You may not have even noticed that I was missing (because I set things to post on my blog everyday that I was gone). But, we just got back from a twelve day road trip.

Dwayne had to go to Chicago, St. Louis, Springfield, Missouri and then Tulsa for work, so we tagged along with him like we do sometimes. But, before heading all the way back home, we took advantage of the fact that we were in the middle of the country and met up with my dad's side of the family for a huge party/ family reunion in Arkansas.

In the next few days, I will tell you more about our adventures and share photographs from our trip. But, below is a collection of some of the more random, less important photographs I took while we were away.

Norah played on her new Nintendo DS alot while we were stuck in the car (and so did I). I finally figured out how to get ninety-nine lives on the New Super Mario Brothers game. It's a trick I've been wanting to learn since I was ten years old and my older brother was able to do it on the original Super Mario game.

Luckily, Avril stayed pretty happy in the car. It was only toward the very end of the twelve days that she started screaming from boredom or frustration, but even then, she'd fall asleep for a little while and then wake up cheerful again.

We always kept a cooler stocked full of drinks and bags of snacks. It helped cut down on the amount of stops we had to make. In this photo, Norah shares some raisins with Avril across the backseat. She's a great big sister.

Avril drinking milk one night at dinner.

Yes. We let our kids jump on hotel beds. Why? Because if they don't get to jump on their own beds and they aren't allowed to jump on hotel beds, which beds will they ever get to jump on??! See. I bet you mindlessly strict parents never considered things that way. ;)

Swimming in one of the hotel pools after a long day in the car.

Laughing at Mommy.

Happy to be out of the car seat and free to crawl around the room. But, she isn't just crawling now. She took some of her first steps on this trip and she's been walking a little everyday since.

Avril was constantly getting into "trouble" while we were in the hotel rooms. She's at that stage where she likes to explore.

She crawled under the beds when she could, wedged herself in between or behind hotel furniture, took laundry out of our bags and stuff out of our boxes. But, she'd been cooped up in the car all day, too. So, we weren't as concerned about setting boundaries as we are at home.

Norah swimming in yet another hotel pool.

Avril sinking her face into her very first yeast roll.

After as many hours as I played, I did eventually beat the game.

She sat here and watched television one night. Later, she stuffed a large beach towel (that she'd taken from the laundry, of course) inside this night stand to make it even more cozy.

I wore the girls out everyday. To get the most out of our trip, we just kept going till we had to drop dead-tired into our beds each night. Below you can see Avril sleeping in one morning with her butt up.

I'll post more photos from the trip tomorrow. Like I said before, these are just the random ones.