyed camp. I loved watching them both grow so much at camp. Another successful week at Dellwood was complete! Both girls are excited for next year!
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Justin at Jockey Ridge State Park. The dunes! Outer Banks, North Carolina.
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Here is Jackson! Getting ready to climb Hatteras lighthouse!
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7-10-12--We climbed Hatteras Lighthouse! We headed up about 1:20pm and climbed down about 1:45. Jackson, Sarah, and I climbed up and this was one of the beautiful views!
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We are on the way to climb Hatteras Lighthouse!
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Miss Sarah playing in the ocean!!! :) Welcome to Corolla, North Carolina!
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Entering Duck, NC. 16 miles to our destination and we will be lucky if it takes us under and hour!
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Still Driving!

So...we stopped over the bridge for pizza! Justin liked the toys they had at the front of the restaurant and didn't eat a whole lot. He has had a pack of smarties and 3 suckers. :) Our dentist will be so thrilled! So, now we are back in traffic on the way to Corolla. 18 miles to check into the house. We left Elizabeth City at 11am and it's 2:15 now. So, we have gone approximately 50 miles in 3 hours. UGH!!! Hoping that we can pick up the pace soon!
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Going over the Wright Memorial Bridge! Beautiful Curricuck Sound!
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Vacation Elizabeth City

July 6-7, 2012
We spent yesterday driving and arrived in Elizabeth City around 5:00. Right in time for a huge storm! We headed to dinner at Applebee's since we couldn't swim. The kids were reasonably well-behaved at dinner. When we were finished, the storm had stopped and we headed back to the hotel for swimming. We tried to get the kids to bed by 10, but they are really horrible in hotels, Justin especially! I stayed in the car with him for the 2nd night in a row, trying to get him to fall asleep. Thurs night it worked. Last night it did not. He didn't go to sleep until midnight and because the hotel was so full we didn't have a port-a-crib to put him in. My back was killing me this morning. I had both Jackson and Justin huddled up against me.

We got up about 7:30 and ate breakfast and headed out around 9. We started out by going toward the water and found a little farmer's maket right on the water. We picked up some corn, squash, zuchinni, onions, and cantelope. The kids got some watermelon samples and boy were they yummy! We tried a special sauce that was also really good and picked up some of that as well!

After taking a brief walk on the water we decided it was just too hot to do much else at the farmer's market so the other item on the agenda was a hands-on science center that I thought the kids would enjoy. It was free and right by the market. Plus it was air conditioned. In the 90 degree heat that was welcome! The kids had a great time building with blocks, playing cafeteria (creating healthy lunches), investigating magnets, and sounds. Lots of things to do! We spent about an hour there and could have spent longer, but it started to get a little more crowded. It was great because we were the only ones there for a while!

Now we are on the way to the beach house in Corolla!!! However, we are stuck in traffic and it is really bad traffic. Hoping we won't be in this mess too much longer! It's 11:30am.
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Driving

Ok, so much for the temperature reprieve. We are driving through the Richmond/Williamsburg, VA area and the temperature reading on the truck is 101 degrees. We just stopped and got out and yes it is HOT! We are about 20 miles out of Williamsburg. We are staying in Elizabeth City, NC tonight. Kids are ready to get out of the car and swim! Justin, thankfully, is asleep. Other two are at least behaving. Only a couple more hours!
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Now moving on to the mountains of Virginia.
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Driving through New River Gorge National River. All the pictures look the same, absolutely beautiful! It rained all through here last year. Gorgeous day today and so far the temp showing on the car is only 79 degrees!
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Hills of West Virginia!
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Driving through Charleston, WV.
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Dellwood Thursday

June 21, 2012-Our day was packed on Thursday! We had no down time what-so-ever! It was a GO GO GO! kind of day. The girls hustled and bustled from here to there but it was lots of fun!

We began with flag and then stayed there and got ready to swim. We were first in the pool and I was so happy, because one of the much-loved aides, Woodstock, was going to swim with the girls. We had three aides, Tinkerbell and Miss India were the other two aides who were with us for the whole week. The other aides that we had were aides-in-training and their names were Starburst, Daisy and Cheerios. Only Starburst swam during our swim time with the girls and she usually spent most of the time going off of the board. So I was very excited to see Woodstock take over some of the play time I had been doing with the girls. I got out of the pool a little early and changed because we didn't have a lot of time in between swimming and our rock-wall climb!

Sarah and Grace grew so much more independent in the water through the week. Sarah spent much of the last swim sessions jumping off the side in the deep end with her swim buddy Alex. Grace hung in the shallow end with her swim buddy Ava. One of the best pictures of the week was when the shallow end girls (about 10) jumped into the water holding hands. I had a few pictures of Grace doing this with the group. Sarah was part of this until her swim buddy had to go potty and then their swim time ended. It was so much fun to see them grow in confidence in the water.

After the swimming adventure, the girls and I got to climb the rock wall. I didn't make it all the way to the top. I may have made it half-way. But I was the very first person from our group to actually climb. Sarah climbed and I was so proud of her! She didn't want to climb at all last year and this year, she tried and made it about a third of the way up. I was just so happy she tried! She wouldn't even put a harness on last year! Then Grace began to climb and I was completely floored. She climbed to the very top of the rock wall! Good for her!!! I was so proud of her too!!! After we watched everyone in the group climb up the rock wall, we thanked the rock wall expert and headed up to eat lunch. We had a cookout in our unit on Thursday. So we had hot dogs that we grilled out ourselves, apple smiles (apple slices, peanut butter and marshmallow teeth), and ice cream in a bag. The ice cream in a bag wasn't too successful. We needed a LOT more salt and didn't have it. So we had "milkshakes". After we cleaned up lunch at the unit we had to hike to the Math and Science Center for our Math and Science session. We had been looking forward to that for days! The girls got to meet a turtle and some lizards. They got to make a special bandana that uses crystals that expand to keep them cool when they dip it in water. After that, they switched groups and Sarah and Grace got to go in and play with earthworms. They even met a snake! Grace loved playing with her earthworm and actually kissed the worm as we left.

We headed to Crafts where the girls made their final crafts. The first one we worked on was a bookmark that the girls wove. It was pretty difficult for little fingers. The 2nd craft was candles that the girls got to dip. They all loved this!

After Crafts, we headed up to flag for the closing ceremony for the day. After flag, it was time for dinner. Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans were on the menu and it was pretty good.

The all camp event was much different than last year, but as an adult, I appreciated it very much. We were able to participate on the retiring of many flags. The first flag we retired was HUGE! It was the size of the AUL flag. Massive! Watching them cut each stripe and place it in a fire was so interesting and very patriotic! After the cut each stripe, one of the 13 colonies was named. After the whole flag was retired, we watched as each unit retired 3 flags. We had a huge bonfire of flags that had to be watched for quite a while. As all of this was going on, we noticed a significant change in the weather. The temperature dropped to about 70 degrees as opposed to the 90 it had been most of the week. It felt awesome outside! We went into the lodge for the conclusion of the all-camp event and got to meet Juliette Gordon Lowe. There was a lady who was there and had studied a lot about Juliette Gordon Lowe and knew a lot about her and talked about her and gave the girls a lot of history about her. It was very interesting and the girls did a great job of listening! They had popsicles and then we headed back to our unit for smores and bedtime. Other than one tent that was a out of hand, everyone else really settled down and went to bed easily. I was very surprised that Sarah and Grace did as well as they did. The leaders and I sat out until about 11:30 and then headed to bed! We needed to be up at 6:40 the next morning!
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Vacation--Heading Out

7/5/2012-We are heading out to our vacation on the East Coast. We decided to take this a little easier while driving. We are driving about 5 hours tonight to Hurricane, West Virginia, then tomorrow we will drive to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Excited to stay in some new places and see some new things! Then on Saturday we will drive about an hour to the outer banks of North Carolina! Can't wait to see the ocean!!!
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