North Carolina....PART ONE...

So, we are back from North Carolina....

I will start by saying that we are still catching up on our sleep.

The trip was amazing and exhausting. We did so many FUN things...all from home and we did a whole lotta NOTHING....

I should mention that we took most of the pictures all week on my Dad's camera...and I did not sucessfully copy them onto a disc to bring them home...so there will be more (priceless) pictures to come. But here are a few:

We tried to fill the week with TONS of surprises for the kids (of which, there were 10). One of the surprises was that the adults planned a sneak (water) attack on the kids. We gathered them all together at the back side of the house and I lead them on a "hike" around the house to the front yard where the adults were all hiding in the hedges with buckets of water....ATTACK!!! The kids then grabbed buckets and got us all back. Here are Kobe and Ryan: Matthew doing a sneak-attack on Ryan...he was totally unfair.
Adam took all of the kids fishing at our pond. The ONLY one to catch ANYTHING was Mackenzie...and it was a really big bass. je RAN all the way up from the pond to show it to us:

We had one sad loss over the course of the week. We had to cut down a pear tree that had been in our yard FOREVER...I can remember making myself sick from eating pears from this tree as a kid. Here is Bryce and Oliver watching the tree start to come down (from the safety of the nearby hammock):

Oliver and Brycee-boy, taking each other in:
Oliver and Brycee-boy watching the chainsaw in action:
Same picture, from the front side. They were totally enchanted:
Adam, doing the dirty work:
There will be more pictures to come....I promise.

All in all it was an amazing trip. I felt like we were constantly making food and then cleaning up after a meal...that's what you get when you have so many people under one roof, right? However, we had many priceless memories.