Kickin' It Off with Otis

We are back from our 10 day country getaway, family visit, and summer vacation. We have jumped right back into the grind here, and now I am slowly starting to work on the 3.5 gigabytes worth of pictures I am returning with. I tried to not have the camera quite so strapped around my neck this year, but I still managed to return with an insane amount of pictures, I guess.

As I said, we have been gone for over a week and we spent 32 hours driving over 4 days of the trip, but all the hauling was well worth it. We started off headed to my sister Lori's to spend our 1st night. I have not a single pic from then. I tried to take some when Lori and I took the kids down to see the goats down the street while Ryan and brother-in-law John played a quick nine holes of golf, but I realized I had forgotten to put the battery in the camera (so something I would do). Despite no pics to show for it, the kids loved getting to see their cousins for the night and had a great time dancing on the Wii with them (it was hilarious) and I felt so lucky we got to see all them twice so close together (if you remember, we were there just over Memorial Day). Sunday after lunch we headed to my parents (about 3 hours from Lori's). When we got there we ate dinner, toured their new, super nice house, and headed out for papa to show off his tractor, Otis. He is pretty proud of his tractor and unfortunately both kids were pretty terrified of it and did not want to ride.

So since we didn 't want to disappoint him, of course =) he took me for a ride on "Otis".

He even let me drive it ... When he told me to take my foot off the clutch, I guess he didn't realize I have never even driven a stick shift- needless to say, the tractor can gun it! Haha.

Pretty excited about their boots.

Always just happy to be with us. =)

A picture was as good as we were going to get.

We visited with the horses and the pony, since Hannah Grace couldn't wait to see them, even if we didn't have time to ride that night.

My handsome boys.

Bennett is not much of an outdoorsman- he wasn't scared of the horses, just preferred the sidelines.

So I thought I would just get us going with pics from the first night. If you've been following along for a while, you know we usually come back with several posts worth of pictures from things we did on our annual "summer vacation". So, following in suit, more to come...