a'Midwesting We Will Go

As some of you may know, the kids and I are on vacation in the glorious Midwest. Would you like to hear about it? Okay!

We took a red eye out of SFO, because those always seem like a good idea at the time.  Then I remembered that the last time we'd tried this, there was no actual sleeping when there was supposed to be sleeping, which just led to lots of frustration and crying.

 

Jonah was a helper-extraordinaire, and offered to haul our heavy-ass suitcase in which I'd packed everything we would need for a two-and-a-half week trip. He pulled it for about as long as it took for me to snap this picture.

 

Turns out my kids were so excited about our trip that while they slept on the first leg of the journey, they just couldn't on the second. That's okay though, they were champs and had smiles every step of the way:

 

We made it!

The very first thing we did after a decent night's sleep was go to the beach, duh. The kids had never seen or been in Lake Michigan, and come on, they didn't know what they were missing! It's kind of like the ocean...but you can actually go in it, and it doesn't make you want to die from salty overload if the water gets into your mouth.

 

First steps in...

Love at first swim!

Then they made sandcastles with friends

Then they stood next to this lighthouse

It was a really fun, tiring, Michigan day. Evie fell asleep on the way home, thus starting a trend of her falling asleep in cars every chance she got:

The next day we drove and drove and drove (more car sleeping), so the kids could experience what I like to call...Grandpa Janik's house. I'm not kidding when I say that immediately upon arrival, the kids jumped into his pool, and stayed there for the rest of our time there:

 

Finally, because we'd done Lake Michigan swimming, and we'd done Grandpa's pool swimming, we decided we needed to do some good old fashioned regular-lake swimming.

Jonah with Bapa on the paddleboat. I'm paddling. It sucks.

After paddle boating, we all piled into a pontoon boat and Jonah drove us out to the perfect swimming spot, where we leapt in like frogs looking for lily pads. Instead we came back with algae lining our swimsuits, but I figured that was close enough.

My once not-so-sure swimmer, having practiced every day of vacation so far, jumped right into the depths of this lake without a second thought. I was pretty darn proud:

Finally, here's a picture that is fairly irrelevant to the story, but I'm adding it because it's basically the cutest picture of all time. This is Evie's new friend Schmetty.

 More to come!