The Midwest, Baptized by Fire, Part 2

Hello from Moab, Utah!

Ok, to continue Patrick's visit...
Day 3 & 4 with the cousins...
A little corn hole, bonfire, some fishin', and lots of cuddle time with the new baby!

Day 5: Illinois farm land

The boys outside the corn silo.

Inside the silo, laying on about 15 feet of corn kernels 

More playing inside the silo

Jumping from the top into the piles of corn

Going to bring the farmers lunch

Harvesting corn! Patrick is inside the combine, the tractor on the right that is cutting the corn down.

The combine with Pat on board

The tractor that takes the cut corn kernels to a grain elevator for storage.

Grain elevators

The trail we were riding 4 wheelers on between farms

The horse Pat is on about threw him off, luckily he only lost a stirrup.

Disregard my horse-back riding windswept hair.

She was in heaven! Biggest smiles ever.

This horse, Charlie, was acting up, so we ran him around the pasture over and over tied up to the golf cart.

The Midwest, Baptized by Fire

Patrick came to visit the Midwest for the first time! He told me he wanted to experience as much of it as he could. I took him very literally and packed as much in as possible for the 5 days he was visiting!

Day 1: Arrived in the afternoon.  Had dinner with an awesome ex-racecar driving couple from the church.
Day 2: Hang with the kiddos and their new go kart.  Shoot guns. Steak n Shake in Bloomington. Visit another awesome couple from the church. Go to Story on the way to see Brett and Nicole.
Day 3: Run errands. Pizza lunch at my restaurant. See some of Brown County. Drive to see cousins Steve and Dalene and their new baby girl.
Day 4: At Steve's. Go fishing, and eat fried fish. Hang out. Drive to Illinois in the evening.
Day 5: Breakfast at Yoder's, an Amish restaurant in Illinois. Play in a grain silo. Take part in corn harvesting. Ride quads. Horseback ride. Beachy's whole food. Stare at some Amish. Family Cook out.
Day 6: Drive from Illinois to airport.

Now in pictures:
Day 2:

Oh, and the go kart did not have any brakes :) I am quite sure us big kids had way more fun with it than the little kiddos.

Give some inexperienced suburban kids a gun, and we are liable to take silly pictures with it.

Days 3-5 will be in the next post!

Life as Usual

Only 2.5 weeks left in Indiana before we begin the drive to California.  How did time go so fast!? I can't believe it.  I have a trip to DC, a week visit with Patrick, and less than a week of work left!  And still so many other small things to squeeze in.

This post is just a bunch of different things I have done in the last couple of weeks.

First is some fun with the kiddos, of course.  The weather has been cooling off and much less humid.  So we spent some more time outside doing things like rolling down the grass hill behind the church, tackling me, doing my hair, and playing frisbee.

Darrel took me to go on a trail walk.  But it was so overgrown that I chickened out.  I have been more weary of overgrown wilderness since my snake sighting. Yuck.  So instead we drove around some of the back country roads and ended up at an old graveyard.  Most of the people buried there were born in the 1800s, and even a couple born in the 1700s.  It was weird to see how short their lifespans were back then, or how many infant and children graves there were.

Notice the couple was both born in the 1700s

Old decaying gravestones.

Notice how short their lifespans, and both I assume from the same family

Some only had little square blank stones like this one.

This is a morning view from the back porch of David's middle brother Brett's house.  Pretty sweet.

I've also been getting lessons in canning (or "jar-ing" really) from Cathy.  She has let me help make pickles from her home-grown cucumbers, and jar green beans from her garden.  We also got a bushel of peaches to cut up and freeze for the winter months when they don't get much fresh produce.  There has also been a lot of shucking and cutting corn from the garden to freeze.

And here is a picture from the lake by their house where David took me for a sunset kayak ride.

Oh, and just a side note about how much of a stud I am, I helped David and two other guys chop down a 60 foot oak tree.  And chop it up into logs for firewood and drag the branches out into piles in the forest so they could dry out.  So I had my first experience of using a chain saw, and getting raw hands from dragging logs and branches without any gloves on.  Just humor me in thinking I am stud on this one.

And just for fun, here are the Miller boys in 1996.