The Bussis Stop: Life with the Bussis'- 1.15.15

We again had a very full 2 weeks. We brought in the new year, celebrated Micah's 4th birthday, and Steve and I spent a week in Mexico! Last winter when the snow just stayed and stayed and stayed (all the way till April) I told Steve that the next winter I wanted to get away to somewhere warm for a week. We have never done anything like that, for our honeymoon we took a 4 day cruise with one stop in Mexico, but we had never gone to a resort and we haven't gone away on vacation with no kids (other than a night or two) since Micah was born. So we decided to just do it and we asked good friends of ours if they wanted to get out of Michigan too. :) We had a fabulous time, the weather was gorgeous (75-80 degrees every day), the resort was beautiful with very yummy food, and the company was awesome! And I got to enjoy 21 meals where I didn't have to cook, clean, or scarf it down while cutting up my kids food. :) It was glorious! :) One thing I did not do a good job of was taking pictures. #1 I had taken my cheap small camera instead of my nice big one and surprise, it doesn't take very good pictures :) and #2 the batteries in that camera died I didn't even have opportunity to take bad pictures :). But here are a few of the pictures I do have:

Very excited for our Mexican dinner. The resort had 6 or 7 restaurants, but we really liked 3 and weren't sure about the rest, so we just went to those 3 twice :)

We kayaked one day (this is our friend Zach. He was Steve's roommate in seminary and is married to Kasey, my roommate from college). We would have loved to kayak again, but it got pretty windy the second half of the week and they wouldn't even let us try. But there was lots of other stuff for us to do, like play tennis, ping pong, basketball, walk on the beach, and of course, my favorite thing, sit by the pool and read!

Every day the person who cleaned our room would make an animal out of towels. This one was my favorite (and the only one I remembered to take a pictures of :))

The first day we were there we were just sitting around and Kasey asked us if there was any job we could have without having to get the training, what would it be. My answer was a dolphin trainer. I absolutely love dolphins, I think they're the coolest and most beautiful animal God made and I think it would be so cool to swim with them. The next day Zach and Kasey informed me that they had looked into the excursions offered at the resort and one of them was swimming with dolphins and they wanted to treat me with that for taking care of all the travel arrangements for our trip. What a treat! And I think you can see from this picture that I truly got to fulfill one of my lifetime dreams and it definitely lived up to all my expectations :) Of course now I REALLY want to be a dolphin trainer :). Don't think there's really much opportunity for that here in Michigan, however :)

It was so much fun to just get to hang out with this guy all day for 7 straight days! With 3 young kids life is very busy and hectic and it was so nice to get to just relax together! He's still my favorite person to hang out with!

Every night after dinner we would play games for a couple of hours. This night we played Settlers of the Catan (and I'm pretty sure Kasey and I each won :))

Steve takes it very serious :)

Even in Mexico they like American football so Saturday and Sunday Steve and I hung out in the sports bar to watch some of the games (Packers fans definitely were the loudest and rowdiest :))

Back home the boys had lots of fun hanging out with Grandma. My mom graciously agreed to come out and stay with the boys while Steve and I went to Mexico. It was so nice knowing they were having fun at home and it was nice for my mom to get to spend all that time with them (well, I think it was nice, I think she thought it was nice :))

They all love climbing on "Grandma's bed"

Obviously, I didn't take these pictures :) but my mom was nice enough to share some with me so I thought I'd share them with you so you can see that they had lots of fun without mommy and daddy :)

Taking a "selfie" with Grandma

Micah got lots of fun things for his birthday that he got to play with

This child loves his buckets!

I guess they loved watching the videos I sent them over and over

We were gone over Micah's 4th birthday, but mom made sure he felt very special. Here they are ready to make him a birthday cake

Not sure who had more fun, Micah or the twins :)

If Micah's decorating the cake, it definitely has to have M&Ms on it :)

Singing "Happy Birthday" to Micah (no idea why he has his shirt pulled up :))

My Dad came in on Friday and the boys wasted no time in putting a book in his hands

I think he (and my mom) did lots of reading

With my dad there they were finally able to get out of the house (it snowed pretty bad the first part of the week and my mom didn't want to attempt driving on snowy road :)). So they went to the mall one day

Another day they took the boys to Cabela's

This is always a picture you want to get sent to you- your 4 year old holding a gun :)

I much prefer this :)

My parents got to experience trying to read a Bible story to the twins :)

Before we left we had a certain someone's birthday to celebrate. He was pretty excited about this Planes memory game he got

And very excited to get his own fishing pole. When we were in California in October he insisted he wanted to go fishing while on my dad's boat. So we thought he might like his own fishing pole. He was pretty excited and can't wait for it to warm up so he can try it out