thanks for all the fun

here are some last few pictures from my trip...
see how beautiful the houses are out there? it's like every one lives in a park...



and the lakes are amazing... and the trees... and the churches...


maggie loved the apples



thanks uncle pat and aunt sharron, for a great trip!


hopefully we'll be able to do it all again, sometime!

Wegman's

you may be asking yourself, "self? what is wegman's and why is kat blogging about it...?" well, put your little psychotic self-talking mind at ease, i'm going to tell you all about it. wegman's is a grocery store in Fayetteville, NY. but it's not just ANY grocery store. it's like the mother of all grocery stores, nay the disneyland of grocery stores.

it's huge, it has everything you could ever imagine in it...


they have every kind of fruit, vegetable and fregetable you could think of...


and also every kind of homestyle salad you would even want to think of eating


there are literally millions of different kinds of cheeses


a whole isle devoted entirely to tea (i know the picture is small, but really, this is just tea... who knew there were that many different flavors of dried leaves in a bag?)


and another for magazines


they also have what i'd like to hereby name "the world's largest olive bar" with every fathomable flavor of olive

and they even put flowers hanging from the ceiling in case you look up to give your unbelieving eyes a break...



Anyways, here's to Wegman's... (and here's to being apparently very much in love with food so much so that i felt the need to share this highlight of my trip with all) thank you.

i scream, you scream...

while in NY, we discovered a delicious ice cream place called "Kimberly's"... by the way, they have the most amazing pistachio ice cream. seriously to die for. anyways, i'm an admitted ice cream addict, and so i made sure we went there pretty much every night. maggie was thrilled, of course, and so was little abby. here are the pics to prove how much they loved Kim's ice cream (which is all home made and did i mention to die for?)

oh how lovely...

travel log: stop 2, sacred grove. it's not so much a grove as it is a forest, in my opinion...

here's a picture of my attempts at being "artsy".

here's a pic of me and maggie, and one of me, ash and our girlies.


and here's more pictures of our girls, because let's face it, they are pretty much the cutest little cousins ever.

travel log: day one

Friday we picked up ash and her bebe and headed to palmyra for a day of some religiously historical touristing. first stop, hill cumorah. we were chickens and opted to drive up to the top of hill cumorah rather than walk (it was a really steep climb... and c'mon, i'm prego). in fact, it was so steep that my mom was terrified that her little grandbabies would fall off the "edge" and go rollling down the hillside. she screamed any time one of them got within 10 feet of the slope. 10 feet is about how wide the top of the hill is, so she was pretty much freaking out the whole time. here are some pictures of moroni (i should clarify: it is a statue of moroni), and the hillside, and well, they pretty much speak for themselves... enjoy.

phive

well, my sister ashley and her daughter abby (who is 6 months older than maggie) have come to new york for a few days. so now there are 5 of us touristing it up in cazenovia. here are maggie and abby having fun in the car ride home from the airport. (we eventually had to move their carseats apart because maggie couldn't contain herself and kept scratching abby's arm in what we'll call "unrestrained elation" at having a little friend visit.)

and do you all remember maggie's new dog Braeloch that we bought at the Brae Loch Inn? well, in genius foresight, my mom and i thought it would be best if we bought abby a puppy as well, so we went to a store called Mulligan's and bought abby a scotty dog... his name is Mulligan (the Smith's are real original when it comes to naming stuffed animals). even though they each have their own doggies, the girls still like to pretend fight over whose is whose for fun.

warning: idiots in the kitchen

so, i'm here in NY with my mom and tonight my sister sarah called my mom to find out how to make none other than French Toast!!! who doesn't know how to make French Toast?!? My sister Erin is 25, Jonathan is 22 and Sarah is 19... between the three of them you'd think they'd be able to figure out how to crack a couple of eggs in a bowl and dip a piece of bread in it before frying it up. sheesh. i bet tomorrow morning they'll call asking how to make cheerios and milk for breakfast.

New York is for (dog) lovers...

Maggie and I are in upstate NY for a couple of weeks housesitting whilst my aunt and uncle are in Oregon for a wedding. My mom came out as well to help with Maggie and to be a tourist with me. Here is my aunt and uncle's house. It's the cutest little house ever. We are in a town called Cazenovia which is just outside of Syracuse. All the homes out here are these neat little houses built in the mid to late 1800s. It's such an "Americana" town. Across the street from the house is a hotel called the Brae Loch Inn and a lake called Cazenovia Lake. My mom and I went into the Inn which has a definate Scottish theme going on. Maggie found this little dog in the gift shop and had to have it. His name is Braeloch (of course) and Maggie takes him EVERYWHERE. I think by the time we get home he'll be brown rather than white, but hey... as long as my little girl is happy.

a picture is worth a thousand words...

...this picture is worth a million.