July 29, 2010
Ionia State Park

We made reservations for this trip an entire 6 months in advance.
We even scheduled our arrival one day earlier than we originally planned in order to guarantee that we got the site that we wanted....our favorite site of the entire park.

We love to go to bed to this.....

...and wake up to this. Beautiful and peaceful, at least to me.

July 30, 2010
Day 1 at Ionia State Park

Paul had a golf outing for work today, so he commuted into town for the outing and we spent the day with Grandma and Grandpa. We started the morning with a walk, which of course, with the kids that included scooters. Over the summer, I can't count the number of times the Gabrielle helped Sam with his bike helmet - so I couldn't resist catching a picture of Sam helping Gabrielle with hers.

The most memorable part of today's walk was the discovery of wild blackberries. We found them in several different places throughout the campground. The biggest find ended up being directly across the street from our campsite.

I think we ended up with spending 1/2 the morning picking berries. We had many scratches to prove it as the berries just kept begging us to go a little bit deeper into the thicket.

After you pick the berries, you have to wash them right?
Good thing between Grandma and I, we had a total of 4 collanders - because each of the kids wanted to wash their own berries.

We finally convinced the kids to combine all of them into one bowl.

As if, they hadn't tried enough berries while we were picking them -
they all sat and ate a few more.

Later, in the afternoon we headed down to the 'Nature Nook' at the beach house.
The Young Explorer program was offering a time to explore and do some crafts. We were the only ones there, so they had the Young Explorer Ranger all to herself and they sure kept her busy with all of them wanting to do different things.

One of the things we did was make necklaces. The beads are made out of paper and I am looking forward to trying it again sometime with some different color schemes. The beads turned out to be a little more difficult for the kids, so mom and I made beads and the girls strung the necklaces.

Gabrielle's favorite part was the painting. I think she painted 4 or 5 different pictures all a little different. In this shot, she was very carefully painted more of an abstract type of painting and it turned out really nice. She definately has some talent when it comes to artwork.

Sam was very proud of his piece of artwork as well.

The kids helped Grandma with dinner that night.
Sam and Gabrielle dressed the part in the aprons and cooking mitts.

More to come....