If you're a bird, I'm a bird

In my last post I mention going through Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, WY. We had a wonderful time on the drive. What wasn't so fun was waiting in line to pay to enter the park. We waited for at least an hour. Then, suddenly, the line started moving very fast. I began to think that everyone in front of us had already paid and were only showing their receipt to get back in. Then it's our turn at the window. The lady simply waved us through and said we just want to get the line moving, no fee today. It was sweet! Woo-hoo, no $25 entrance fee! We saw a few wildlife, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Michael and I feel like we've been through the park enough times to not need to stop at Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic Spring and other places like that. We pretty much just go to see wildlife now. We've only have a few out of the almost dozen times we've gone that there hasn't been a bear sighting. This time would be one of them, but we didn't even drive through the whole park.

When Michael and I were on our honeymoon, in Jackson Hole, we explored the town a little bit. This is the place that has the huge National Elk Refuge where they claim to winter over 1,000 elk. Pretty sweet, right? They do sleigh rides onto the refuge and take you right up to the elk, for a pretty penny. We wanted to do that for our honeymoon and decided it was too expensive. And I've wanted to do it ever since. Maybe one day. So instead of a horse drawn sleigh ride, we found this back road the you could actually drive your car on to the refuge. I think every time but once that we've driven that road, we've seen bighorn sheep. The first time we drove on it, we saw a heard of over 60 sheep! With a ton of rams too! Of course we take that road every chance we get. This time around we saw a coyote from just a few feet away. 

And add that to our collection of bighorn sheep pictures from this place. 

 Michael has been informed that he has to take a class in which he must identify 500 birds. He is allowed to think back to his past and write down any birds he can remember plus the birds he sees that semester. Since learning this, we have put our digital zoom to good use. We love our camera, absolutely love it, and I was just about devastated when we lost the memory card from it in January. Michael has been able to photograph quite a few birds. I think he's got close to 75 birds on his list, just from the ones he has pictures of. Just to brag on him a bit, here are a few, not even close to all, of the pictures he's taken.

Charlotte's First Camp Out

We love camping in this house and just couldn't wait to get back to the outdoors again! We have a camping trip planned in Island Park, ID with Michael's family the first week in August. So we decided to check out the campsite we reserved and camp there while we could. Brenda came up to visit us that weekend so we gladly took her with us.

Our sweet little campsite. The river is just on the other side of those trees behind our tent. 

We made a stop at Big Spring while we were nearby. There are usually a ton of really big fish swimming under this bridge, but we didn't see any this time. This is Michael and Ivan throwing fish food at a couple ducks. 

So this camping trip was everything but uneventful. Charlotte has a bad habit of projectile vomiting the entire contents of her stomach every couple days. This also happens to coincide with the frequency of her bowel movements. Poor girl only gets a good poop every couple days. So on Friday night, she decided it would be good to puke. All over me. All over her blanket. All over herself. She also managed to poop at the same time. This was quite an explosion. Thank goodness I have packed extra pajamas for her and an extra blanket. I have to say I was pretty prepared for this campout. I know that Idaho gets cold at night, so I put Ivan to bed in about 4 layers, had him laying on a thick blanket with a pillow and had another blanket to cover him. This would have been really nice, IF he would have actually used it. He started to fall asleep on me when I put him to bed. He did not want to sleep in the pack and play in the tent. Instead, he cried and cried. I eventually got him to sleep with me in my sleeping bag. Then Charlotte decided to be hungry. I put Ivan in his crib and fed Charlotte. My parents got Michael and I really nice sleeping bags. They go to 0 degrees and they really are super warm. I absolutely love mine! The only bad thing is, they have to be pretty narrow in order to retain the most heat. This meant that me and Charlotte sleeping together was a little complicated. I had to turn my back to the zipper and have her on the inside so she would be warm then have Brenda zip me in it. This would have been fine if I didn't have to nurse her on both sides in the middle of the night. Rolling around in that thing is pretty impossible. So after Charlotte waking up every 2 hours to eat, Ivan waking up without his blanket on in the middle of the night, and both the kids deciding to be awake at 530... I was ready for a nap! Michael, the good husband that he is, took Ivan out to explore so us girls could attempt more sleep. Charlotte did go back to sleep, yay! Then twenty minutes later, I hear a kid crying. At first I thought, oh no, it couldn't be Ivan. Then it got closer and louder and I knew it was him. Normally Michael does a great job of consoling the kids when they cry. So this time, when he frantically called for me outside the tent, I knew there was gonna be blood. Ivan had been exploring, still in his footie pajamas, and tripped over a rock. He face planted, with his pacifier in his mouth, and cut his gums open. At this point, he doesn't have any molars, so his bottom teeth chomped right down on his gums just behind his front teeth. It was pretty scary to come out of the tent and see blood all over Ivan's mouth. Thank goodness I can think in the sight of blood, thank you vet tech program, and I grabbed a cold bottle of water. I rinsed out Ivan's mouth so I could assess the extent of the damage and to numb his mouth a little with the cold. He stopped bleeding pretty quickly and I couldn't really see any cuts or gashes so I knew he wouldn't need stitches. I did prepare for injury, so we had the first aid kit and tylenol with us. We quickly drugged him up and gave him a lollipop.

The remnant ring of blood. 

Ivan's chosen spot to eat his lollipop. We were really worried he'd be too active to want to sit in the backpack for hikes. I guess he showed us.

I've got to say this was not my most favorite camping experience. When we woke up Saturday morning and finally decided to sit in the car, it was 32 degrees. That was at 7:30 in the morning. I can only imagine how cold it got in the middle of the night. After we left the campground, we took a scenic drive through Yellowstone and the Tetons. We stopped in Jackson Hole, WY for the tail end of Stampede Days. Then back to the car for a long drive home. 

Charlotte is 8 weeks!

Time sure has flown by. Charlotte is 8 weeks old today and absolutely adorable. She can roll over and smile. She really likes the sound of my voice and looks for it every time I talk. She loves Ivan. Any time she's on the floor he makes sure to go say hi, with his face. And she stares and stares at him. She has measured in about the 70th percentile for height and weight and 50th for head circumference. We are all adjusting well to having her around. She's pretty attached to me, so that can makes things complicated at times. As long as Ivan gets as much one-on-one time as Charlotte, he's totally fine with life. Charlotte gets the hiccups like crazy. She gets them all the time and it's so violent that it shakes her whole body. And she really hates bottles. At least any time I try to feed her a bottle she gags so bad she almost throws up.

This picture is from when Charlotte was only 2 weeks old.

Ivan's favorite snack lately is string cheese. And his favorite TV show is Curious George, even if my favorite cartoon is Shaun the Sheep.

Got your toes! Anytime Charlotte has toes or fingers visible, Ivan takes that opportunity to tickle them. He even makes noises like he's saying tickle tickle. And like a good little sister, she sits there and takes it.

Ivan really likes to draw. He thinks it's the coolest ever. On this particular day I gave him a closed pen and my tiny notebook and he stayed busy for an hour! First he pretended to draw on every single page, and the cover. Then he worked on his fine motor skills and threaded the pen through the spiral. Seriously, busy for an hour, that's a miracle in my book.

He loves to hold his sister. Any time I ask if he wants to hold Charlotte he immediately goes and sits down so she can sit on his lap. Kinda sad that she's almost as big as he is!

Tummy time together! 

Here's Charlotte at 8 weeks. 

Family Pictures

After Brenda's graduation we all went back to Aberdeen to give Charlotte her baby blessing. It was such a cool experience to be at Michael's parents' house and have my husband bless my baby. I am so thankful for the gospel in my life that allows for such closeness to our Heavenly Father with things like blessings. After we had the blessing, since all of the children were together, we decided to have family pictures.

This is as good as it gets for the whole family. With crying babies, talking adults, and those silly ones that blink, there's about 10 other copies of this that have something going wrong. 

Ivan and his cousin Ben, just having a conversation. 

Wampler grandparents with all their grandbabies. 

I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this, but I don't really like taking pictures with a big group of people. Any time we get together in a group, my kids always cry. And for some crazy reason, I just don't like to make my kids cry so that I can take their picture. Plus, who wants a picture with a bunch of crying faces anyway? It's really hard for me to get together and actually participate in big group pictures. And it's usually me that says "ok we're done!" first. That being said, taking pictures at the park was a wonderful idea. It gave the kids something to do while they were waiting for everyone else to get their picture taken. 

The ZOO!

We love animals, the outdoors, and hiking. So doesn't it just make sense that we love the zoo?! Brenda graduated, (congrats Brenda!) from ISU on Saturday. She was among the first people to walk across the stage out of the tons of other people that graduated that day. So we took the opportunity to watch her walk, then leave. We promptly went to the zoo afterwards. Ivan absolutely loved it! The Pocatello zoo is nothing fancy, not in the slightest, nor is it all that expensive. Most of the animals they have at that zoo are native species to the area. I thought it was pretty cool to see animals you could see in the wild right in that area but up close. They had a mountain lion, a bald eagle, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, buffalo, antelope, foxes, coyotes, black bears, a grizzly bear, and some other birds. Here's the rest of the story.

Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep

Charlotte trying to stay out of the sun. 

Isn't this a great picture? Michael is really good at getting birds to look really creepy. 

Ivan absolutely loves birds! 

So much that he almost caught this one!

The infamous finger point. Michael walked past the mountain lion before with Ivan in the stroller. The lion just laid there and slept away. 

This is what the cougar did when Ivan walked past it not in the stroller.  Pounce mode. 

And the cougar followed Ivan as he walked past. 

And he stared longingly as Ivan walked away. It was probably the scariest thing ever. That cougar knew Ivan was easy prey. I never, ever, ever want to see one of these in the wild. Ever. 

Here's some more animal pictures cuz we like them.

At the entrance to the zoo there is a petting zoo. All they had in there was a bunch of goats.  But they are animals and Ivan loved them just the same. In fact, when we got there, none of the goats were outside the barn. Ivan walked over to the entrance, where the could walk into the petting area, and did a little dance he was so darn excited. He stomped his feet and even clapped a little bit. When the goats did come out, he didn't actually want to pet them, he just wanted to look at them. He really enjoyed feeding them though. And it was definitely worth the dollar in quarters we spent on goat food. He would laugh and stomp his feet when their lips touched his fingers. And he actually didn't get bit!

He just couldn't get close enough!

Ahh, the best part of an afternoon well spent.