Celebrate at the Lake!

Alexa's 2nd Birthday
 Lake of the Ozarks

We love to visit Kyle and Cassie because they are such cool people of course, but they also live in Lake of the Ozarks which is so much fun!  This year they have their own boat, which was very exciting to city folks like us!  The problem with all this fun is that we all come down for Alexa's birthday party, but its in October, which is way too cold to do anything in the lake.  Every year we run into this problem, but we
just can't seem to get to their house and visit any other time.
We need to just start celebrating Alexa's birthday a few months early!

 We packed lots of family on this boat trip!  Here are our fellow boat buddies, Natalie, Quentin and Alexa.  Obviously Alexa has been on a boat much more then the rest of us, and is not nearly as excited as we are for yet another ride around the lake!

 Another sweet part of this deal is that Kyle & Cassie's friends, the Bankheads, always let us stay in their lake house!  It is so nice to all stay in the same place, its right on the lake, and its less then a mile down the road from Cassie and Kyle.  Cassie always stocks it with tons of food and soda, its the best kind of vacation spot to come to.  Picture above is Mooma holding Garrett, Quentin, Natalie and Cassie, hanging out at the lake house watching kids play in the beautiful weather, while we take our turns riding the boat.  It's a great way to spend the weekend, many thanks to the Bankheads!

 Garrett is enjoying himself too, even though he didn't get to ride on the boat.  He seems perfectly content hanging out on Grandma Bells lap as long as he has something to chew on.

 Preston is loving playing in the woods, he can find all kinds of cool things to play with, like this tree stump.  It's the little things that he gets excited over.  Preston, Ashlyn and Alexa spent most of their time simply collecting acorns in plastic cups.  The simple joys of childhood.

 Now its party time, the reason we all made the trip to visit.  This year Alexa's party is at Miner Mikes, a huge, very fun, indoor amusement park.  Complete with roller coaster, Ferris wheel, bumper cars, arcade games and tons of tunnels to climb through.  It's a favorite spot any time we come to visit Kyle & Cassie!  Only this trip its birthday party time and the kids are loving the candy, soda, cake and ice cream galore.  Ashlyn (pic above) seems more excited about coloring her picture then eating her ice cream!

 Preston's no fool, he's not letting that good stuff go to waste, he's getting as much sugar as possible.  It's not every day you get candy, soda, ice cream and cake all at once.

 The birthday girl herself, our big 2 year old Alexa.  She seems to be loving all this good stuff too!  And she hasn't even opened presents yet!

Miner Mike's was originally built to house this complex tunnel, slide, crawling gym system for kids, and unfortunately their parents to get lost crawling in.  It really is that big, that I can't even go in with the kids, because I can't figure out how to lead them back out!  (pic, above) Kyle drew the short straw and he's trapped in the tunnels with Alexa and Preston.  Fortunately they rent knee pads to the adults to ease the pain.
It was a great weekend, the weather was awesome, all of the Bell family was able to get together and Cassie and Kyle know how to have fun, fun, fun!