This week entrance to all National Parks is completely FREE! In honor of that I am posting a bunch of photos from our various visits to National Parks and Historic Sites.
Dry Tortugas, 2003:
This is where Dave and I got hooked on visiting the parks! It is absolutely beautiful there and it is the most remote National Park, so as we visited the gift shop the lady working there encouraged us to buy a park passport {and get it stamped!} if we planned to visit other parks in the system. Possibly the best $10 we have ever spent and a great memory to have the book stamped in all the parks we visit!
Rocky Mountain National Park, 2004:
Martin Luther King Memorial, 2008:
Cumberland Island, Georgia, 2008:
A video from the National Parks we visited in the summer of 2010:
Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial, 2011:
The fun memories, cool experiences and things we have learned from visiting National Parks and National Historic Sites could not possibly be summarized in a handful of photos and a few sentences. I was disappointed to go through my posts and see that I have not documented nearly all the sites we have visited. I definitely encourage you to stop and visit any National Park that you either live near or are driving past, you will not regret it!! Previous National Parks we have visited and I have posted about {click any of the links to view}:
Florida The Wright Brothers Gettysburg Pennsylvania Ronald Reagan's Home William Howard Taft's Home George Rogers Clark Monument Abraham Lincoln's Farm
We have been busy making summertime memories. The summer has been sweet so far, and already the time is slipping through our fingers too quickly! How can this week be the 4th of July already?!?
Dave's parents were visiting and it was great to spend time with them and have them here at our home {PS...thank you so much for everything, we were so excited you could visit, that we could get a little vacation in, and have both sets of grandparents here for Emma's national meet! It was wonderful!!} I will share more about all those adventures later, but first in honor of our special guests from Hawaii that we had to say good-bye to last Thursday, here is a little song Kamele ran around the house singing in early June and below it a recap of our last few days. The song had a few more verses before she started feeling the pressure of the camera being on her. I love that Ka'iulani is doing a little hula in the background!
This little one loves her ukulele! She often carries it around the house singing a chirpy little song, sometimes something we recognize, most of the time just something she's making up as she goes.
The day Dave's parents left to go back home, I took the girls to the library to pick out their free book for the month of June. We love the summer reading program!
Later that evening, this is what gymnastics practice turned into:
It was about 100 degrees, possibly even hotter than that in the sweaty gym, so we called it quits about an hour early and all the girls played on the slip and slide. Alyssa and Rebekah had their fair share of leo clad tummy slides too :-)! After a sad morning of saying good-bye to Grandmommy and Granddaddy the girls needed a fun night of being goofy.
The next day I took the girls to the lakeshore where they played and relaxed...
Perfected their sand castle building skills and...
Emma worked some handstands on her paralettes.
While mini-vacationing in the Dells, we added a new pet to our family. A hermit crab the girls called "Super Crab" because of the super cool Super Man "S" painted on his shell. Rebekah insisted upon the addition of Cotton Candy to his name, so we are proud to introduce the newest member of our family:
"Super Cotton Candy Crab."
We love him already, even though he is not too social, and in his rare moments of crabby friendlyness, he has scared Emma with his "creepy" eyes. Yesterday, while I was busy in the kitchen, I half heard Rebekah asking if she could add seashells to his habitat. I told her okay, not knowing what she was talking about...well, as of this morning he has abandoned his superman shell for a much more narrow shell that I am worried about his ability to crawl out of {I did not even know we had such a shell anywhere in our home, just to show how on top of the adding shells to his habitat conversation I was}. He is fine for now, but if anyone has an idea of how I could get him to go back into his regular home that would be very helpful!
This past weekend we had a Celebrate Freedom 4th of July musical at our church that Alyssa and Emma performed with the children's choir in. It was followed by an all church picninc with lots of great food.
Our patriotic princesses. Thank you so much Grandmommy and Granddaddy for the pretty dresses, the girls looked so sweet!
One of the very few photos I took during the picnic after service: Alyssa playing joust with one of her MPact teachers, Miss Rebecca. It was an intense match up, but they looked like they were having so much fun! Looking forward to the 4th of July and hopefully catching up with sharing more of our recent adventures really soon...
