Confession Friday

I really had intended to write another post between last week and today, but it just didn't happen. Maybe next week. Haha. Right.

Anyway, my confession for this week is that I am absolutely terrified of heights. I am not sure when this happened. When I was in high school I went on all kinds of roller coasters and up in high overlook things and none of it bothered me. My friend and I went on this Xtreme Skyflyer thing several times at a local amusement park. I mean, they hoist you 200 feet in the air and drop you! What the heck?

Well, a few years ago when we visited the Grand Canyon, I noticed that I was more nervous around heights. Getting too close to the edge made me nervous, but I was okay.

Last month on our Yosemite trip, we found out the hard way that I am now completely terrified of heights. We did a hike to the top Sentinel Dome. It is this awesome rock from where you get this amazing 360 degree view of Yosemite - many of the falls, Half Dome, the valley - and it's breathtaking. But to get to the top, you have to hike up the steep side of it. In snow. And it's pretty curved so you kind of feel that if you slipped too far to either side, it wouldn't be too difficult to keep sliding and fall over the edge.

It probably didn't help that as we arrived at the base, there were three people slipping and sliding their way back down. Ryan talked me into going up (I mean, we have life insurance, so it's okay, right?). I just put one foot in front of the other and charged up the thing. When I got to the top, I was shaking. And almost hyperventilating. And almost crying. And I'm not a crier. I couldn't help it. I had to sit on a rock in the middle of the dome and compose myself. Ugh. I felt like such an idiot, but I couldn't make myself not freak out.

We did several other hikes to the top of very high places, but I always had to stand way far back from the railing along the edge, just to get used to being that high up. I wasn't going to let my fear keep me from seeing Yosemite, but I realized that there are some fears you can't make go away just because you don't want to be scared. Fear of heights is real, people. And I have it.

See those happy people at the Upper Yosemite Falls Overlook there by the railing? The ones enjoying the view of the Yosemite Valley?

Then see the legs of that person against the rock wall? Yeah. I don't know those happy people, but the legs are mine.

Confession Friday

I was doing pretty well with my Confession Friday posts there for a while.

Side note: I don't know if Confession Friday is actually a thing. I just kind of made it up and put it on my blog, but there are so many thousands of bloggers that someone has probably already thought of it and done it so... sorry if it seems like I stole someone's idea, but I really didn't. Not intentionally, anyway.

So, yeah. I was posting kind of regularly. But then life happened with all it's birthdays and other craziness that happened in the month of June and I got way off track. Again. I'll try to get back into it with this, another Confession Friday post. I have two confessions for this week. Here goes.
1. I went on vacation without my kids and only missed them a little. I know. How can I even say that out loud? To celebrate our 10-year anniversary, we decided to go on a trip to California, just the two of us. My very wonderful sister and brother-in-law stayed with our boys so we could pretend we were jet-setters for a week. Leading up to the trip, I was anxious about how much I would miss the boys. However, once we were away, it was just SO nice to have that time to spend with Ryan and to have "us" time, that I was able to completely enjoy our adventures. Sure, I thought of the boys and there were a few times I had those pangs of homesickness for them, but it wasn't until we were actually on our way home that I felt overwhelmed with wanting to be back with them.

2. My husband is a much better photographer than I am. My sister is an amazingly talented professional photographer. I guess she got all the photography talent from our family gene pool, leaving me with only the ability to snap random photos and sometimes luck into a decent one. Here are a few photos from our trip. If you like them, my husband probably took them.

And this is why I hate trying to add photos to my posts.

I can never get blogger to let me caption!

Here is what the photos are, in case anyone is still reading:

1. A lighthouse in San Francisco

2. Us in Napa

3. General Sherman, the worlds largest living tree

4. Me trying to get a picture of the Kings Canyon sign

5. Rivers converging in Kings Canyon

6. We finally made it to Yosemite

7. And it was awesome

The Time We Went to Chicago

Ryan and I love Chicago. We've only been there a few times, but we still thought it was amazing. We'd wanted to go to Shedd Aquarium on our last trip there, but never made it. When we decided to go to Moline on vacation, we thought "Chicago is only 3 hours from Moline and could kind of be on the way home, so why not include a stop there on our way back?" The answer for this question should have been "Because we have never before traveled with small children!" but we pretended the answer was.... "Yeah. Why not? Let's do it!"

One of the issues of with traveling with kids is that you have to go to bed when they go to bed because you are in the same hotel room with them and they need sleep and will not fall asleep with the TV, lights, music, laptop, or anything else on. In Moline we had a room with two queen beds so we decided to divide and conquer when it came to bedtime. I slept in one bed with Owen and Ryan slept in the other with Luke. This seemed most reasonable to keep them from killing each other in the night.

After our second night of going to sleep by 9PM, waking up a million times for fear the child in our bed would fall out as he tossed/turned/kicked his way through the night, we got up insanely early to pack up and head east. The hotel we stayed in offered a 'free' hot breakfast (how is it free when you know they just include it in the cost of the room?), so we ate before we left. Well, three of us ate. Owen, the two-year-old, was on hunger strike for the entire trip. I desperately tried to get him to eat something -- anything -- to lessen the pain of the three-hour trek to the Windy City. He ended up eating, with a spoon, eight little containers of Smucker's strawberry fruit spread. Ah.... strawberry extract and high-fructose corn syrup gel. The breakfast of champions.

We headed across northern Illinois, planning to go to the Aquarium first, as our check-in time at the hotel in Chicago wasn't till 4PM. We were going to stop to get lunch prior to arriving in the city so the boys could eat in the car and be (we hoped) happy and well fed for our time at Shedd. However, we did not know that for the last 20 exits prior to arriving in the city there was not so much as a McDonald's (or even a gas station snack shop) in sight. It was all asphalt plants and train yards and constructions sites. Great. The boys were thrilled to see all the construction equipment and trains, but we were not so happy knowing we were going to have to spend triple the amount of money on lunch as we'd planned.

We arrived at the aquarium and all the signs along the road were apparently for pedestrians. They all direct you right up to the drive in front of the building so we had to drive around the circle drive in a long line of other tourists who have done the same thing and get stuck in that traffic before driving forever and paying a crazy amount of money to park in a garage that is far, far away from the circle drive and building. At this point I was totally annoyed that we forgot to pack the stroller (not that Owen would have sat in it for more than 15 minutes anyway), because at least I wouldn't be trying to carry him everywhere since his little legs are so short and he walks very slowly when he knows you're trying to hurry.

Once we finally got to the entrance, there was a line just to get inside the museum to pay for admission. At 11AM on a Wednesday. Seriously? So we stood in the line and Ryan went to get us hot dogs and a bottle of water for lunch from the hot dog stand conveniently located near where the line forms. We spent $18 on a lunch we could made at home for $1.98. Awesome. Owen, of course, took one bite of his hot dog and refused to eat the rest. So I stand in the line for 30 minutes holding the stupid thing, trying to get him to eat it. Why didn't I grab more strawberry spread and stash it in my purse at breakfast??

Shedd aquarium is amazing.... from what I remember. Luke looked at the map and wanted to see the penguins first, which were as far away from the entrance as you could get. Everything between there and the penguins is pretty much a blur. We tried to get him to stop and look at other things, but he was on a mission and just kept pulling on us to keep going if we stopped at any other viewing areas. Of course, once he got to the penguin exhibit, he was done. We had paid too much money on admission to just leave at that point, so we did try to make it to all the other exhibits, but the boys were tired and hungry and cranky (and to be honest, so were we).

After checking in to the hotel, we decided to walk to Giordano's for some delicious Chicago style pizza. On the map it looked about three blocks over and one block up. In reality it was about a mile away. Why don't they show all the streets on maps instead of just the main ones? Overall it was a good experience. The boys loved taking in the city and Giordano's has the best pizza. Thankfully, we sat in a booth near the window so the boys could look out and see the city going by. They were completely fascinated by the buses and taxis and people on bicycles. The evening ended with me falling asleep on a pull-out sofa between the two boys (who were trying to kill each other in the night because we decided they should share the sofa bed since we were tired of sharing sleeping space with them).

By the time we left Chicago I was completely exhausted and felt like it was only a moderately successful visit. Yes, it was adorable when Owen kept saying the Chicago skyline looked like a castle and how much he loved the buses and had to point out every single one. It was cute that Luke got so excited about riding in the hotel elevator and helping Owen spot the buses and just taking in everything about the city. It was fun to see them looking out the hotel window and exclaiming over all the things they could see from up on the 11th floor. But it was frustrating that we spent all that time and effort and money to go to the aquarium when they really couldn't have cared less.

So.... what is the moral of this story? The things your kids are going to love are most likely the things that are free. If your toddler/pre-school -aged kids aren't the kind who can sleep anywhere and everywhere with no trouble at all, they will likely be tired for the duration of your trip. They won't want you to try to make them stop and look at certain things you want them to see. They won't care that you just paid $17.95 for them (and $24.95 for each of you) to see all the wonders of the Earth's rivers and oceans. They will just want to walk in the park and point out the things that interest them, like buses, trains, the boats in the lake, and the beautiful castle that is the city skyline. Just go with it. Enjoy the short period of time in which they want your undivided attention and save the costly field trips for when they are no longer enthralled by the day-to-day goings-on of a busy city.

It does kind of look like a castle...

The Time We Went to Moline (The Home of John Deere)

I'm really not sure why we thought it would be a good idea to go on a road trip with a 2 and 4 year old. I guess it's the crazy. Starting the night before, the 2-year-old wouldn't sleep because he was "Ready to go for our trip" as he reminded me for hours every time I went to his room to tell him to go to sleep and that we couldn't leave for our trip until he fell asleep and woke up when it was light outside. Of course an hour into the trip, both boys were saying they wanted to turn around and go back home.


We finally made it to Moline, which is a very strange town. It seems they have more bars there than any other type of business and anything that isn't a bar, hotel, or John Deere seems to be for sale or lease, even the court house. Everything is under construction and there are very few signs indicating where you are or how to get where you want to go. This is not the least bit stressful or irritating when you have two kids in the back seat yelling various things about having to go potty or wanting food or wanting to sit in another tractor. We even accidentally ended up on an active military base just trying to get across the river because the sign that tells you it is a military base was about the size of a speed limit sign with three paragraphs explaining it was the bridge to the base and what you needed for access and there is no way a normal person could read it all while driving up the on-ramp by which it was posted and trying to merge with traffic. At least we weren't arrested at the guard post, since this is (shockingly) a very common mistake. The boys seemed to enjoy most of the things we did, despite that Ryan and I were stressed and tired most of the time. They loved seeing all the John Deere equipment and the Mississippi River and riding in the hotel elevator and swimming in the hotel pool.


Although this trip was really for the kids, but we had a great time too. Before we had kids we stopped in Davenport, IA on our way back from Yellowstone and had dinner at this cute little brew pub there called The Front Street Brewery. Since Davenport is right across the river from Moline we did get to have dinner and some beer (well, just dinner, no beer for the kids) there one evening. We sat outside on their patio and talked to the boys about our Yellowstone trip and about how we would all go there and to the Grand Canyon someday and it was nice.


The strangest thing about Moline was the volume of retiree-type persons we encountered and how very rude and unfriendly they were. I understand that not all people like children and that doesn't usually bother me. Typically, these people just ignore kids or at least attempt to be polite if they absolutely must interact with them. Not the old people of (visiting?) Moline. These people did not even try to hide their contempt for kids. We had people give us dirty looks just because our kids were near them in a public place. Mind you, we are not those parents who let our kids run around crazy and get in the way of other people or disrespect that others are sharing a public area with us. We keep them close to us in public and remind them to watch for others and if they do happen to get too enthusiastic and run in front of someone we always apologize and remind our kids of the behavior we expect from them. None of that mattered. We had people sneer at us. Sneer at our kids. Cut in front of us in lines as though we didn't exist and hadn't been waiting patiently and quietly with our two energetic kids for our turn. People in general were not that friendly there, but the behavior of the older persons was actually shocking. It was bizarre. Not that any of this ruined our trip, it was just too odd to not mention.



Both of the boys loved Moline, but I think Owen had the most fun. He constantly walked toward a huge tractor or combine or other heavy machinery with his arms outstretched shouting "It's giant!" His favorite thing to say now is "I want to go to the John Deere place." He is actually in bed saying it right now, even though it is an hour past his bedtime. Maybe he can retire to Moline and visit the John Deere Pavilion every day and be rude to the families with little kids who come there.