The Great Outdoors

Today was an exciting day - FINALLY Southwest had a good sale so we booked our vacation for the end of the summer to Baltimore. I had one free flight from Rapid Rewards credits, so at least we'll be postponing the sting of having to pay for Lil now that she's over two. Airfare has been about 3x the norm this year thanks to the increased price of gas, so I was starting to think there wasn't going to be a good sale. We had started looking at rental beach homes in Florida instead but thankfully they had some great rates today. There's nothing wrong with spending a week at the beach (and I had picked out some great houses with their own private pool and the works!) but it's just not us. And with Baltimore we'd be able to do some exploring and some ocean time, and fly. We all three love to fly. Lilli has flown three times already - Kansas City, Chicago and Houston. This is another direct, fairly short flight. We already have Maryland on our quest to see all 50 states, and the only three states we need are North Dakota, Alaska, and Hawaii. To get to North Dakota we'd really have to fly to Minneapolis, and Southwest doesn't fly direct from here so total travel time would be about 5 hours each way, which is NOT going to happen for us with a 2 year old this year. And with baggage fees and the amount of STUFF (car seat, stroller, pack n play and ON AND ON!) we have to fly with us there's no other airline we can fly. So Baltimore it is!

Once again every picture I have is from outside! That's pretty much where we are all the time now, except when we're eating!

Lilli likes to help me water the flowers, I like it when some water actually gets on my plants. (We're repurposing water from her pool, splash table, etc for the plants when we're done with the toy.)
A shot of the new garden pathway as it looked last Monday.
She's already had a great time riding her car up and down all the new pathways.
Brent hard at work sawing the caps.
Granddaddy was in town last Tuesday and stopped by that evening after we got home from work and had dinner with us.

Later that night we walked across the street to the playground to play. The current "it" shoes are her shark flip flops. She loves those things. Don't tell her I got them in the boy section at Target.


Loves to swing, loves to slide!