Color Me Rad (again!)

You may have remembered pictures of Adam and I doing the Color Me Rad 5K race in May.  Well, it came to Bethlehem again and we decided to let Avery give it a go!

Here we are "pre-color"...

She ran hard for a good five minutes and then we ran/walked the rest of the way.  

 Occasionally, her legs were just too tired and she had to get on Daddy's shoulders for a rest.  

Here she is about half way through...standing on the Fahy bridge with Steel Stacks in the background (it's not often we can run in the middle of a street over a bridge, so it seemed picture-worthy!)

 It took us about 50 minutes (double what it normally takes me for a 5K run!), but here she is at the end! And we got so much more "color" than we did in May!

 Tough girl face!

I think it was a mixture of loving it and hating it!  The color "spray" is not too bad, but the color "bomb" of powder can get a little scary when you can't see past the color for a few seconds! We'll see if she'll want to do it again next year.  

Camp

Two weekends ago, we did our annual summer weekend at "camp." Actually, last year was my first year ever going, but this has been a tradition with Adam's family for years (even before Adam existed!).  It is a house on Lake Goodyear in Oneonta, NY.  It is a gorgeous place, but given that it is on a lake, you do have some bugs, spiders, etc. to deal with.  The kids, of course, had a great time and it is always nice to relax and have some family time!

Here is the view from the dock...isn't it beautiful?!?

And the view from the deck...

The kids enjoyed fishing (or trying to fish) off the dock.

 Best buds/cousins....

Here's a flashback to last year's dock picture of the girls!

 Thanks Uncle Bobby for finally catching something!

It was too chilly for any of the adults to even want to get in the lake for a swim, but the kids had no problem with it....

And they even made mud pies!

 We enjoyed lots of family time and giggles...

Grayson got vey cuddly with Madilyn

 And we enjoyed lots of good food and family dinners.

 Nonna and I even took the kids out on an adventure walk along the train tracks one of the mornings....

 We stopped to play on someone's tractors....

 saw old, broken down trucks...

 and the best part was the old train that we let the kids play on!

All in all, it was a nice relaxing weekend of doing hair, nails, crafts, reading, playing games, fishing, swimming, walking, talking, and lots of eating and drinking!

However, we are always happy to get back home to our own beds after a weekend at camp!  This year, was particularly rough on us...there was something in our room buzzing around our heads at night and Adam and I both got bit in our sleep despite being under the sheets in long sleeves and pants!  

Portrait time!

So, every year we begrudgingly take the kids to Portrait Innovations to get their birthday portraits done.  It's always a stressful process, so this year, we thought we'd be smart and just do them together in one visit for Avery's 4th birthday and Grayson's 2nd birthday. We got their first appointment of the day and got there nice and early and ready to go.  Our plan backfired when our little man refused to leave my arms to stand in front of the camera.  We tried everything to get him to stop crying! This usually happens for a few minutes and then he is fine. But after 20 minutes or so, we figured we'd better move on with the photo shoot so as to not hold up the next customers.  

Therefore....all of the pictures are just of Avery!  Of course, she loved getting her picture taken and pretty much every shot was perfect!  It just kills me that Grayson won't have the traditional picture next to the number "2" block.  But I guess we'll just remember this year as the year he refused to take pictures. 

Funny thing was that just a few days later, it was our scheduled time to get our family portraits done for our church's directory. It was a random weeknight at 7 pm, so I had REALLY low expectations for this  session given Grayson's performance a few days earlier.  But, what do you know?  He did great and we got a nice picture of our whole family together! 

We even payed a ridiculous amount to get an 8 x 10 of this one of the kids together.  

These were just scanned in from the originals. We just have these two, so we can only really share them electronically.  So enjoy!