Colyer Caravan 2012 (Part I)

Well, friends...we're back to normal life after our 11 day trek to Orlando. It was wonderful and exhausting. So much fun and so little sleep. It would take me forever and a day to get it all into one blog so I'll just post bits and pieces as I have time. Where, oh where, do I even begin?? The beginning, I suppose...

We pulled out of John & Judie's driveway at 6:15am on Wednesday, the 3rd. It wasn't bright and early. It was just early. Of course, even with actually getting several things packed up and prepared days ahead, I still had 5 gajillion things to do the night before. So I started the trip on about 4 hours of sleep. We got to my aunt's house in Atlanta at about 11:30pm. We planned for a full day in Atlanta since both of us have family and friends there. I was sad we didn't have time to see more of my side of the family while we were there but there's only so much you can do in one day and we had a lot of plans with Jon's family. We definitely had to squeeze in time to meet up with Jon's best friend, Hodge, aka Uncle Hedgehog (Bennett dubbed him that when he was 2 and it stuck). We hadn't seen him in about 2 years and we missed this goofy guy so much.

 

Dance party in Hodge's cool car. Well, Hodge and Bennett had a dance party. Dawson wasn't in the partying mood:

 Love these boys:

Later that day we met back up with the rest of the Colyer crew. Judie's first cousin (who we call Aunt Sue--she and Judie grew up like sisters.) lives here and all of her kids (Jon's 2nd cousins). It had been a couple years since we've been able to see this family since his cousin Matt has been in Japan for the past 3 years. It was so fun to all be together again. We used to see Matt and Stefani quite a bit when Matt played ball in Chicago (and also in Des Moines occasionally). You know, those glorious days when you weren't tied down and you could jet off to Chicago for a weekend?? We took full advantage of that and had a lot of fun with them. We've all multiplied our families quite a bit since then (ie: lost all freedom) and I couldn't wait to see all these cute kiddos together. We met at this amazing park near McDonough, GA called Noah's Ark. It was basically a huge zoo with gorgeous open spaces and trails and it was all free. It was the perfect place for our kids to run after being in a car for 16 hours the day before. Between our four families who were there, there were 11 kids under 7!

 Never mind about the lion, tiger and bear in the cage next to them. There were ants!!!

 One of the best parts of childhood--climbing trees:

 The Colyer cousins with their 3rd cousins!

Not pictured: John Mark's sister, Abigail (1 month) and Macie and Micah's brother, Andrew (8 mos.) and Channing, of course. There's one more 3rd cousin, Natalie, who's about a year old. She was at dinner that night at Aunt Sue's house. Aunt Sue hosted ALL of us for dinner (brave woman!!). It was actually not completely nuts. She is one organized woman and we all fit pretty comfortably in the basement. We always have so much fun with this side of the family and I said more than once, I really wish we could just transplant all of us Colyers down to Georgia. Jon and I would go in a heartbeat. We just need to convince big John and Josh to start candidating at churches down there :)

A couple shots from the road. Oh, this angelic face!

And this little trooper who cut his 2 first teeth on the trip! I couldn't handle the 5 minute naps he takes in his carseat when we were driving for 2 solid days there and back. So let's just say he got a few good naps in and we'll leave it at that. (Please don't report me. Pretend its 1985 when every one of us slept on the floor of the van).