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DAY 7:  We spent much of day 7 exploring my parent’s property.  We kicked off our adventures with the traditional forklift rides.  Isaac and Charlotte took turns riding the forklift with their grandfather.  He showed them how to lift a pallet up and down and even gave them a ride on the pallet and loaded them onto a truck.

Next they had a tour of his warehouse which included showing the children the kiddie rides that grandpa Bird has been storing for a company.

Our next adventure was to explore grandpa’s forest.  When we were kids, he planted 2,000 pine trees on the land behind his warehouse.  Unfortunately, he planted them in a year when we had a drought so we had to hand water them (by hand water, I mean watering them individually with a house).  My dad is sure to always tell the children how their mother watered all those trees by hand.  The kids thought the forest was so neat that we decided to gather some branches and make a fire to cook our lunch.  After lunch, the kids started gathering wood in the forest to make “the longest bench in the world.”  They excitedly described how all their friends from Utah would come to sit on the bench.

As soon as I put Nicole down in the clearing of the forest, she tried to eat some of plants.  It was actually a really funny sight because she didn’t try to pick them and put them in her mouth, she tried to just eat them without touching them with her hands.  This meant chasing plants with an open mouth—if only I had gotten a video!Our next adventure was to create the biggest leaf pile we could and then bury each other in it.  The kids laughed and laughed and really enjoyed jumping around in all the leaves.

Much of the rest of the day was spent playing outside.

DAY 8:  On day 8, Grandpa Bird took Isaac out to see the train museum.  Unfortunately, he discovered that they were only open on weekends during the school year, but there was enough to see outside of the museum to keep him happy.  The also visited the gardens at the developmental center and took a stroll through a cornfield.  Grandpa ended the trip with a visit to the “french fry store.”  My father tries to label everything with the word ‘Ohio” so Isaac came home with an ‘Ohio vanilla milkshake’ which he said made him too cold.  He crawled into his bed as soon as he got home and said he was trying to warm up.  Unfortunately, he spent the rest of the evening either in bed or on the couch and had no energy.  His cheeks were rosy and his head felt warm.  He want to bed early that night and I feared he’d wake up puking during the night, but luckily by morning he was fine again.

Charlotte would have gone with them, but made some bad choices before they left and lost her opportunity to go.  Instead she stayed home with her mom and grandma.  She made an art project with stickers while my mom and I played a few hands of cards.  Then we painted her nails with a variety of colors.

Barbara left about mid-day to head back to DC and Lee stopped in to say goodbye in the evening.