Success!!

Going to the grocery store has been more and more of a nightmare lately. Yes I know I only have one child, but Kyler can be a handful. He's decided he doesn't like sitting in the cart anymore, and he hates holding my hand, so a 5 min stop at the store usually turns into a 30 min hunt for Kyler. His newest antic is standing up in the cart (where he's suppose to be sitting) and then when I come to sit him down he throws his arms around my neck and squeezes. I'm pretty much helpless, and he loves it.

Needless to say, I'd had enough, so yesterday I decided we were going to the store for just a few things and he was going to stay sitting the entire time...no matter what. I was good to my word, and Kyler let me know he hated it. He SCREAMED the entire time. Poor thing had puffy eyes and a runny nose and I'm sure I looked like a tyrant of a mother. But today when we went to the store, he started to pull his foot up, I calmly said "Kyler, sit" and he did...the ENTIRE TIME! No fussing, crying, whining, or other antics. SUCCESS!

I'm sure he'll test me again, but even just today was worth it!

A Weekend with Dave

My brother Dave came out to visit us, it was great to have him here for the weekend. We did some fun things as we discovered more of North Carolina.

We went back to the Children's Museum, Dave had fun hanging out with Kyler

My face when they asked me to touch the snake....no thankyou

Then we went to a dirt track race. I LOVED IT! I never really understood nascar, or why people would want to watch a car go round and round a track. Now I TOTALLY understand, it was so COOL!!! To watch these cars go around those turns, and all the sliding and crashing and loosing wheels and the excitement of watching a car go from last to first, it was probably the funnest thing we've done, I would go back in a heart beat.

Then on Saturday we made the drive to Chimney Rock.

Me and my Bro

Kyler kept pretending to fall asleep, it was pretty cute

They have a little cafe at the top. We stopped there for lunch. It was fun to eat right by the window and enjoy the view.

Then we took a hike to Hickory Nut falls. It was beautiful, and the chill from the falls felt really good.

Last but not least we took this small trail especially for kids. It had little areas with something the kids would enjoy every few feet, Kyler loved to finally get out of the Kelty (the child carrier) and hike for once :)

Then Sunday night before David left we had to Celebrate his Birthday. It's not till the 28th, but we'll be on our way back across the country, so we had to celebrate while he was here. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting, his favorite.

Thanks for coming Dave, we know who loves us the most! :)

Kylers Portraits

We finally got Kyler's 18 month pictures taken. Thanks to everyone who commented on the outfit choice. We ended up going with both the brown and the green. We got more cute shots in the green for some reason. Anyway, Kyler is getting so big, and he's smarter then I give him credit for most of the time. He's learning new words every day. His newest are "tees"=trees, and "ool"=cool. He's also testing the law of gravity, climbing on kitchen chairs and jumping off the couch. His favorite time of the day is still picking up Daddy from work, after which they shake of the stresses of the day by wrestling on the living room floor. We love Kyler SO much, he makes us better people.

Easter on the Carolina Beach

Easter in paradise. I'd do it again every year if I could. We were SO blessed to spend a wonderful weekend on Carolina Beach State Park. The weather was suppose to be terrible (tornado terrible) but we prayed real hard, and the weather couldn't have been more perfect. We spent several days on the warm beach, and warm nights in our tents. This was the last weekend we'll get to spend with Phillip and Jamies family, we'll really miss them. Here are the highlights of the trip.

A "Real" Southern Experience

So, while Brian and I are here, we wanted to make sure we tried some real southern BBQ. Every state in the South boasts about it's BBQ, and sense we live in a area with a lot of mom and pop type stores we were excited to go try the real thing.

So I start researching places we could go, looking at reviews, asking around. And I always ended up coming back to R.O's Barbecue. It's been around sense 1946, and advertises, "The slaw flows at R.O's" Now if that doesn't sound southern I don't know what does. :)

So we map quest it and head out. As we find it we notice a line of guys all in R.O's attire hanging out on the side of the building, as we pull up, one of them comes to our window and says, "What can I get,cha" (of course in a deep southern accent). By now we've realized that it's a curb side type place. We tell the guy that we've never been here, and he heads off to get a menu. As we looked over the menu we realized it could have been in another language. Things like sliced cue with slaw, hush puppies, and cherry sundrop, are things your not going to find on a menu at home. So we went on the wild side, and got two large cues with slaw (because we heard the slaw was out of this world), some hush puppies (which the waiter finally described as fried cornbread, but he really had to think about it, it's like trying to describe what a french fry is to someone who doesn't know what a potato is) and Brian got a cherry lemon Sundrop. The waiter described the drink as "It's just sundrop with lemon and cherry's and stuff to make it all special" all in southern, it made us laugh. When we asked what Sundrop was he said "Ya'all's never had sundrop?? Oh, you'll be back" Pretty much it's like carbonated lemonade.

He brings everything hot to our car, and that's it. We headed to a park to eat, sense Kyler doesn't do well with food in the car :). We munched on the hush puppies as we went, they grew on us and we actually really liked them by the time they were gone. Our sandwiches were a completely different story. You could see the slaw even before you unwrapped the sandwich there was so much of it. I came to the conclusion that their "slaw" is like really finely chopped cole slaw in kind of a creamy BBQ sauce. The meat is thinly sliced pork. It was pretty good, most of the slaw is on the wrapper, so the middle of the sandwich was kinda dry. The flavor was unique, which is what we were going for. All in all we decided we probably wouldn't go back, but that we're glad we went and that we'd recommend going if you want a "real" southern experience.