Teen Titans Go!!

Happy Halloween from the Hines family! AKA Teen Titans!

Halloween Eve Eve Trick or Treating in Maynard
Joy, Joy, Robin and Beast Boy

Sugared Up and Running!

Halloween Eve Performance and Parade at the Preschool
(That's our Robin in the middle.)

Waving At His Fans

Halloween Night
Robin (with Starfire plush), Raven, Beast Boy and Cyborg...
altogether forming the Teen Titans!!

A Bumpy Ride

Another cool new NH experience we had while on our staycation was doing an off road adventure. A company there has these old vehicles designed to traverse the Alps with a 4 cylinder engine. They were pretty impressive!

We drove a short way on the roads to the dirt road up the mountain. We were warned of being cautious with our hats in the wind. And we were. Except for this moment when I asked Dylan to turn for a picture and his hat blew off....

No worries. The driver turned around and we retrieved Dylan's hat off the road. Also on the land where they do the up mountain driving adventure, the company also does ziplining. In a nice case of cross advertising, we got to walk across their tree to tree bridges and watch some of a group start their ziplines. The boys thought these bridges were pretty cool. Then it was back to the vehicle and up.

It was a very bumpy ride! We all enjoyed it. Even got a nice family picture at the top.

Apparently it wore Cade out. No car is too bumpy for napping.

Totally cool activity. And as they do it year round, it could be interesting to give this adventure another try in snowy weather!

Staycation

Given that freezing temps happened overnight last night and I even saw some snow flurries in the sky briefly yesterday, summer is pretty much a distant memory. However, in the effort of "catching up" the blog, I've got to get our last summer hurrah documented.

Our initial big summer vacation plan was to do a Disney cruise. Well, for multiple reasons, that got scrapped and we quite frankly couldn't find a destination we were as excited about as the cruise. Since the kids were sick most of the summer and we hadn't done a lot of summery stuff as a family, we opted for a staycation to fit in all of the summer fun we had missed.

First off, of course, was a few days at our beloved NH home. We hit some familiar favorite spots and even did a few things that we hadn't done before.

The Polar Caves is one of our favorite places in the world and we always enjoy going there. And, this year, they even had fun new stuff to play on before getting to the climbing of the rock caves.

New Fun Cut Outs
My cute polar bear and moose!

Our Old Bear Pal

Always gotta get your smooches on the kissing bridge!

We hopped up on this chair and then all were surprised by the quick slide back.

One of the new things we did was the Cannon Mountain Tramway in Franconia Notch. We've passed it about a million times but never stopped to take it up.

Waiting For Our Tram

The views from the top were absolutely stunning! The clouds were threatening rain but passed around and over without getting us.

Heading Back Down

The below is a picture is a small mountain at the top of the notch that is one of our favorite hikes. You you can see it here from earlier in the summer. Little did we know the rocks we've scrambled down several times held a profile of a face. Can you see it?

Our vacation was off to a great start!

First Day of School!

We are well settled into the school routine after being back in school for over a month now. The boys are LOVING school and are doing really great.

Dylan started kindergarten. Kind of a huge deal. He handled the first day with quiet bravery....Mom was not quite as put together after dropping him off. I've heard these stories of silly over emotional moms making a huge deal of dropping their kids off for their first day of school....I just didn't think I'd be one of them. I mean what's the big deal? I've done it for preschool for 3 years. BUT it isn't just a big deal...it's a HUGE deal! This is school...real school! Focused more on learning and rules than craft projects and play time. It's structure and learning that are pivotal to get down so that he continues to be successful in subsequent years. It's him going from my little guy to a full blown kid. It's going from being a little kid who's sole responsibility is having fun to a kid who now has to take on more mature tasks and take responsibility for those tasks. And he now goes to school every single week day and be away from our loving eyes for hours of each day. So yeah, it is a big deal!

And he's handled it like a champ and really embraced it. I've seen an amazing transformation in him in the last month. He's gone from a kid content to have everything done for him (seems anything he needed to be independent doing, we've really had to push to make him so) to a little man who is very proud to be taking on new things and looking for more responsibility. It's amazing!

The main reason we waited to send him to kindergarten until this year (last year would have been an option too), other than the fact that it seems very common here to wait for summer birthday babies to start after they turn 6, was that Dylan just wasn't interested in desk work. Sitting and focusing on a paper in front of him just wasn't his thing. But now...now....it's all he wants to do! Even when he's not in school, he wants to color, or draw, or do activity books. I mean, who is this kid?

I'll tell ya who this kid is, he is an awesome kindergartener! Confident, loving his class specialties - computer, art, gym, music and library, making new friends and learning their names (not something he's been that great at...remembering names). I'm so incredibly proud of him!

And then there's this guy that I'm equally proud of....

My sweet Cade. He's in his 2nd year of preschool and has gone from 2 days a week to 3. And the 2 days not at preschool he goes to speech therapy. He also is loving school. He brings home songs from class and he is really practicing his lessons from speech class every day.

My little babies are really growing up. And their personalities are developing and thriving. And they love their mom. And I love them so completely and try to eat up every moment I get to spend with them.

The Flying Graduate

After our first vacation away from the kids, we were happy to go back to Dallas to pick up these sweet faces from Mimaw and Pipaw camp:

But the vacation adventures weren't over just yet. There was one item of business to take care of on our 24 hour Dallas layover. My awesome nephew, Reece, had spent the week at freshman orientation and we hadn't yet given him a graduation present. And I am a firm believer in experiences as gifts so our gift to him was an indoor skydiving experience! But we couldn't let him fly alone....we had a group pass so he could have company in the fun. 

The Fly Gang
Reece the graduate, Presley, Me, Cade and Mike

Cade looked so stinkin' cute in his flying uniform.

Here we are waiting for our first turn. It was at this point Cade decided he didn't want to do it. 

Reece Flying

Presley Flying

Me

Mike

I somehow got Cade out there after everyone else took a turn. He was not sure about it AT ALL but they allowed me to come out with him to help him feel more comfortable. But he looked ridiculously cute flying!

And since the whole group of flyers knew how nervous he was about doing it, he got some big cheers when he got back in the waiting area. It wasn't enough to convince him to go back out there though. I was proud that he tried it. Reece got to take Cade's 2nd fly.

On our 2nd round, we all opted to do a fly high which is when the instructor flies you up and back the high center tube and back down several times. It was really fun.

After the whole group was done, the instructor gave us a little show with lots of insanely awesome tricks. Seems like a pretty fun job!

Reece, ever the man of few words, seemed to enjoy the experience which was the most important aspect of the trip. As for my review, while I've now done both indoor and outdoor skydiving, there's only 1 I'll do again.....if you want to guess, it's the one with the much lower odds of sudden death!

Rio Secreto

Mike found the cd of photos we got from one of our off resort excursions on our trip to Mexico in June. It was really an awesome experience! Just a small group, an underground river and our helmets with headlamps to lead the way - The Secret River.

First we had to get blessed by a Mayan shaman\priest before we entered the underworld. Entering the underworld for water used to be the sole responsibility of the Mayan priest but now they allow tourists to do it too.

That's me and Mike right behind the shaman with our super cool outfits.

There were times on the tour that we were walking on dry ground and other times that we had to swim under stalactites (an experience I highly recommend).

Of course we weren't allowed to bring anything in other than ourselves and our caving gear. So we had the pleasure of purchasing an additional photo package so we can have pictures to help us remember the excursion. The pro to that is that their professional photographers got some really nice shots of the cave that are much better than we would have gotten ourselves.

Ever since I visited my first one as a kid, I have had a fascination with caves\caverns. They are truly amazing natural formations I am in awe of. Getting to experience one this way was really awesome. The downside to traveling without my kids is that now I feel like I need to go back so I can do these things with them too!

Summer Camp for Kids and Adults

I was pretty quiet on the blog front throughout the summer. Until mid June, there wasn't a whole lot interesting going on in our lives...unless you count not sleeping, staying indoors and a few trips to the doctor. My normally pretty healthy kids took turns back and forth for about 2 months being sick. Cade had pneumonia, Dylan had an ear infection and strep, Cade then got a cold and Dylan got yet another ear infection. It was a rough couple of months and it felt like we'd never be well again. We had a reprieve from the sickness for a few weeks (enough time to squeeze in the events of this blog post) then Dylan had strep again and Cade had a couple more trips to the doctor for urgent issues. And that was just the humans. The many critters of our household have also had their share of issues.

Timing was on our side for the break in sickness in June because the boys ended up both being healthy (with Dylan still finishing up a round of antibiotics) for their big trip....to Mimaw and Pipaw Camp! My parents' have hosted this camp for several years for my oldest brothers' kids. Last year Dylan was invited and went. This year, Cade was "eligible" for camp since he has been recently potty trained. Something clicked when we told him on our St. John trip that he would start going in the potty when we got home. That worked for him. It's been messy but he's been mostly successful (though he had a bit of a regression since coming back from camp). In any case, we flew the boys to Dallas to "drop them off" at camp. They joined their cousins - Presley, Ryker and Payton for the week. My oldest nephew, Reece, was off at his college freshman orientation (gulp!) and my youngest nephew didn't quite make the potty training eligibility. My parents were going to have their hands full with 5 grandkids! And we weren't invited. Boo!

But not really sad because we got to have our first kid free vacation! I've wanted to go to Belize for years but flight times and other travel issues just didn't work out. So, we did as similar a trip to Belize as possible and went to the Mayan Rivera in Mexico for the week. After passing the boys off to my parents at the Dallas airport, we spent our long layover having a leisurely lunch, getting treatments at the spa in the terminal and exchanging some money. Then we were off for our flight to Cancun!

Cheers to the Beach!

While it was amazing in ways to be kid free it was also fairly anti climactic. We were pretty boring. There was lots of eating, drinking and sleeping. But we did get to do wild and crazy things like sit across from each other at dinner every night and have real conversations.

We also got off the resort a few times to take in the local scenery. One of the big things I wanted to do was see Mayan ruins. The first one we went to see was Tulum, which is right on the ocean. Due to storms passing through, we weren't able to snorkle there as hoped, so we just took in the structures and the scenery.

A couple of days later, we went on another adventure off resort. This one was a half day bus tour. The first part of the trip was a tour around another Mayan ruin, Coba. Coba is even larger in acreage than the more famous Chichen Itza and you are still allowed to climb one of the pyramids, which has been banned in most other sites. We had a fun day riding bikes around the grounds, going up the pyramid steps as quickly as possible and walking easily by all the chickens (people not birds) going down on their rear ends.

From The Bottom

From The Top

The Yucatan Pennisula is VERY flat at you can see from
this panoramic taken from the top of the pyramid.

There was a long lecture from our tour guide at the above rock. I heard almost nothing of it because apparently my bright colored back pack was of particular interest to about 4 bees and I spent about 10 minutes trying to circle around the tour group to simultaneously hear the historical info and to run away from the bees. 

The second part of the day trip was to a Cenote, which is a natural limestone sinkhole. There are a lot of them in the Yucatan and are now a draw as glorious swimming pools. The one we went to was unique in that it was almost completely enclosed in a dome. It was so beautiful and a seriously awesome experience to swim in.

The Only Source of Outside Light in the Cenote

Crystal Blue Water
Those rocks that look like you could touch from the surface were really about 30 feet away!

Roots Coming Through From Up Above Trying to Reach Water
(That's me standing at the entrance\exit.)

Entrance to the Cenote

Map Of It

The day ended with a performance of Mayan music and a recreation of a Mayan ball game (we had seen the remains of the court used for that game at Coba).

On resort, it was like summer camp. There were always activities going on. For the most part, we opted for a lot of laziness, but we did do some arts and crafts as well as activities.

Iguana Watching

Painting Ceramics

Our last day there, we also rented jet skis and had a TON of fun on the rough water. The stormy weather prevented us from snorkeling that week (bummer) but we had done plenty to make it a memorable and relaxing kid free time. Not pictured here was our fun day in an underground river. I have to find the disc they gave us of pictures and will hopefully post them here. It was another seriously cool experience.

Then it was time to get back to my babies. We stopped over in Dallas for a short 24 hours to get these sweet faces (who had a great week themselves at camp).....

.....and for one more fun experience before heading home. More on the below picture another day.