Easter Weekend

I'm a little late on this one, but better late than never. Well, we decided at the last minute to go down to the Smokey Mountains for an Easter weekend getaway. Notice that I called it a getaway and not a vacation ... nothing with two young kids is a vacation!!! Anyway, we decided to go down to the Gatlinburg, TN area with our good friends Brian and Denise Dewes and their little guy Braeden. It took us about 8 hours to drive down there (in two car affectionately named "big bear" and "little bear"). The drive down wasn't too bad. Dayton took his normal nap and we stopped for a while for dinner. Dayton was a handful, though, because he doesn't want to sit once we take him out. Anyway, we eventually got to the cabin at about 10pm. We rented a 3 bedroom cabin ... here it is from the outside.

34 steps from the bottom to the top ... Dayton counted every time! Well, he counted to 20 then Mommy or Daddy counted ;-)

So our first full day was a bit rough. None of the kids slept well the previous night. Dayton got up about 3am and was raring to go. Two hours or so later, we finally got him back down. Brian and Denise had similar problems with Braeden so it wasn't until about 3pm on Friday 'til we finally got moving. We decided to take a "hike" up to see Laurel Falls. And by hike, I mean push three strollers about a mile up a paved path. Got our exercise! Here are some pics from the top!



That about sums up day one. I can't really remember how the sleeping went the second night but we were in much better shape Saturday. It was very nice out so we decided to do some exploring around our cabin. Our cabin was actually called "The Lodge Between the Streams", so there were two nice little streams to follow. Dayton had a ball and it was the first time that Carson spent any real time outside. Everyone did great!



After our hike, Dayton and I relaxed a bit in the hot tub that was on our deck. It took a bit of convincing to get him in but once we did, he loved it. We cut the temperature down to about 99 so it was just like a bubble bath for him!

Saturday night the kids all slept great!!!! It was a minor miracle :-) The mommies and daddies even got about two hours of hot tub / margarita time all to themselves!!! So Easter Sunday we were all feeling pretty good. The Dewes' were good and went to church ... Eric and I chickened out and elected to take the boys to a playground that we found instead (it's hard enough to take Dayton to a church we are familiar with ... couldn't imagine trying an unfamiliar one). Dayton had fun at the park and tuckered himself out enough to take a good nap for us. Once he woke up, and the little ones were fed, we decided to check out the aquarium in Gatlinburg. It was the coldest day of the weekend so it was a good day for it. Dayton for the most part just ran around like a little maniac. Here he is in the discovery area ... for those of you that know my son ... of course he fell in love with the big steering wheel!

Here we all are ready to go through the gift shop and get out of there! All in all, it was a nice aquarium and we had fun.

We ended up waiting until Braeden and Dayton went to bed to eat our Easter dinner. While the boys were out getting the grill ready, Carson napped in the swing. I'm not sure what he was dreaming about but I think a time out was in order ;-)

Here was dinner (pre-grill) ...

A huge thanks to Brian for getting fanatic fillets for dinner! They were awesome ... we all stuffed ourselves and then treated ourselves to some really yummy smores too!

Then it was off to bed (a miserable night). All 3 boys slept for crap so we were all dragging pretty bad Monday morning. Its always fun to drive 8 hours on a great night's sleep. Anyway, I thought I would share a pic of the pool table in our place ... Brian played one game on it. It was mostly used for this purpose, as well as a changing table. Ha!

All in all we had a really nice get-away. Thanks for putting up with us Dewes' we had fun as usual!