Broken Bow, OK

I've been in desperate need for a vacation. Starting in about March, I began (practically) begging Seth to find us the time, money, and vacation time for us to be able to get away for a few days. We finally decided to go to Broken Bow, OK and rent a "cabin"* (I put quote marks because this cabin is nicer than my house!) for two nights. I wanted to just be alone with my family without events or things to get to or tasks to get done. My To Do list beckons me 98% of my awake time, and I needed to get away from it. And the only way I can really do that is if I spend time away from home.

I am a stay-at-home-parent. This means that I work full time, parenting my preschool-aged children from morning til night. (Literally. Seth leaves by 6:30am and returns at 6pm.) I feed breakfast, I take them to preschool or BSF or playdates. I feed them lunch. They come with me running errands, getting groceries, taking meals to people. I make all the appointments--dr., dentist, hair, eyes and then get them to said appointments (97% of the time, carting all three with me each and every time). I am also in charge of most of the "traditionally female" jobs. I mostly do all the laundry, groceries-buying, meal planning, house cleaning, etc. My workplace is my home. My home is my workplace.

(Side note:/Sidebar:/Soapbox: Now, don't get me wrong. I have chosen to stay home with my children. We both strongly believe that when it's possible, it's best for a parent to be doing the fulltime rearing of kids. We make serious sacrifices for this to be possible. I also believe me working full time right now would be a bad fit for me. I would be too stressed out and I don't want to be making choices that add unneeded stress to myself or my family. Also, I hate the myth that says we must be rolling in dough to be able to make this happen. Not. True. I know TONS of families where one stays home by choice, but not because it's the best financial decision. Would we have more disposable income if I worked full time? Sure. Would our family be better off? I don't think so. I don't want this to get into a debate about staying home vs. not staying home, though. I have friends who choose to work full time because it's a better fit for their personality. I applaud them. I have friends who have to work to make ends meet. I applaud them. I have friends who stay home and it's not financially difficult to do so. I applaud them. Whatever decisions you make for your family, I'm assuming they are what's the best fit for your particular family, and in doing so, I applaud you. What's best for our family is that I stay home right now. But that doesn't mean that Momma doesn't sometimes need a break!)

I need to pause to give Seth a shout out here and admit publicly that I have not run my dishwasher more than a handful of times in 5 years. When pregnant with Austin, it was a duty I handed over due to the amount of heaving I was doing and it's stuck that he loads and unloads on a nightly basis. He is also COMPLETELY willing to cook a meal or grab some food from the store. He's very open to assisting me when needed. However, the main responsibility for these things is on me. It's me keeping track of these things, while he keeps track of outdoor things.

So while we started looking for something to do in March, it couldn't actually happen until mid-May because of pre-existing commitments all the weekends leading up to it (mostly soccer). Eventually, it rolled around and Seth took a Friday off from work, we packed up, and headed to OK with my Sport Wagon packed to the gills with people and stuff!

It was SUPER hilly there in OK.

We stopped in the last "big" town to get groceries for the weekend and then got to the cabin Friday afternoon about 3pm. After unloading the car, the bigs and Seth took off for a "nature hike" which was fairly difficult, I'm told, because the terrain there is extremely hilly. So much so that they never did it again and Graham had a big blister from shoes he's worn hundreds of times. Carson enjoyed wandering around the cabin while I laid on the couch and read. Sure, I had to stop every page or so, but it was one big great room where he couldn't do much damage and I had no To Do list calling to me. I felt relaxed on a level that I haven't in a really long time. (Probably since giving birth to Carson, actually, because being in the hospital is like a mini vacation!)

Our Cabin

The first picture I took, from laying on the couch.

The front yard/deck/driveway area.

Hard to see, but GORGEOUS table. and SMALL chairs.
Plus, the traveling highchair we have on permanent-temperary loan.

It would not have occurred to me to care,
but I loved how low the windows were for C's sake.

One big room. Beautiful!

Awesome kitchen.

both bedrooms had king beds

both bathrooms had two sinks, huge tub and walk in shower

the view out the back

On Friday, we just hung out at the house, cooked hot dogs for dinner and played games and enjoyed each other. Saturday morning we went through a drive through the park and came across this gift shop+museum that we stopped to see. The museum was about the logging industry and the boys enjoyed that fairly well for what it was, and we pressed two pennies, took some pictures, bought a Christmas ornament and a shirt for each big. Then we loaded up to go back home to eat lunch, work on the puzzle, play some games and have everyone take a nap. I felt sleepy and just went in our bedroom to lay down and woke up like 40 minutes later. It was so nice to feel sleepy and just actually be able to do something about it!

Seth loves to put puzzles together, and we rarely have enough table space that he can just interrupt for weeks/months on end to work on one, so I brought one on vacation that I thought the boys would enjoy working on with us. It took us all weekend to get that thing done. It was HARD. However, we did a bunch of other things like play Go Fish and Crazy 8s and use WikiSticks and make smores such. It was a perfect weekend. Here are some pictures from the Beavers Bend museum:

All from one piece of wood!

While we were at the museum, we picked up some brochures on local things to do. We hadn't left town to add things to our To Do list, so we had done practically no research on what to do once we got to Broken Bow. When we saw in the brochures that there was a train-in-the-woods ride, we decided to go for it. Plus, everyone had actually napped, so people were in a good mood, come late afternoon (which feels rare).

The train ride was really fun and I'm glad we did it. It goes through the woods and we saw wildlife which was neat. We ended up winning some cotton candy in a free ticket drawing, so we got a Slush Puppy and nachos as a late-late snack before heading home to eat dinner. Here are some pictures of that:

A sign at the concession stand. lol

Graham really loves himself some nacho cheese.

Once back to the cabin, we ate dinner, made smores, played with glow sticks I'd brought, used the hot tub, and just sat around enjoying each other. Sunday morning, we played a game of Memory before packing up to head towards home.

The Puzzle.

We donated it to the cabin.

packed up and ready to go home

I had to get a picture of this!

We stopped in town to eat lunch before driving home and one of the local places to eat is a pizza place called Grateful Head. The boys love pizza, so we had no trouble picking the place to eat. lol

cuteness

The rest of the drive home was pretty rough as far as drives go. The boys were sugared from the junky way we ate and Carson was over tired. He wouldn't sleep and decided to cry at us for the last hour of the trip. By the time we got home, I needed a vacation from the vacation! haha. Not exactly, but I was really glad when he finally fell asleep (about 20 minutes from home) because he was so miserable. And anyone who knows him knows he rarely cries, so this was annoying and sad.

I would totally recommend vacationing there, and I'm already thinking we'll go back in 2018 which will be our next Spofford Family vacation that's ours to plan. There were tons and tons of cabins under construction, so soon there will be lots more options of places to rent. Seth would like for us to pick one that has more flat space outside for playing catch and a better outdoor firepit. As it was, we used a gas fireplace to roast our marshmallows because the firepit was pretty undeveloped and the little people we have are too little for that to be a safe situation.

Have y'all been there before? What else should we look into the next time we go?


* The reasons I chose this particular cabin were twofold: it had two bedrooms, both on the main level and The Bathtub. (I miss our old tub in Atlanta that was like A Bathtub. Our tub here is just a plain old, small tub, and I miss a good deep, hot soak.)

Mother's Day 2016

I got some super awesome cards from my boys this year for Mother's Day. Seth always does a good job of getting them to help... painting the outside and this year he asked the bigs what they wanted to say on the inside and he wrote it down for them. Some pretty awesome stuff in there! He also printed out the Easter picture and cut each kid out and glued it to the front. So thoughtful that he took the picture from the blog, sent it to Target to print, picked it up, and then cut out and glue, all without me knowing anything. The thoughtfulness means a lot to me.

from Seth

The best part is that I got the gift that I asked for! I'm already counting down the days until I can use my certificates!

We were running late for early service church, so I didn't get a picture of me and my boys beforehand. And by the time we had a chance to take the picture, the bigs were covered in their lunch and Carson had had a blowout. We're going to try again soon. It's very important to me that I get a picture of me with my children every Mother's Day, to watch how they've grown over the years, but one week isn't going to make a difference.

As per our tradition, we had lunch with the whole family and then headed to the nursing home to visit Grandma Houston. The kids get restless there after awhile (who can blame them!?), and we decided to go to Nonnie and Gramps' house. I feel like we didn't do that last year and so I wasn't expecting to encounter Tilly and thus hadn't taken medicine. I was fine for the first few hours, but then my eyes started to really itch and be a problem. I washed my face, took medicine, and changed my clothes when we got home, but I was still having sore eyes for over a day later. I really ought to carry some allergy medicine around in case we have a change of plans like that.

Austin did this at church and I thought it was worth inserting here to have it on record forever:

My favorite part is "shows. Like Fixer Uppers"
Plus, his answer for what I'd do if I have time is
allow him to watch a show. HA!

Updated to add: Pictures of me and my boys! (just three of the 30+ we took)

Goodbye Bamboo!!!

Seth has been fighting the Bamboo Forest for the 7 years we have lived in this house. Our kids were always too young to enjoy playing in the house/fort/play area that the previous owners (and surrounding neighbors) had used it as and it was growing so out of control that it required monthly trimming which ate up a ton of Seth's time. He'd mow and work on the bamboo constantly or else it would start growing up in every crack in the driveway, the neighbor's yard, the alley area, etc. We got sick of him spending so much time maintaining it with very little value to us that we decided to get rid of it entirely.

So, he asked for money and time for his birthday last year. Money to rent equipment and time from his dad (and brother) because it was such a tremendous project it couldn't be completed in one day by one person. It's taken us nearly a year to use the gift, but it has now been used and I'm so excited that Seth will have time back! Mostly to work on other maintenance things like general tree trimming, leaf collection, edging, etc. without totally eating into our weekends.

His dad met him at The Home Depot bright and early Saturday morning to haul the tractor to our house (we don't have a vehicle with a hitch) and they got to work right away. The boys were more than anxious to watch so we ate breakfast in a hurry and they threw clothes on faster than I've ever seen. In not too long, I had a whole seating section set up so they could watch, but still remain a safe distance away from the tractor. They were told their butts needed to remain in their chairs or else we'd have to go back inside. They did a very good job obeying that rule!

The tractor itself seemed so tiny,
but it dug up the roots far better than a person could have!

Seth shows off one of the many roots+runners clumps.
This is why bamboo is so hard to maintain.
It regrows and regrows until you take out the root system.

Some of the "treasures" found in the forest.

a runner coming out...

The sunlight makes this hard to see, but it was like 10 feet long.

Another giant clump of root system!

Later that morning, Spencer arrived with Ireland and Turner and after playing in the back yard, watching the bigs so I had a chance to shower, etc, they wanted to get in on the bamboo removal. Each took a turn with Spencer, but I didn't get a picture of Turner on the tractor with his dad.

This next picture is a little hard to see, but Seth is driving the tractor, Turner is to the left of the tree cutting down bamboo shoots with a clippers and Spencer is behind the tractor wearing a red shirt, using his pickaxe. You can see it up over his head. He was chopping away at roots too close to the retaining wall to use the tractor safely.

Halfway through the day, Spencer took a full truck load to the dump (Load one of two) and he and Seth grabbed some food from Braums on their way home (sweet tea, hotdogs, buns, chips, etc). In hindsight, I should have thought of that before, but these hard workers needed some serious food come lunch. (I should have gone the night before and stocked up on lunch supplies, but it never occurred to me and then we had a house full of people I couldn't feed. And too many kids that I couldn't leave the house!) I was fixing plate after plate of food for everyone and then sat in the dining room with the daddies to try to eat my own plate of food. I almost had to move, the smell of them was so strong! lol. I guess it was a good thing they were all done and got up to leave soon after I sat down.

The one thing I'm happy I thought to do was use the big insulated mugs for ice water for the daddies (the hospital ones) and insulated kid straw cups for the kids. Even though the cups were in the shade, away from the work, the tops were still always covered in dirt and I felt good about them not drinking tons of it and always having cold ice water available. Seth drank tons, but still required a Powerade later that evening, so I guess in hindsight I'd think of that in advance too. I'd have sent everyone home with a Powerade as a thank you. I did send the kids home with a Capri Sun, but should have had some legit re-hydrating liquid available.

When the tractor was having a break, we put everyone to work!

Ireland

Austin

More tractoring, more clumps.

Bamboo Clearing Team minus Gramps who was napping inside with AC

Once the bamboo was chopped up and removed, they used the tractor almost as a till to just break up all the dirt which is why it looks lumpy. Seth talks about having to re-grade it all by hand, so I guess we're not exactly done. You get charged $200 for not cleaning off the machine well, so Seth hosed it down and then gave our boys a ride on its way out to the trailer.