Dad's 4th of July

So, there was so much fun stuff done over the 4th holiday on our trip to McCall that we broke the posts up into two parts, Marisa is handling some parts and I am taking care of the other parts. First of all, it's great that McCall is so close. It's a quick two hour car ride up there, so the road trips up and back were very uneventful (other than intermittent sleep - which would be a theme for the trip).

The house was great, across the street from the lake (sort of), but beach access nonetheless. This was the 1st time we have ever stayed in McCall and it was wonderful. As you can see, Faith amused herself quite well and didn't get too far off her sleep schedule. She did spend most of the trip as you see her here, in diapers and nothing else but sunscreen. She had a great time keeping up with her brothers and cousins, everyone matching snack for snack over the course of the four day trip.

Sleeping for the boys was worse than as home, which is no surprise. I swear to God, our first vacation without the kids, it won't make any sense to even leave Boise - we'll just check into the Motel 6 down the road, because I'll have six years of sleep that I will need to catch up on first, before I am even close to back to human again. Those Sandals Resort commercials; you know with the tanned, non-sleep deprived couples, para-sailing and scuba diving...those make me want to throw the hell up. Tanner slept with us one night, Jake another night and Jake and I switched beds the final night. The kids stayed up much later than normal (especially on the 4th to watch the fireworks), but in the logic that rules my life now, they still woke up at the same time in the morning. Thus the photo of Tanner and I crashing on the couch.
Since we had all the additional daylight hours, we were able to do a lot of fun stuff as well. I took Jake fishing in the Payette River, caught nothing - but that's going to be par for the course for a few years is my guess. I took Tanner fishing in the lake for the first time which he really liked. He told everyone, "I go fishing, I threw it WAY out there, but no fishies get it." He is in this phase, were the more tired he gets, the more he talks, so he was pretty much talking non-stop on this trip. "Daddy where you get that hat?" Daddy what you eating, open you mouth, let me see." Daddy, why you say that?" It gets old quickly and you find yourself saying things that, before you had kids, you swore you'd never say. "Tanner please just watch your movie please." "I'll give you some candy if you be quiet for 10 minutes..."

We also rented a Wave Runner for a day, which we had a blast on. Marisa had never ridden one, and neither had Jake, so they had a really good time. Jake is turning into some semblance of a teenager over night. He was fine on the wave runner as long as we didn't go too fast. He told the rest of the kids after, " My limit on the Jet Ski is 37, and we jumped some big waves." He was yelling to all of them as we came back into shore, "Awesome dudes, double peace (holding up peace signs with both hands), double peace, yeah!" So I think he enjoyed it. Marisa and I got to go out a couple of times on our own and she had a really good time as well. We got to explore the whole lake and it's much bigger, and much prettier that I thought.

On the whole it was a great trip and an great 4th. A couple of weeks of semi normal life then off on our midwest roadie. As Bon Jovi says, "I'll sleep when I'm dead".