Road Trip to PA

I decided enough was enough and threw together a road trip to Pennsylvania at the last minute. We hadn't seen my brother Sean's family for over five years, since the family reunion in June 2003, although we saw Sean briefly in January 2005, which I remember distinctly since he accompanied us to get our ultrasound of Jack and then he told everyone we were having a boy. Anyway, this long overdue trip was last minute because I realized that our dog/house sitter would only be available until 8/22, then would be gone for over a month. Dennis' mom is always there for us when we need her, but will be going to visit with her mom in San Francisco for about six weeks...don't know WHAT we will do without her! She took Murphy for us so we could go visit Sean, his wife Jenn, and their three boys, all of whom had never met Jack or Jason. We also got to see my nephew Steve, who is now 24 (!) and living in nearby Wilmington. Here's a picture I took especially for my parents -- this is all six of their grandsons together. Pretty cool!

We had a nice visit. We saw the Philadelphia Zoo (on Friday and Sunday) and also toured the Crayola Museum in Easton. That was neat. After seeing it featured on an episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8, we just HAD to go, and would recommend it to anyone with kids under 10 or so. We got to see how crayons and markers are made, and there are lots of art and craft stations where kids and their parents can make all kinds of stuff. We ended up spending over five hours there! Here are Jack and Jason in front of the world's largest crayon, which would make 144,000 individual normal-size crayons:


Even Jason had a good time at Crayola. Well, he has a good time everywhere, he's just that kind of kid. Look at that grin, you would never know he was working on pushing out another tooth (number five), which appeared the next day.










Well, I don't know why it took us so long to get a visit in to Sean's family; it definitely won't be another five years before we see them again!