What we really did for Jared's birthday

As I mentioned in a previous post, we did more for Jared's birthday than just have a family party. We actually took the whole family to Lake Tahoe for the weekend. This is a picture of Kimmy on the ride up. She has become obsessed with the headphones for the DVD player in the car. You might have to look a little hard to see them on her here, but we can hardly go anywhere anymore without her wanting to wear them, or hear her screaming about how she wants to wear them.

Anyway, we had been talking about going to play in the snow for a while, but each time we tried, Kimmy kept getting sick, and with all of her medical trauma, the last thing I wanted to do was to be so far away from a hospital if she had a seizure. Funny enough, the weekend that everyone was finally feeling good enough to go was Jared's birthday weekend, and he had four whole days off to celebrate.

We went to the Northshore of Tahoe, and though we didn't see much lake, we had an excellent time. We had planned in staying somewhere around Truckee, which is not quite all the way to Tahoe, but when we got there the first couple of hotels we checked out were charging between $140 to $249 per night. HAHAHA! This was supposed to be a quick cheap weekend and paying that much for a hotel room didn't fit into our budget. Luckily, I was able to use our navigation system in our Honda Odyssey as a yellow pages and find a hotel in King's Beach, which is only seven or eight miles away for $40 a night instead.

It was certainly not the Ritz Carlton, but it was sufficient for our needs, especially for the price. And while we were in King's Beach, we randomly ran into two guys from Norway, who fascinated Nate with their ability to speak Norwegian. It made us think of Dee-Rob.

Unfortunately for us, the motel didn't have adjoining rooms, and we forgot how poorly Kimberly sleeps when there is more than just Dana in the bedroom with her. She basically spent the whole night awake either wriggling around in a bed disturbing everyone else in the bed, or screaming from her playpen about how lonely and miserable she was. Not the best night. You may be able to tell from the two pictures above how happily our morning got started since no one really got much sleep, except for Dana, who could sleep through a volcanic eruption!

For breakfast, we went to this restaurant in Truckee, I think it was called the Wagon Wheel. The food was fantastic, and the portions were HUGE! Nate couldn't finish his order, and you know that means there was a ton of food. That is one thing my Nate got from Big Nate...he can eat more than any other kid his age by far.

We had planned on going sledding at the resort Boreal, but their inter tubing area, which was nice, was CRAZY EXPENSIVE!! Anyone who wanted to inter tube had to pay $25 for two hours of inter tubing. If you weren't going to be tubing, but wanted to watch, you had to pay $5. For the whole family to go, it would have cost us $125 for two hours, plus the $7 for parking. I don't know if you can see it in the picture below, but they did have this cool escalator thing that you could ride to the top of the hill so you didn't have to hike, but I certainly wasn't going to pay $125 to go sledding! Lucky for us, we had borrowed a sled from our good friends and neighbors, the Sarots, and were able to find a day-use snow park a mile or so up the road which cost us $5 total for a parking permit.
As you can see, our little snow park was not as tree-free as the Boreal sledding area, but at a savings of $120, I was willing to compromise. And since the kids had never been officially sledding before, they didn't even know the difference.

We didn't really have a very good hill, because the path wasn't smoothed out yet and there wasn't really a good place to sled that didn't have trees at the bottom, directly in the line of sled.

Because of that the first couple of times Nate and Dana went down with Jared, he had to use his feet to stop to avoid the trees (see pic below): and Nate and Dana both got sprayed pretty good in the face with snow. As you can see from our pics too, we were kind of in the shade, so that made it a little chilly for them too. However, after a small amount of begging on my part, Nate and Dana both got up enough courage to go again with me after I swore to them I could do it without spraying them in the face with snow.Of course, Nate still wasn't convinced that sledding was fun, and he spent the rest of them time there either sliding down the hill on his bum or making snowballs and throwing them at trees to destroy them. Thankfully, Kimberly was more than happy to go on unlimited rides with both me and Jared.Kim was also happy enough to wander around in the snow with Nate or Dana and shake off her gloves a lot too.The excitement of this also seemed to wear on Kimmy the longer we were in the snow...

This is the girls when we first got there...Kimmy, 20 minutes after arriving...Kimmy, 30 minutes after arriving...Kimmy after two sled rides with Mom...Kimmy after five sled rides with Mom...Kimmy, before we even got her snow boots off in the car...
Though Nate has yet to be convinced of the fun that sledding can be, he does love to build a snow fort, or in this case, a snow hole.

We had an awesome time, and are thinking of making it an annual trip...Tahoe look out!