South Carolina - The Library

We went to the Richland Library!  It was super cool.  It's in downtown Columbia and is a tall building with so many cool things inside.  We did a scavenger hunt (they had tons to do) and each of the kids got a button.  They even had Princess in Black buttons, so they're pretty rad.

The entrance on the bottom to the children's section.  There was construction going on on the building next to the library.

The Children's section

The doll house, which had seven (I'm told) different scavenger hunts just for it.

They had nifty BIG things on their walls.

The entrance to the teen's section.  Apparently there are all sorts of good things in there.

Some of my kids' favorites: the escalators! I think three levels of them.  They were pretty fun to ride.  

The view from the top floor:

The view down to the children's section.  Did I mention that there were live trees in the library.  I like trees.

They have a seed library where you can get seeds to plant.  It was such a good library!

South Carolina - The Capitol

Next we went to South Carolina where we did ALL THE THINGS!  It was so fun to have a tour by Melissa and her kids.  The Capitol building there is gorgeous! 

Here's a monument by our parking spot.  Oh!  We drove by the world's largest statue of a fire hydrant.  I didn't get a picture, though.  Sadly.

On the side of the Capitol building is this neat monument to African American History.  I think they did a really good job with it.

Isn't this the coolest tree ever?  We saw lots of trees and lots of rocks on our road trip.  But more about that later.

I think this is the oldest monument in the US.  But I could be wrong..

The Capitol

Which is apparently called the State House!  It was neat to see the stars that they put where the wall was hit by shelling.

The building is so pretty!

The Library

If you look hard enough you can see the scepter that they put on the table that turns on the lights when the house is in session.

It's Swamp Fox!

It's us and Swamp Fox!  A red-letter day that I had to brag to my sisters about.  We watched Swamp Fox growing up. I have no idea if the show holds up or not.

Did you know that more Revolutionary War battles were fought in South Carolina than any other state?  I had no idea until Melissa told me.

North Carolina

We started off our trip hanging out with cousins in North Carolina!  Brita was at FSY and Peter had to work so, it was just the younger kids and me.  They played, and made cookies and we spent an enormous amount of time looking for shoes that I was supposed to buy before I left, but I ran out of time.  So eventually Lisa saved us by buying them online and we picked them up because shoe shopping is hard.

The kids made chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, and no bake cookies.  It was A LOT of cookies, but there were only 6 by the time we left.  

A lot of time was spent playing.  I was hoping to make it seem like our road trip wasn't starting until later so it wouldn't seem quite as long.  No idea if that worked or not, but they had lots of fun even when their cousins were in school.

Some day they're going to find out they're too tall to sleep this direction, but it's adorable while it lasts.  They tried it with Ingrid in there, too, but that girl is terrible at letting other people sleep!

They also spent time swimming at the neighborhood pool.  Seriously, we had so much fun hanging out with cousins!

Benton scraped up his knee pretty badly on the bottom of the pool.  It's mostly healed now. (You know, a month later.)

 

Five years

 Well, apparently it's been five years since I used my blog.  Good times.  Lots has happened.  Probably most notably we had another kid!  Welcome, three-year-old Ingrid.  

And now I can tell you about our trip.

So many things

There are so many things I want to share with the world (and with a permanent record, since my memory is shot) that I thought I'd throw them on a blog post rather than facebook.

First of all, I had pie for breafast today.  It was so yummy.  My Relief Society has started doing more little group activities during the month and I love it.  Today we went to someone's house and Sheridan demonstrated pie crust making.  She brought a cheddar pear pie and it was so good!  I love pear pies.  She also made a key lime pie and a chocolate peanutbutter pie.  They were also really good.  The kdis played in the basement, which was awesome because it had concrete floors and there were bikes and skateboards all all sorts of thingsdown there to ride on.  Benton and Brita discovered how hard it is to skateboard.


Yesterday Elias was taking pictures (which he loves to do), and he captured some great shots of my life:

I didn't realize this was an action shot.

They totally crack me up.  Horrible pictures.  Horrible spit-up mess.  So much of my life is spent like this that it's kind of nice to have it documented.

Unrelatedly,
The other night Irene prayed that "We wouldn't sneek candy in the middle of the night."

The kids have started identifying leaf veination and edge characteristics on the leaves that stick to our windshield while we're driving.

Elias on his birthday...

Tonight Peter was helping Elias pray for dinner.
Peter: Thank thee for the food.
Elias: Food.
Peter: Thank thee for my birthday.
Elias: CAKE!


Elias has become a little obsessed with Peter helping him rather than me helping him lately.  He pretty much just loves his dad and thinks he's the bee's knees.  So..

The kids were thanking me for making dinner.
Benton: Thanks for dinner, Mom.
Irene: Thanks for baking this, Mom. You're a good baker.
Brita: Thanks, Mom.
Mima: Thank you, Mom.
Elias: Thank you...DAD. *impish grin*

He's a pretty great kid.