Our Family Trip to South Dakota

Well friends, my husband decided it would be a great idea to take a family trip to South Dakota, since we are only 8 hours away. And as he put it, "We probably won't be this close to Mt. Rushmore again." So even though I had nagging voices in my head saying "don't do it", we decided to proceed.

The trip there was relatively uneventful, we stopped often, had a picnic lunch somewhere in Wyoming, and overall the kids handled it pretty well. In two days we saw Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, Rushmore Caves, Custer State Park, and a few other fun little places along the way.

Since we were touring around, the kids never got more than a 20 minute doze in the car, and they were up most nights until 9 or 10pm, so you can imagine that they were getting pretty tired. I decided to include in this post a few hilarious/exhausting moments:

1) We were driving along and Ella and Ryan took off their shoes in the car. Out of nowhere, Ella says "it smells like toe jam in here!". We busted out laughing!

2) Ryan waves at a helicopter and says "hi Gigi". It's so funny because my mom left a week and a half ago and he thinks she's still on an aircraft somewhere in the sky. Super cute for a kid that's not even two yet!

3) We are at a park when Ella runs to swing on her stomach, and goes over the swing and does a nose dive into some pea gravel. Needless to say she is scraped up on her nose, upper lip and chin. She is bawling and bleeding everywhere. We tell Aubrey (7) and Ryan (23 months) that we need to go because Ella is hurt. Aubrey says, "what, we've only been here like 5 minutes". That didn't go over very well since we were all exhausted, and Ella was hurt! So the next day I told Aubrey to look at his sisters face, and that's why we had to go home, to which he replied, "I hate myself for it". And he was serious, Hilarious!

4)The last night we were there we went to Mt. Rushmore for the night time ceremony which meant we didn't get back to the hotel until 10:30. Everyone was borderline delirious and Aubrey was acting so horrible. I finally told him to stop acting like a jerk. I know, I win mother of the year for that, but he was acting like one. So we all go to bed and I had forgotten all about that remark I made, but Aubrey didn't. He told me the next day that he forgave me for saying that. All I could do was laugh and explain that we all say things we don't mean sometimes. Talk about humility!

So that about covers it, we had a good time but came home exhausted. We have great pictures to prove to the kids that we did take them to South Dakota because I'm sure Aubrey is the only one who will remember it. So needless to say it will be a while before we willingly take another road trip, but I'm glad we did it!