Vacation – Jocelyn Rau

September 14, 2024September 14, 2024

End School –> Summer –> Start School

As usual, I am far behind over here, but such is a busy life with 5 kids and a full-time job. Said kids all passed their grade levels last year, whew!, we had a fun-filled summer vacation, then they all started back to school within the past 2 weeks. We are now in 3 different schools for the duration with Della starting high school and Lana starting middle school, so that’s a big change, too!

Here are pictures from the last day of school in June and the first days of school this month, but I’m not going to photo dump everything from summer in here. So sorry, that would take forever. I’ll mix a couple summer fun pics in that I might not have posted on social, but our vacations (late winter/early spring break in Florida, Canada in July, and St. Thomas in August) would be entire posts all their own and I just don’t feel like doing that. 😁 But that little Instagram box in the right sidebar here rotates through all my Instagram pictures so they’ll pop up over there, and if you follow me personally on Facebook then you’ve seen most of them there, too. And if you haven’t, just use your imagination! 🤣

June 11, 2023

Summer- summer- summertime!

The kids are now all out of school for summer break, and I love it! Yes, they bicker and get on each other’s (and my) nerves sometimes, and yes, I’ll shout at them to be quiet while I work at home full time sometimes, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love summer vacation, and we’ve got a good one planned this year. Here we come, #summervacation2023!

December 9, 2021

Up Nort-giving

We took our 4th annual fall trip up to Eagle River with our good friends last month, then 2 and a half weeks after that I took the kids down to Peoria for our family holiday. It was so great to spend time with everyone again after not having the big, fun family gathering last year.

So no, we didn’t spend Thanksgiving up north, as the title might imply, I was just trying to be efficient by combining all these pictures into 1 post instead of 2. Or lazy, whichever.

So, so much to be thankful for, not just on Thanksgiving, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking for the rest of this one (go ahead and click on each picture to open it up larger).

4th year in a row in Eagle River in fall – so much fun!

September 16, 2021September 16, 2021

#summervacation2021

I know – summer vacation has been over for a couple weeks now. But you know how things roll around this blog by now. Posting only a *couple* weeks late isn’t bad! 😉

I have so many pictures to dump here from our summer break this year, I’m just going to break it up into a few different galleries. Not much explanation is needed, either – we were planning to go back to Canada finally but the border didn’t open in time for our trip so we did a couple smaller trips around here, soaked up the warm weather (thank goodness for air conditioning this year!), and enjoyed as much time together as we could. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the slideshows!

The start of summer vacation back in June and a trip to Palos and Peoria to spend time with family:

Door County and 4th of July:

A long-overdue trip to Eau Claire:

More summer fun around here, our third trip to Palos of the summer, our first trip to the zoo in about 2 years, and our first Brewers game in a long time:

We are now fully back into the swing of a new school year, so more about that will be coming up next. Stay tuned!

November 19, 2020

Up North, annual #3

We took our third annual fall trip up to Eagle River last week, and it was another fun one. It didn’t seem quite as fun to me as the past 2, but looking back as a whole, I’m so glad we went again.

I’m not sure why the difference, but I think a lot of it had to do with the big 3 doing school up there. Lana and Morrison didn’t log onto their live meetings and Della was only on hers for 2 out of the 3 synchronous school days we were there, but they did still keep up with all their posted lessons on their own so they didn’t get behind. So that was a big chunk of their days. A prime example of the mobility of virtual school being both a blessing and a curse. 😉

Also, the pool at the resort was closed due to COVID-19 this year and they didn’t think the pool at the other resort that we used last year was quite up to standards, so we didn’t even bother taking swim suits. That was always a highlight of the time for the kids, so that was missing this year, too.

However, there were plenty of great times. Ryan took the big 3 on 2 cool hikes; I took the twins on walks around the resort grounds, which they loved; the deer friends were out in force this year, which we did miss last year; we had fires daily, which I loved; I played a number of fun games with our friends; and the wine was good and plenitful, a vacation must. We got a couple dustings of snow again, too, which make everything look and feel so festive.

So all in all, a successful trip #3 to Eagle River. We stayed in a different building than our previous visits that was right across from the playground and at the end of the little bay the resort is on, which was a setting I liked so much better than the other building we’ve stayed in.