Visit Part 3

We ended the day at Dad and Amy's house. Again, the weather cooperated fully. The rain stopped as we were leaving the musuem, the temperature dropped, so we were able to have a fire outside as planned.

We made and ate caramel apples (well, John and Amy made them and the rest of us ate them)...

We did dot to dots...

And colored...

And cooked hot dogs and roasted marshmallows...

And played with sticks...

Don't ask me why his jacket was on his head.  I really have no clue.

And played football...

And played with more sticks...

And ate marshmallows...

And played with a flashlight and a fence...

High five! And a heart (awww...)

And played with the kitty, of course!

I loved the time I spent with everyone!  I hope we can do it again!

Visit Part 2: CAT Visitor Center

Next we headed to the Caterpillar Visitor Center.  Even though I've lived in Peoria for 12 years, I'd never been.  I love new experiences in my own town!  The boys LOVED it.  And the adults got in on the action too.  The entrance to the museum is through this huge machine here:

There is actually a movie theater in it where you go on a ride in the machine to see how it works.  The front of this is the actual machine, while the wheels are plastic because the machine itself is too heavy and would fall through the concrete!  All the facts about this one machine that CAT makes were fascinating. 

There were tractors that you could actually climb into and pretend to drive.

The boys were trying to push me over!

When I said that even the adults got in on the action, I wasn't kidding.

There were simulators where you could experience driving a couple of the tractors.

These are the fake wheels to the actual truck!

We sometimes have a morbid sense of humor in our family... Apparently, Michael later told Grandma, "don't worry Grandma, the wheels were fake, so we wouldn't actually get run over."

John is almost as tall as me!!!

We had to drag the boys away, even though they had already been on every tractor two or three times!

Next up, a fun evening...

Visit Part 1

Ann, John, and Michael came to visit the first weekend in October. I'm so thankful to have a place for family to stay.  We had a relaxing but eventful Saturday.  We started with a drive up Grandview Drive with the obligatory stop to take some pictures. I was hoping that more of the leaves would have changed, but it has been too warm of a fall and we are still waiting for all that color!

How far can we toss Michael?!

Michael wanted to try to toss John!

Reliving their "childhood" :)

We also went up in the tower.  You can't tell from the pictures but it was crazy windy.  We thought we were going to blow over the edge, so we didn't stay very long.

We also went down to the river front in order to take a few pictures and say that we saw it.

The rain held off all morning for us to get the outside stuff in.  We headed to Avanti's after and as we sat down to eat it started pouring rain!  Just in time.

More fun activities to follow...