Hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway- Jumpinoff Rock

We had a fun family weekend of camping, family worship, and hiking. It was my last Saturday night off for a while (I am going back to the weekend option work schedule) so we headed up to the Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, NC after I got off of work on Saturday morning. We spent the night at Price Park Lake. The kids did well camping. They each got their own tent. :) Somehow we forgot to take pictures of the campground. :( Gabe of course ate lots of dirt. Thats probably why no pictures got taken. We were always trying to coral him onto a blanket to play or cleaning the dirt off of him. :) We hiked around the lake there. The next morning after we packed up camp, we drove north on the parkway for a bit and stopped for lunch and family worship looking at the mountains on both sides of us. Then we took a short hike to a lookout. Those are the pictures below. Olivia saw lots of fun things on the hike, like red leaves, acorns, mushrooms of all colors, a monarch butterfly, the webs of tent catepillars, the roots of an uprooted tree, and the skeleton of a leaf. We had a great time.

Our New House Lapbook

So we have been working on this lapbook since early spring. We bought our house at the end of January. We spent a lot of time working on it before we ever moved in. I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about several topics with Olivia. Olivia leraned our names and we have worked on her being able to carefully write her full name and spell it for others. We talked about where we live and have made some headway in memorizing her address and phone number. We also talked about our neighbors and how God wants us to love our neighbors. Now that we live in the house, we take walks most days and always say hello to our neighbors. She also loves to stop and spell/read the "Lindley Park" sign. We made cookies for the neighbors on either side of us so we could meet them and practice greetings. We read numerous books about how other people live and how their houses are similar or different from ours. We also talk about these things as we ride around our city. We talked about safety rules for our new house. Our bible verse was Matthew 7:24-28. We didn't memorize this one but we have talked long about applying it to our home. We want to have lots of family time in this home and recently we have started having family worship every day so that our house will be built upon THE ROCK. Enjoy the pictures...

Yes, Olivia drew Sarah standing upright but she does have a tail. So it's not just Sarah who thinks she is a human in this house. :-)

Sarah's come home!

We're so excited to finally have Sarah living with us again! While she may have enjoyed her time at Grandma and Grandpa's house, she's settled right back into her usual routines...jumping on the couch, stealing things from the laundry basket, rooting through the trash...ahhhhh, it's good to have her back. It took Gabe a couple of days to get used to having this large black thing snuffling around and licking him, but he warmed up to her when he realized he could drop cheerios to her from his high chair.