Happy Birthday Great-grandma!

In April we drove back home to Pennsylvania for my Grandma Rambo's 90th Birthday.  Getting this many great-grand-kids to stand still for a picture is a feat in itself.  But look at all those smiles! 

I think Grandma enjoyed having so much family all together at once.  We sure enjoyed being with her and seeing everyone.

The cousins played non-stop at each location through the day:  from hiking & cake decorating at Phil's house, to bingo at Grandma's party, and then pizza and playground fun in Beaver.

Life with kids

I am not sure if there is anything as satisfying as teaching kids to work and they think that it's just play time. We have a great system for fertilizing our plants (no, that is not product placement you see). Alice scoops and pours while Carl stirs with any of his favorite sticks. Then I walk all over the yard feeding our little plants. 

We had some warm weather that invites picnics on the back porch. I love my new table and chairs! How did they know my favorite color?

We did have other pictures of the kids and the tulips. Some where they were even looking at the camera. But never more than 50% of them at once, so I opted for this more thoughtful and peaceful rendition of our kids. Please disregard what looks like a tulip being torn to pieces by Carl, I'm sure that would never happen. It must be the lighting.

 We had to stop at our flooring place in town and they have this "vintage" carousel. The kids had a great time even without moving. I figured if I only rode on stationary carousels growing up, they could do the same.

The kids have been going through a train period. I've found them "chugging" all over my house, usually when we've forgotten to recycle our boxes that week.

Do you think Carl's outfit fashion suicide or homicide?

 There is a lot of spunk in this 5 year old.

To say nothing of this 8 year old.

A hiking we will go

I decided that we had better start trying out more trails before the Johnson Family Reunion next month (gasp). The challenge is finding fun trails that do no require harnesses for younger children, as that would require Craig to strap three to four kids to his person depending on the trail.

I was really excited for these fun train tunnels. Sadly this trail is likely to be unaccessible once church camps start in the summer. 

I really liked this trail because it was easy for the kids to that they needed to stay between the ties. Of course they needed to be reminded of this. But who can blame them with waterfalls trickling along the sides?

Everyone tried each family's trail mix. As a side note, you would not believe how many m&m's the grandparent's put in their mix now. Dad did mention something about never getting the m&m's after we had passed the bag around on hikes of years gone by.

Make sure you bring your hats.

This is from a little hike/walk near our local fort.

Last week we tried Blue Hole trail. We had a hard time finding the trail,

but that didn't stop us from fording streams,

or clambering over trees.

It was hard to get this picture without 20 of our closest friends. (We did go on the hottest Saturday afternoon of the year.)

It was lovely and cool down in the ravine.