Our First Family Road Trip

Back in early October, we packed up our car and set out for our first family road trip!

This trip was planned specifically at this time of year because for several years I have been wanting to go to the International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in Albequerque, New Mexico. For one... I thought it would be an unbelievable sight to see in person and ever since I became interested in photography I have wanted to take pictures of the beauty of hundreds of hot air balloons lifting off the ground and floating in the sky.

This was our first family vacation with just Chris, the girls and I. In planning, we started talking about how close we were going to be to the grand canyon and since Chris and the girls had never seen it, we decided to add that destination onto our plans. And once we decided to go over into Arizona, we realized we were only 4 hours away from Las Vegas! Now most of you know that Chris and I have been to Vegas many times and that we feel very strongly about that not being a place to take your kids. However, because we have been to Vegas so many times we have developed a close friendship with a couple that live there and they have never met our kids. So we broke our cardinal rule about not taking kids to Vegas and added that as a "brief" stop on our trip to visit our good friends Rey, Karen and their son Ryan.

When deciding how we should get back home, we figured it was easier and more fun to essentially make a loop and come home going through Colorado Springs and that way I could visit my friend Lauren who lives there.

In all the planning and mapping out of our road trip and determining what we wanted to accomplish at each of our destinations as well as taking into effect the most effective driving solution...we ended up flipping our trip around and heading through Colorado Springs first. We then traveled through Utah to Las Vegas, from there to Arizona and the Grand Canyon and onto our original destination of Albequerque to finish the trip off by seeing the beautiful balloons!

We made this trip in just 10 days.

I can't wait to tell you more about it and all the fun experiences we had...but that will have to wait til next post.

Stay tuned...and I promise there will be pictures!

A Different Look at the Johnson's

We had a few changes around here that has given a couple of us a different look about them...

Brooke lost her very first tooth!

And she was so proud...she couldn't wait to put her tooth under her pillow for the tooth fairy.   Another milestone for this family that has come and gone for each one of my kids. *sigh*

And additionally...on Monday she chopped of all of her hair for the first time...

And now she has such a cute little bob! She is growing up way to fast!

Speaking of growing up too fast...our Maddie now has braces!

She was so excited (yes, I said excited) to get braces. She has been so good about cleaning them and making sure she doesn't eat anything she isn't suppose to. (I wonder how long that will last?). But she looks so much older with them.

It is just so hard for me to face the fact that my kiddos are really growing up.