26 weeks

Fort Monroe

This ends my flood of posts from Tara's visit. We had so much fun with her here. The boys love their Aunt Tara, and those 2 weeks flew by way too fast! The last day she was here, we went to Fort Monroe, which is one of the oldest military bases in the U.S. It is so beautiful and ancient there, and there is still a moat around the inner part of the base and inside that they have a casemate museum that we love to go to. It is very cool.

Lighthouse

Boats

Tara and Micah on the bridge that goes over the moat.

Noah's Book of Rare Sights

Noah has started a book called "Rare Sights" inspired by his brother Kaden, who scraped his nose at the bottom of the pool in swimming lessons and had a sore in the perfect shape of the comma. Noah asked and asked me to take a picture of it for his book, but Kaden picked at it a few times before I got around to it. Also included in Noah's book with be Kaden's 2 toes that are connected half way up. I hope he finds more things to include, so that Kaden doesn't start to get a complex.

Decorating the Christmas Tree

Here we all are putting up the tree. Noah: "Christmas season does not start until Dec 1rst!!" In the same breath, "Can we put up the tree tonight PLEASE?" well before December...silly boy.

Noah finally gets his cake

We ate Noah's birthday blackberry pie a couple of days late. I can't believe I have a 9 year old!!!

Swimming at the hotel

We got to swim at the hotel both nights we were there. I even braved the cold water and got in. I am the biggest cold wimp lately!! Trav got a great workout just throwing big boys into the air, and Micah shocked us all by asking to be dunked in the water like his brothers once in awhile.

After 2 days of no naps, and it being bedtime, Micah is very relaxed. I wondered if he would let me put him to bed (under the table) earlier than everyone and he wasn't going for it and said he would sleep right there (in front of the TV). I told him he had 5 minutes. A couple of minutes later, he got up, said "Micah go night night" and put himself to bed. I went to lay by him to see if he would actually fall asleep and he ordered me back to my own bed, and was asleep in about 5 seconds. It was amazing!

Natural Bridge caverns

I have been wanting to take Noah to see some sort of caverns ever since Trav and I went to the Luray caverns a year ago. These were also very cool, although if you have to pick one cavern to visit in your life, these really didn't hold a candle to the Luray ones. Noah ate it up, though. It's just his kind of thing.

Wax Museum

We also got to go through a wax musem and a toy museum before moving on to the caverns.

The Natural Bridge

Here starts the copious amount of pictures from our trip to the Natural Bridge. This was such a fun trip. Our kids get to stay in a hotel so rarely, that I am pretty sure that part was Ammon's (and possibly Kaden's) favorite part. All day long Ammon begged to go back to the hotel. Here is Micah's favorite friend in the gift shop. Micah

Kaden

Ammon

Noah

The natural bridge. It's just this massive arch, and you can hike past it and beyond it a ways they have set up a little Monocan village you can look at, and a mile past that there are some falls.

Tara and Me

Ammon saying, "Take a picture of me, Mom"

Kaden and Noah

Taking a break at the Falls

The house in the Monoccan village.

This was the coolest basket. You see all kinds of cool things people used to do to make use of what they had, but I have never seen bark sewn together to make a basket like this before.

On the way out

Discovery Museum

For a fun trip while Tara was here, and for a fun birthday surprise for Noah, we packed everyone's bags secretly and the day after Thanksgiving we left for Natural Bridge, VA. We went through Charlottesville and stopped at this little Discovery Museum, because we saw that it would be free with our Air and Space Museum membership.This is a very cool game called "Skittles"