Our Family Picture Shoot

We were so impressed, when we were in Cleveland, with how beautiful the scenery was at the metroparks. After we visited Squire's Castle in the evening with Chelle, we decided that we would go back and take some family pictures there the next day when we could get dressed up and the light would be better. We are soooo happy with how the pictures turned out.

So impressed, in fact, that we can't decide which of them to put on our wall. For this, we are asking you (yeah you, the one behind the monitor clicking the mouse right now) to help us. What we want is for you to tell us which pictures you like best. Basically, we will number the following pictures, and we want you to click on the "comments" link at the bottom of this post and vote for your two favorite family poses, and your two favorite Gabbie alone poses.

(we've also posted a few collages of some of the pictures that didn't make the cut (or didn't fit the categorizations))

Family Picture #1

Family Picture #2

Family Picture #3

Family Picture #4

Family Picture #5

Family Picture #6

Family Picture #7

Family Picture #8

Family Picture #9

Family Picture #10

Family Picture #11

Family Picture #12

Gabbie Alone #1

Gabbie Alone #2

Gabbie Alone #3

Gabbie Alone #4

Gabbie Alone #5

Gabbie Alone #6

Gabbie Alone #7

Gabbie Alone #8

Okay, that's it for voting!
(don't forget to vote again in November (I know I'm Cheesy, but, as many of you know, Christy and I are pretty big supporters of Barack Obama))

Here are the other Pictures:

Fun at the Wildes

Our next stop, after visiting Christy's sister in Virginia, was to go and visit Kyle's sister Chelle (some of you may know her as Rochelle) her family in Ohio.

Here are some great group shots where you can see pretty much everyone in her family:

One of the best parts of our trip, both in Virginia and Ohio, was to watch how Gabbie interacted with all of her cousins. Her cousin that is closest to her in age is Chelle's youngest son Graham, and he and Gabbie became the best of friends right off the bat. We got some of the cutest pictures with the two of them while we were there:

Another thing that we got to do while we were there was to go and visit some of the great sites around Cleveland where the Wildes live.

The first place that we were able to visit was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. This place was pretty cool, cause not only did it have displays of dinosaur bones and gems and rocks and stuff, but it also had a Discovery Room (where kids could do hands on stuff) and an outdoor section where live animals could be visited. Chelle's kids favorite part of the Museum was Lucy the Otter. Gabbie mostly liked the dinosaur bones and Gems the most.

While we were at Chelle's Lincoln, Chelle's oldest boy, had his fifth birthday. For his birthday party he wanted to have some friends over to make a Star Wars movie. Kyle was nominated to play Darth Vader in the movie, and it actually turned out really cool (a couple of Chelle and Jeremy's friends had some pretty sweet costumes.)

Another fun part of the trip was being able to visit the Cleveland Zoo:

The Cleveland Zoo is really cool because it is broken up into two parts: an outdoor portion and an indoor portion. The indoor portion is called "The Rainforest." I think that we liked the rainforest part the very best.

Gabbie (not to mention Mom and Dad) seemed to have tons of fun (as usual) at the zoo.

We've developed this new tradition whenever we go to a zoo of determining which animal at the zoo was Gabbie's favorite. Both of the last two times we have gone we have had a hard time deciding between the monkeys and the tiger/leopard. This time, because we were on vacation (and we noticed that this zoo's gift shop was fairly reasonably priced), we decided that we would buy Gabs a stuffed animal representative of her favorite.

Since Christy and I couldn't tell very well whether she liked the monkeys or tigers, when we got to the gift shop we picked out two cute little stuffed animals: one cheetah (that looked like the leopard at the Hogle Zoo) and one Gorilla (it was pretty cute, you should've seen it). We decided we would hold both out in front of Gabs and let her decide (by reaching for the one that she wanted) what was her favorite.

The resulting scene was hilarious: She gave both animals a quick look, then lunged, almost falling out of the stroller she was buckled into, for the Cheetah. There was no doubt which animal was Gabbie's favorite.

Since that time she has taken Whiskers (the cheetah) everywhere she goes.

The last day that we were at the Wildes we got to visit one of the famous Cleveland Area Metroparks (see Chelle's blog). The experience didn't disappoint.

Not only was the scenery extremely beautiful, but there was a castle there that was awesome to look at (see upcoming post).

Thanks Wilde Family! We had a blast!

Explanation and Disclaimer

During our trip we took a ton of pictures. If we were to post all of the ones we liked individually it would take an incredibly long time to do so. In order to make the blogging process easier, we have created a bunch of picture collages that will help us in the process.

As we know we've told some of our family that they are free to print off some of the pictures we post on this blog for their walls, and we understand that posting our pictures in this way may inhibit this: we first apologize, and also offer that if anyone would like a copy of one or more of the pictures that are in the collages, they can let us know via comment on the post that the collage is contained in or e-mail and we'll be happy to send them to you.

Camping with the Campbells

One of the major highlights of our trip was going camping with Christy's family. We went to a lake in Virginia called Smith Mountain Lake. It was one of the most beautiful places to camp that I have ever been to. (For those of you from the west coast: to give you an idea of how beautiful this place was, imagine Lake Powell, but instead of having red rock as a backdrop there is beautiful green forest and foliage everywhere... I guess you'll see a little of it in the pictures.)

The most exciting part of camping was Christy's Brother-in-law Tony's boat. Two of our days were spent riding around taking in the beautiful scenery with the wind in our hair and pulling whoever was up to it behind on the tube.

Here are some great pictures of Christy's sister Taylor and nieces Jossie and Arieanna riding the tube:

Here's some of Christy's sister Jackie and her son Aydan:
(Oh, there are some of Christy in there too.)

Kyle took a few turns too, and Tony let him try getting up on skis again after about 8 years... He ate a lot of water trying to get up slalom, but when he put the second ski on he was able to get up on the first try:
(Oh, and what's a good boating trip without having to take a look at the motor because of problems getting it started )

Another Great thing about Smith Mountain Lake was that they had this awesome beach. I wish we would have taken a picture of what it looked like from far away. It was awesome, and gave us all a fun, safe place to play in the sand and water (there were lifeguards and everything):

(The ironic and scary part about that last comment is that while we were there (luckily not while we were at the beach) there was a kid that actually drowned at this beach... kinda a freak accident... ask us or the Campbells about it if you want to know more)

Gabs loved the water, and most of all, she loved her new life jacket we got her:
(She still swims with it in our pool at our apartment complex and loves it... Mommy loves it too.)

Some of our best time was spent just hanging out at our campsite. It was fun to just sit back and relax and get to know our family a little bit better with no distractions. Some of the favorite campsite places were: the hammock, next to the grill, in Tony's giant chair, and next to the firepit.

Smith Mountain Lake was also great cause there are a ton of places that you can go to ride bikes or take a walk, and it is pretty close to the lake for some good fishing or skipping rocks.

One of the funnest things about this trip was watching Gabs personality come out as she interacted with different people. A surprising place where this personality came through was in our tent. We realized while we were out there that Gabbie does really well around lots of kids as long as she has some breaks in-between when she can just go and play by herself for a little while. When we first got to Grandma Campbell's house we were surprised that she had gone out and bought us a porta-crib (how Grandmas always know exactly what to get you to serve as a lifesaver I will never truly understand, but this porta-crib was definitely just that on this trip) and Gabbie loved playing in it while camping.
Here are some great pictures that we got of her while playing:

We're so glad that we got to go camping with the Campbell and Fesperman families. I don't know that we would have been able to have any better time visiting than we did.

Here are some of Christy's favorite pictures from our Camping trip:

Guitar Hero

While spending some down time at my parents before we went camping, we decided to play some guitar hero together. My younger sister Taylor had only played about once or twice before and was pretty nervous about playing. We talked her into it and even got Mom to come downstairs to play a round or two with us.

I was playing to make a fool of myself so Tay felt comfortable so we got some pretty sweet pictures of me getting really into the long notes in the songs. After playing a little while, my younger brother James came home from work and showed us all up big time. He was awesome and spent some time trying to show Taylor and I how to actually do it. There hasn't been a lot of times where we were able to spend some time together as brothers and sisters so this time was really special. It really made me realize how much I miss seeing these guys more than once a year. Hopefully when we move to Texas we will be able to see them more often.

Great Grandma Campbell

We arrived at Christy's parents house at about 12 Saturday night. We woke up early to attend church with mom and then got ready to go spend some time with Christy's grandma and her extended family. It was really nice to see everyone together again. It was like the old days of the entire family coming over to grandma's for Christmas.

We were able to get a four generation picture with Christy's dad, Grandma Campbell, Gabbie and Christy...

Here Gabbie was playing with her cousin Arieanna (to the right), Christy's cousin Rachel, her stepfather Jeff, and her daughter Brianna.

Christy and her older sister Jackie sitting on the floor because every single seat was taken.
Spending time with family that you have not seen in over a year is a great feeling. We loved the warm feeling of contentment that was there in the gathering and can't wait for the next time we all get to be together again.