Our trip to the "pond"

We got back last Wednesday from a little vacation to Minnesota to spend some time with Chris's family at the cabin! The lake (Mille Lacs) is the 2nd or 3rd biggest lake in Minnesota, but Mya repeatedly called it the pond and Max referred to it a time or two as the pool!

It was a hot week and with no AC in the cabin, we definitely put the lake to good use! Max and Mya went swimming a minimum of 7 times per day and always had a willing adult to take them in! Max and Grandpa started a little tradition of hitting the lake around 9pm for a "lake bath" followed by roasting marshmallows. Both of which he thought were the coolest things in the world! Max got a little adventurous and was doing some swimming without his life jacket on and jumping in off the dock and Mya got way more comfortable in the water as the week went on. Neither kid would go to the bathroom in the lake. When I tried to get Mya to go, she looked at me and said, "I can't do that...there's fish in there!" Another good Mya quote happened when she went under the water at some point and when she came up she said (as she was hysterically crying) that she saw a fish coming right for her! Max had fun looking for "grayfish" (crayfish) and the mosquitos were out in full force evidenced by Max's 20 or so bites!

(Max getting bit by a mosquito during a photo shoot:)

Ivy had a little bit of a tough week, but you wouldn't have known it most of the time. She popped her first tooth on Sunday and is sooooooo close to crawling and pulling up that it is driving her crazy! You can tell she's so agitated because she just wants to move and can't quite figure out how to get her legs to work with her arms. She went in the lake once and was squealing with delight:) She napped really well, but the nights were a bit of a different story!

Max and Mya got to do a really fun craft with their grandparents called "sock drop painting" where they filled a sock with sand and then put paint on it and dropped it down off of a ladder to make fun designs with the splatters. Uncle Jeff and I even got in on the action and made one! You can see in the first picture below that Max definitely figured out the "splattering" part!