It's funny now...

This past weekend we took a quick two-day trip to Turner Falls in Oklahoma. Even though it doesn't seem like the most exciting vacation ever, we were pretty excited about playing in waterfalls and just spending some downtime together as a family. Little did we know that there is no downtime when you vacation with kids. We actually got out of the house Thursday morning one minute earlier than we had scheduled which is an absolute miracle. We saw this as a great start to a great vacation and just knew that luck was on our side. HA! Practically the whole way there Addie cried as Jack covered his hears and yelled over her, "Addie keeps crying, Addie keeps crying, Addie keeps crying!"

We survived the drive of eternal hearing loss and arrived at Turner Falls on time only to discover that the cabin we rented was not available to us for another hour so we decided to go into the great town of Davis to grab a bite to eat. After driving all way through the town we concluded that we had three options...Subway, Pizza Hut, or Terri's Fried Catfish. We opted for Subway and returned to our now available cabin. Now let me just stop here and explain something...Levi had been to Turner Falls as a kid and he had told me the awesome stories about how amazing and beautiful it was there. So I naturally had these images in my head of this cool log cabin surrounded by this gorgeous landscape of waterfalls and rivers. Not exactly...our cabin was one of 8 and they were all so close together that you could barely park a car between them. They were between the stinky dumpster and the nastiest part of the very brown clouded river. The entire park was so crowded, there was trash everywhere and more than half of the people there needed to put on more clothes. But whatever, what mattered was we were on vacation as a family. So we put on our swimsuits and set out in search of waterfalls. After about an hour of playing in the water Jack starts whining that he is ready to go home and he wants to play his Wii games. This whining did not stop so eventually we had to threaten to spank him if he said the word "games" again. But the day ended up being a lot of fun. We played in the water for several hours and then hiked to an awesome cave that evening.

For dinner we cooked hotdogs on a campfire (yes it was really hot and almost unbearable) and made smores. Jack thought the fire was pretty cool but didn't care for the smores too much. That night we all rested peacefully in our beds dreaming about the fun we were going to have the next day when sometime well past midnight two stupid teenage boys somehow managed to unlock our cabin door and open it!!!! They thought it was pretty funny so they slammed it shut and opened it again. Of course, this woke Addie up and because this awesome cabin was only one room and shared a wall with the cabin next to us, we could not let her cry herself back to sleep. So I spent the rest of my night waking up every 5 seconds to make sure Addie hadn't fallen off the bed or I hadn't smothered her because I put her in bed with me while Levi crawled into bed with Jack and was snoring in less than a minute.

Morning came way too soon which wasn't so bad because there is always the silver lining of coffee. We went hiking and found a really beautiful part of the river that we played in the rest of the morning.

At noon we packed up and headed out to Arbuckle Wilderness. We paid close to $50 to drive through the "wildlife park" and see lots and lots of cows, ducks, goats, deer, turtles, donkeys and llamas. There were a few zebras and giraffes there too but not many. But despite the park's lack of interesting animals we had such a good time because we laughed so hard. Levi rolled a llama's lip up in the window and almost ran over another one while trying to get away, Addie spilled all the animal food all in our car, Jack was so freaked out by the ostriches that he refused to sit in the front seat and I almost got my hand bitten off by a zebra. Good times.

We said goodbye to Arbuckle Wilderness and headed home. The drive home was probably the most relaxing part of the whole trip because the kids finally slept (the entire time) and Levi and I got a chance to hold hands and laugh about our not so perfect family vacation.