Of weddings and vacations!

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the family. Here's the story of our lives.


CHAPTER 1: THE WEDDING

Emily was the flower girl for my cousin Matt's wedding. She was pumped. She made several new friends over the course of a couple of days and still talks about the wedding. Here is a video of the beginning and the end of the evening.

CHAPTER 2: VACATION

We took some time off the week after Mother's Day. With the store closing and lots of other changes going on in our lives right now, it was a good time to get away. We went down to Tennessee and took some time refocusing and hanging out as a family and with some friends that live down there.

We spent a little extra time in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg this trip. One of our first days there, we stopped at the Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant... or as Tom calls it, The Apple Barn. :-) Tom and I are both on Twitter (@tsfGodGuy and @jennihypes) and we tweeted a lot during our trip. Tom sent out a few posts while we were waiting on our yummy food!


We also killed a little bit of time while waiting for our food by playing with my camera. Check out the close-up of Snickerdoodle's beautiful eyeball!


At some point during the week (I can't remember if it was after lunch or an entirely different day -- but does it really matter in the whole scheme of things?) we went to Ripley's Aquarium. It's become another one of our standard stops when we're in the area. Here's a picture of Em looking into an aquarium tube from underneath it... or if you don't believe that, she might also be listening to angels announcing the virgin birth, or trapped in a Steven Spielberg movie.


The Ripley's Aqaurium has quite a few exhibits to be proud of.

There's the giant, Emily-sized catfish that apparently likes to have it's belly tickled.


There's a ginormous tank that you can see from above....


...that has sharks....


... and old people swimming and scootering about in it!


Then, there are the giant tubes with moving sidewalks that take you underneath the ginormous tanks so you can get an up-close-and-personal view of the sharks, turtles, stingray and other creatures lurking about in the deep water.


There are also creatures that make us want to go, "Oooooooo!"


At the end of the moving sidewalk are several other exhibits and rooms to explore. Here's another giant tank that would make a fabulous addition to our living room. Any volunteers to buy it, set it up, clean it and maintain it for us?


One of my favorite exhibits at ANY aquarium are the jellyfish. We saw these first when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I made these guys sit still for this picture and it took about 6 takes before the smaller of the two stopped grumping it up... it was WAAAAY past nap time at this point.


Once we made it out of the darker, more peaceful part of the aquarium, someone caught their second wind and was ready to start checking out the domes that were built into the smaller aquariums.


On our way back past the giant aquarium (remember the one we wanted for our living room?), we were lucky enough to find a diver that was just finishing up feeding the fish some lettuce. That's Em's silhouette on the bottom-right working her charm to get the diver to wave at her.


There's a new penguin exhibit in the aquarium this year. It opened just a little over a month before we got there. It was pretty sweet. Here's a picture of Emily laying on the glass floor watching penguins swim back and forth between the indoor and outdoor parts of the exhibit. They also had tubes to crawl into so you could reach a dome that popped up in the middle of the penguin exhibit. Up close and personal folks. Up close and personal.


It was a good day. A long day. But a good day to snuggle up to a penguin.

Slip me some skin..

While we were in Townsend, TN, we stopped by Cade's Cove for our regular visit.  After making a quick potty break stop at the visitor's center, we walked around and spotted a park ranger with some animal skins that she was talking about.  Emily was fascinated with the bear and skunk skins.

Vacation in the Smoky Mountains

We took off last Friday for a quick trip down to our favorite spot in Tennessee -- The Smoky Mountains. We took a planned detour through Nashville on the way so that we could meet our niece for supper and hang out briefly while we were in the area. Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures on my computer at the moment but am hoping to round some up that dear hubby took.

Some highlights of the Nashville loop of the trip:

• Emily got to eat at The Aquarium, a restaurant at the Opry Mills mall in Nashville, while sitting beside swimming sharks, stingrays, a bunch of smaller fish, and a diver.
  
• Emily got to eat ice cream with her new best friend, Anna-Vija.
• Emily told me she had to go potty while at the restaurant, but made a QUICK u-turn as soon as she discovered they were scary (read: automatic flushing) toilets.
  
• Emily got to ride on the carousel about 5 or 6 times in the Opry Mills mall in Nashville.
• Emily got to pet stingrays in the same mall.
  
• Emily got to spend the night with us in our king-size bed at the hotel and repeatedly told us, "I love this room!"
• Emily got to eat continental breakfast at the hotel -- including a mommy-made waffle (ok, so I just poured the waffle mix from the cup into the waffle iron, flipped it over and waited for it to beep... but you theoretically you could mess that up, right?)
  
• Emily got to ride up to the top/3rd floor of the hotel in a glass elevator and I stopped to let her run a lap around the inner square hallway on each floor before we got back in the car to head to our next destination. I think she actually ran 2 laps on the second floor... but whose counting.

We spent the week in our favorite rental cabin in Townsend, TN. We enjoyed rainstorms from the front porch nearly every day and experienced some torrential downpours toward the end of the week that we heard dumped 8 inches on us in a 24-hour period.

Prior to the trip, I gathered up some materials so I could spend some time learning a little more about my Nikon D50 camera. I'm ready to start learning to do a little more with my camera so we can get away from using the automatic setting the majority of the time. I didn't get a lot of time to read up but spent part of a morning playing with the aperature and shutter speed settings. I still have a LONG way to go.


We did Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg in one day and took in the aquarium there. We like it because after you walk partway through the exhibits you can hop into a slowly moving sidewalk and it takes you under and beside the huge tank that houses a bunch of sharks, sea turtles, and a wide variety of fish. I couldn't think of the best settings to use on my camera and recommended that Tom use a nightime setting because it was fairly dark in there... bad choice. Most of the pictures came out blurry and I should have had him set it back on Auto.



This kind of shows the size of part of the exhibit. That's a shark in the center of the picture and the bottom-left shows people on the moving sidewalk going around one of the bends.


A closer look at one of the sharks in the tank around us.



Emily is NOT camera-shy like some of her cousins. As soon as she sees you holding a camera, she immediately whips around with her "C-H-E-E-E-E-E-S-E!" pose. As soon as the picture is snapped, you get bombarded with an excited, "I Wanna See! I Wanna See!" Hmmm... seems my generation missed that aspect of photography.


Our cabin comes with a hot tub on the wrap around porch. Emily and I took advantage of it nearly every day. There were a couple of times when a shower came up on us all of a sudden and much to Emily's chagrin we had to head inside. On one such occasion, I just deposited her directly from the hot tub into the bath tub and let her keep playing in the water. This was her first chance to play with her special bathtub crayons that she picked out. Yeah, we vandalized our rental cabin's shower... we're just mean like that. No, actually, these are pretty cool and similar to some I remember playing with as a kid. Emily had a blast taking the bathtub through the "carwash" when it was time to clean it all up.


Check out the hair! When she first came home she had NO hair. Then it came in blonde and straight. It's VERY slowly getting longer and is still very fine but she's got little ringlets when it gets wet. (And weird frizzies when it doesn't have mousse or gel on it.)


Late in the week, we had the really have rainstorm come through. Somehow, we managed to leave an outdoor light on at the back of the porch and in the morning the outside cabin wall near the light was speckled with over 3 dozen different moths. Only 2 of them had similar coloring and shape! There was a pink and yellow one not pictured below and two looked like rolled up dead leaves until I looked more closely and discovered they were moths. Here are few of the specimens that I found really interesting. The green one is worth clicking on the pictures to see a larger version! I'm sure they were drying their wings or whatever it is that moths do, but these things were on the wall at about 7am and they were still over 8 hours later and didn't look like they had moved the tiniest bit. They were gone by dark and none were there the next day.






I love watching sunsets but the view from our cabin has never revealed any cool colors or anything like we see at home or when we travel to Michigan's U.P. I did set my camera and tripod up one evening though and over the course of an hour took about 10 photos of the changing evening sky. They don't call them The Great Smoky Mountains for nothin'! Be sure to click on the triangle/play button to view them. Enjoy.



Vacation is over and it's back to the grindstone this week for me. Stay healthy and be blessed y'all!

-j