Opening Weekend with the Dornaks

This past weekend was opening weekend down at the ranch and we had my entire family out - 7 kids and 9 adults, we still have them outnumbered...for now. The weather wasn't the best, kindof overcast with occasional rain on Saturday and Sunday with occasional windows of sunshine. Luckily Misty brought some shirts and paints so we could all make Halloween shirts, although if she hadn't brought them I'd have probably been able to take a much needed nap - oh well. We'll actually all get to go trick-or-treating together since Halloween is on a Saturday this year so the shrits will be fun to wear during the day on Halloween.

Skylar and Holly painting a shirt.

The highlight of the weekend was taking all the kids on a ride in Dwayne's newly created top-drive truck complete with seatbelts for the kids and coolers stocked with juiceboxes and cokes. Unfortunately, because of the weather, we didn't get to ride in it as much as we would have liked. We had a lot of fun together anyway and even managed to get a few deer. I did a poor job of taking pictues so I had to borrow a few from Holly (thanks Holly). As the kids get older trips like this get easier in my opinion. It's so fun to see them all interact and to be able to pick up on who they seem to be taking after personality wise.

Backseat riders in the top-drive truck.

Side view of top-drive truck. Notice the ice chests are padded and have a frame welded around them to hold them in place. I was sitting on the one you see in the picture and put on juice patrol!

We're off for the first trip.


Charles chalking early Sunday morning.

One of my favorite examples of this was a conversation between our Addie and Wendy's Abigail. They were on the back porch EARLY in the morning with Grandma when Abigail said "That's a forest," to which Addie replied, "No, those are trees." Apparently this exact conversation was repeated several times until finally, Addie relented and said, "Ok. That's a forest." Later when Grandma was telling the story, Addie dutifully spoke up again and said, "No. Those are trees." I had to laugh because it reminded me of me and Wendy. We can be saying essentially the same thing but because we each have a different way of looking at it we just may disagree - and I'm always going to get the last word:-)

It was a ton of fun. Addie didn't even make it out of the gate before she was out!