End of Summer Visit with Yiayia and Papa including Greta's Birthday Party!

Shortly after we returned from Colorado, Yiayia and Papa (Steve's mom and dad) had a chance to come out and visit for almost a week and celebrate Greta's birthday with us. After quite a fiasco involving my keys, some little fingers, and the floor of our extremely overcrowded pantry that went unresolved for over a week, resulting in an aborted trip to Burger King and lots of mailman stalking, we had a fun-filled week!

Outing to Howard Amon Park:

Party Time!

 Not sure who was more excited - the birthday girl or our sweet little Evie:

 Dunce Cap?

Hanging out at Gesa Stadium:

Impromptu Visit with the Birds

One day back in  August, Steve and I were both itching to get out of the house for a family outing.  The problem is, when you live out west things are different.  There aren't dozens of places to go for a day trip within an hour or two. States out here are BIG and everything is FAR.  Anyways, we decided on calling up our good friends Matt and Sandi and inviting ourselves over for the weekend at the very last minute. (It was already Saturday afternoon :)  It's awesome to have friends that we can drop in on like that!  We hung out at their place Saturday night and then spent our Sunday at Point Defiance park.  You've seen pictures from there before.  It is perhaps the most beautiful city park I've ever been to.  I'm pretty sure the kiddos (our and theirs) loved every miute of it - the beach and the gardens:

Ok, so maybe not EVERY minute.

 

Ain't Life Grand? day 6

Day 6 was bittersweet because while enjoying our beautiful vacation, we had to say goodbye to half of our fam.  We decided a low-key, not-too-time consuming activity for the morning would be to go hang at at Grand Lake Lodge's "World's Best Front Porch" and have lunch together before saying goodbye.

The reason why they call it the world's best front porch? Plenty of big comfy swings and this view:

I think because Haley (my niece) and Elias are so close in age, we've always made a point to take photos of just the 2 of them when we get together.  Here they are:

Ain't Life Grand? day 5

We had previously decided that day 5 should be family day, thinking that everyone might have certain things they'd want to do that weren't built into the schedule and we might possibly need a small break from each other by this point in the week, regardless of how much fun we'd been having.  Unfortunately, we found out late in the game that all the Funston/Callaways were going to have to leave a day early, and I pretty much needed to spend every minute with my sister that I possibly could. So, we called off family day.  Well, the Hollowells really wanted to visit Winter Park because Jeff has childhood memories of it, so they went ahead and took their family day.  The rest of us hung out at the house, the beach that was about a block from the house, and around town.  For some crazy reason, I have no pictures.  If any of my family members who do have pictures read this, e-mail me some and I'll add them to the post.

That night we celebrated Steve's 30th birthday with an Oktoberfest -themed party complete with beer, sausage, sauerkraut, German music, and German chocolate cake (one of his faves, even though I guess it's not really German - oh well!)  Again - no pictures of my own husband's 30th birthday. I. am. lame. I think I was too busy making sure all 4 kiddos were fed.

Afterwards we walked to Adams' Fallsonly about a mile from the house. It's something we'd been wanting to do all week, but hadn't yet gotten around to. Thankfully, I have pictures!

 The Falls

Uncle Nate - professional goofball

Ain't Life Grand? day 4

For the second day in a row, we attempted, and succeeded at, group photography.  The fruit of our labor:

Afterwards we went gallivanting around town in those matching shirts on a team photo scavenger hunt in which teams had to take photos of themselves representing various song titles the best they could.  Steve and I split up since we designed the contest, and the group formed Team Funston and Team Lindemann.  Funstons won. What can I say? We're creative and cool like that :) I don't have any of the Team Lindemann photos, but here are a few gems from Team Funston:

It's the End of the World as We Know It

 Dancing in the Street - everyone not in a green shirt were very kind complete strangers

 American Pie - get it? 3.14 Ha ha! And we came up with something that nerdy without having Steve on our team :)

Wild Thing

Kung Fu Fighting - Is my mom not amazing? She talked about not even coming on the trip because of her broken arm (notice the cast on the left arm), but decided to tough it out and was a great sport!

That afternoon most of the guys went beer tasting at the local brew-pub and came back laughing almost as much as we had while rafting.  That might have had something to do with the beer, but games that night were possibly even funnier than the night before. Inside jokes make for a great game of Loaded Questions.

Ain't Life Grand? day 3

Day 3 began with a rather successful attempt at getting some cute shots of all the girls in the matching dresses I had managed to score (yes - for all 4 of them in sizes ranging from 12 mo up to 5T!) at Old Navy the year before.  My sister, despite having 2 little ones at home, somehow found the time to make them all these adorable headbands!

 Greta and Sadie

 Haley May

 Cute cousins!

 The girls

 In the day 1 post, there's a picture of Greta caring for Lincoln.  Here she is doing the same for Haley. 

She is such a tender-hearted, loving little girl.

Later that morning, we took the kids fishing in those adorable little outfits of theirs.  The boys had coordinating outfits also, but we never managed to get them all in the same place at the same time looking 1/2 way decent, so we had to settle for only a girls' photo shoot.  You can see below how cutely coordinating Elias is, though.

 Poppi and Greta - I love this shot

You can't go fishing without a snack in 1 hand, right?

Later that afternoon, the 20-somethings (on one of the last few days we could be called that as Steve's 30th birthday was the day after we got home from the trip) left the kiddos (all 7 of them!) home with the grandparents while we went on an afternoon rafting adventure.  I'm pretty sure the 6 of us all agree that it was the best thing we did all week.  We laughed like crazy, and then laughed even crazily that night while we played a game in which the jokes of the day got funnier and funnier as the night went on.  It didn't even matter that it was cold and raining and we had a little scare over whether my pregnant sister in law should even go (she did and it was the right decision by all accounts) and something happened to my inner ear when I jumped off a 30 ft rock into the river that caused me a lot of pain - for hours, it was awesome!

Ain't Life Grand? Day 2

On our second full day of vacation, we visited Rocky Mountain National Park.  It was a relaxing day of enjoying some of God's most beautiful creation together. 

The Calaway Clan - so cute!

Yiayia and Papa on our first hike of the day.

My hiking buddy

Sisters

Turned out the old umbrella stroller didn't work out so well - bummer for the Hollowells.

Steve and his hiking buddy. Notice the marker/lightsaber in Zeke's hand (hint: look behind Steve's right ear)?  That and a couple of action figures kept him pretty well occupied the whole ride to CO.

Hollowell fam

When we neared the highest elevation in the park, across from the visitor's center were not only giant patches of snow, but a whole herd of elk standing in the middle of it.  It was totally a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And yes, we did have snowball fights in July :)

 Enjoying the snow

Experiencing snow for the first time he can remember

Elk - they were close!

This one's for Nonni. She was captivated by these little forget-me-nots peeking out of the rock.

The view

A little caterpillar friend Zeke found while we were stopped to take pictures

After spending the morning hiking with our family we took off to Bear Lake at the other end of the park in hopes of meeting up with our dear friends, the Butlers.  Due to a crazy set of circumstances, we had no idea where to find them and weren't completely sure they would even be there, but had faith that God had arranged this visit and therefore we would be able to locate them somehow.  There is no cell phone reception in "the park" and only spotty reception in the surrounding areas, including Grand Lake.  Isn't it SO God to prompt  Brent to call less than 1 minute before we lost service for good and there would have been no hope of getting in touch with them about meeting up later?  In fact, we lost reception very shortly after he called and had to turn around to where we could  finish our conversation.  The only plans we made were that we would meet at Bear Lake, and an approximate time. That afternoon after passing by a sign that told us Bear Lake parking was full  but deciding that if we parked in a remote lot our hopes of finding our friends would be minimal, we pulled into the main parking lot only to find a parking space rather quickly; A partking spot that just so happened to be right next to a minivan from Iowa with Cru (the organization with which Brent and Erin are on staff) literature in plain view sitting in the front seat. Upon loading kids up in the stroller, we went in search of them.  Looking out across the lake, we rather quickly spotted Erin on a little outcropping not far from us! God certainly worked miracles and promted us to know just what to do in order that we might experience a very sweet, albeit very short, reunion!

Some pics from the afternoon:

The best group shot of the kids we could manage :)

Together again!

 

6 of the Crazy 8!