Lazy Days in Wisconsin

We headed up to Wisconsin for a week in June to visit with my family - and of course Bailey the dog. I brought my new fancy camera with me to try out different settings, and I'm really excited about the quality of picture and colour it produces. I have by no means figured it all out, but I can tell that just the auto-setting point and shoot is fantastic.

I know you can't see John's cute little face here, but I loved the richness of the colours here - the green grass, his shirt and the pretty flowers. Note: this was taken BEFORE he and Sydney decided that decapitating Grammie's flowers was a lot of fun. This is on my mom's deck, which is where the kid's spent countless hours playing with bowls of water, swinging on the double deck swing and generally harassing Bailey. The first few days we were there it was hot and humid, not much of a change from Houston, but then it cooled down and we have mid-70s the rest of the time and the evenings were just beautiful.

Our beautiful little sunshine - so happy to be in Wisconsin with Bailey, oh yeah, and Grammie and Aunties. You can see a bit of Bailey in the background, no doubt wishing that the steps weren't blocked off so she could run and jump into the pond away from the kids.

Speaking of the pond. You can do catch and release fishing in the pond, so we (Grammie and I) thought it would be fun to do some fishing with the kids. Grammie managed to find a pink princess kid's fishing rod, and the neighbours lent us their Mickey Mouse kid's rod, and we bated the hooks with bacon and did a spot of fishing.

OK, so the kid's didn't think this was cool at all. Sydney announced over and over and over "I'm scared" - which she really wasn't, but it was fun to announce it then run and hide in the tee-pee (more on this in a minute). John didn't have the 18-month-old patience to sit and reel it in, he tried it once, and was good, so instead he'd just toddle on down when we got a fish, give it a quick poke and then run up the hill.

Mom and I, on the other hand, thought it was great fun. I think we were just excited to CATCH something. No joke, we caught 7 fish in 15 minutes one time. We both don't actually like fishing, or as I like to call it "waiting", so the fact we had something to catch was great.

And of course with any fishing expedition comes a fishing story. All we were catching were some perch, pretty good size, but nothing to write on the blog about (though I'm sure I would have tried). Mom had heard rumours about some big bass in the pond, and sure enough, they would follow the perch who had taken our bait. So we were determined to catch a bass. And Mom did! And yes, on the pink princess pole - go Ariel.

This gives you a bit more perspective of just how large it was - John is only standing about 1 1/2 feet (half a meter) from him, and he's about 1/2 as tall as John! John thought he was pretty cool and gave him a few pets as we were getting the hook out.

Here's the tee-pee sanctuary. The kids had a good time playing in them (Sydney had a pink one, the Camo one is John's) both outside and inside. Had Mom's yard not been so exposed and the mosquitos not so bad, maybe we would have even camped out one night. Maybe...