There's No Place Like Home

I spent the last week and a half of May with my family in Kansas thanks to a ride from my brother-and-sister-in-law. They were headed out to Iowa to visit family and do some family and church history touring and hey, you have to drive through Kansas to get to Iowa from New Mexico, right? So they let me go along.

Well, the trip is at least a two-day drive especially when you travel with four kids. Here's a picture from Day 2 of the trip there of my youngest nephew. The best part is that this is literally a minute after he took that veggie stick from his dad. He was so exhausted!

And this would not be a Kansas-trip blog post without some pictures of food right? Actually this one is my dad...

But this one is of food! He got a grill cook book for his birthday in April from Mom who thought it would be a nice but inexpensive gift. Ha! Was she ever wrong! That book is getting more and more expensive with each new meal. :D

But it's totally worth it! The food was delicious as always. Everyone was still in school when I got there so I got to cook dinner a couple nights which was fun for me. I also spent the days trying to sew a dress for Jenny but I won't say more about that until it's finished... Soon, hopefully.

This is not food - thankfully. It's actually a picture of Jenny's pet tadpoles. I took a picture because there is an albino one, I'm just sure. In the bottom right area there's an almost see-through tadpole and the rest are all way dark. Weird, huh? I can't wait for him to become a frog. How cool would that be? A see-through frog! That could make science class less gory if you could just see through the frogs instead of cutting them open, eh?

Back to food... This is a dill avocado dip that was amazing! However, it gave me really bad breath. But it tasted amazing with shrimp, bread, veggies... pretty much anything.

Jake is working as an assistant manager at the pool this summer and he wanted me to help him make some freezer meals to take to work since he works 7 hour shifts with not much break. We had a blast cooking together. It took about 3 hours but we had about 10 little meals ready for him to take.

He wanted to get up at six and cook and I didn't believe that he would so I told him sure, just wake me up whenever he woke up. Well, he woke me up at 7:30AM. Not bad. I can handle that. :D

Here he is pretending to eat a deadly apple. He tried to slice it with the slicer gadget and broke it in the process. The blade was stuck in the apple and at first I felt a little nervous for him when mom and dad found out but about a half hour later, I realized how humorous it actually was and about died laughing. I made him take these pictures even though he was worried about the evidence. Oh well. What can you do?

He couldn't get it back out of the apple and I was really worried he'd slice his hand into 8 even pieces so this is how he eventually got his apple free. (It was the last one and he was dying to eat it...)

All in all, the trip was wonderful and relaxing and it was so nice to have a ride! Thanks Jason and Mary!