Home Again

The Hackney 4 have made it home after our week long Illinois-Holiday World-Gatlinburg vacation. I'll have some more photos to post later, but tonight I'll show you El Cuatro's vacation pics. If you remember, last year El Cinco went on vacation with us. This year his fluffier cousin El Cuatro made the journey. He had a great time! :)

Chowing down on the continental breakfast from Super 8. He prefer's something a little more substantial, but this did OK.

Here he is enjoying a round of pool at the cabin. Rachel beat him most times they played, but he claims that she cheated.

Here he is helping me keep an eye on the kids at the pool.

Cuatro heard that Cinco's family originally came from North Carolina so he was excited to be able to set hoof in their ancestral homeland!

Cuatro really enjoyed the beautiful mountain view. Next year he wants us to take him to the beach....we'll see how that works out!

(By the way, if you set a stuffed animal on a state line sign and snap pictures of it....people will look at you funny!)

More Vacationing

We're all sitting here at McAllister's deli after a nice dinner. Here are some pics from yesterday. We took the trolley to downtown Gatlinburg and walked around the shops. Then we spent part of the afternoon in Ripley's Aquarium. Today we spent the entire day in Smokey Mountains National Park. Can't show you any pics yet, because I left my camera cable at the cabin.

Vacationing - Part 2

We're having fun down in Gatlinburg. Spent yesterday hiking up to a waterfall in the park and then a drive around Cade's Cove. All told, we spent a lot of time weaving around in the car. Today we're taking a break from hiking and nature. Going to do the touristy stuff. I think we'll take the trolley into Gatlinburg and walk around. Driving through that place is crazy! We did manage to see a bear yesterday while hiking. We also saw a bunch of deer. Craziest thing we saw was coming back down the trail from the waterfall. We rounded the corner and coming up the trail was Dusty's cousin, her husband, and Dusty's aunt! I knew they were supposed to be in Gatlinburg the same time as us, but to actually run into them on a trail was crazy!

Vacationing we go

We're out road trippin' on vacation. Spent the weekend in Illinois with Dusty's parents. On teh fourth we headed out to the carnival and the kids lightened Memaw's wallet. We also discovered the hard was that Rachel doesn't like roller coasters - no matter how small. We had a fun family reunion out at the lake. Then we headed back to the park for fireworks on the 5th of July. Rain delay got us the day before. Today we had a great day at Holiday World. Tomorrow we're off to Gatlinburg.

This is 5 minutes after leaving the house - already watching a DVD!

Dusty has declared that his goal for this week is to be a gluttonous sloth...he's kicking off right by watching a Rambo movie and snacking!

This kids at the carnival with Uncle Joel and Aunt Sarah

Mulberry Fields

We have a great Mom's group at our church. Today we loaded up and headed to Zionsville to check out a new sprinkler park. (Wish we had something like this in Brownsburg!) All in all our group totaled 48! Aaron was the lone big kid, but he survived. I promised that I would take him back to the skate park that was there.

This pic of Jake just cracks me up....typical 6 year old boy!

Alli and I had time for an impromptu shoot in the black-eyed susans

Sparklers

Celebrating our freedom by letting the kids play with explosives on a stick!

Hackney 4 - The sweaty, dirty, smelly edition!

We spent the last 2 days camping with our friends, the Painter and Bohrer clans, at McCormick's Creek State Park. Fifteen people camping for 2 days in 90 degree heat and mucking around in the creek make for a lot of laundry. It was a lot of fun despite the heat.