i went dark

The Smith family just returned from our first official 'family vacation'.  For some reason, it takes having more than 1 child for me to really feel like we can legitimately call any trips for pleasure 'family vacations', but either way--worth every penny we spent, and we sure didn't spend many!
We started off our trip on Sunday after church by grabbing some Jimmy John's (freaky fast!) and hitting the road to Des Moines where Jer had landed us a sweet hotel room downtown.  We unloaded and did a quick walk along the river and grabbed dinner at a brewery nearby, then headed back to our room for the night.

If any of you have done a hotel room with kids, you realize it is not actually a hotel room, it is a very classy prison of quietness and darkness. Our pain was eased when I ran down to the hotel bar to grab us drinks (IPA for him, Diet Coke with lime for her) and super expensive candy from the gift shop.
The next morning we headed out around 8 to our final destination, Edgewild Resort, in Fifty Lakes, MN.  We started it off wrong with a breakfast at McDonalds (Jer insists that all Smith vacations have to include this--I would personally like to nix this tradition) that included a completely wrong order and me waiting for 95 elderly persons wanting a refill on their coffee so I could get an Orange Juice.  Things smoothed out after this, and we cruised along, stopping for lunch and groceries to stock the cabin with at Target and arrived at our cabin around 4 on Monday.

Cabin #7, folks, in all its glory.

We easily had the shabbiest cabin of all, but our vacation eyes only saw peace, quiet, outdoors and beautiful time together as a family.  That was frankly exactly what we had, too.  We kayaked in the early morning hours (because when you have little little kids, you get the best morning time on the beach, when all the other families are still crashed), we hiked daily, we sipped coffee while building 'birthdays' in the sand (cakes/sand castles/mounds of dirt), we ate lunch on the paddle boat and dinner on the pontoon.  We sat on our deck in the evening and chatted about life. The weather was per-fec-tion.  I swept our floor that got covered in sand daily, and did dishes at our sink that overlooked the lake and honestly didn't even mind it. It was everything we wanted vacation to be.

Contrary to first glance, Ingrid is not wearing a doo-rag on the paddle boat.

Henry is actually driving the pontoon here-Jer and I were ROFL.

Teaching Henry to skip rocks--life, made.

Girls/Boys

Jer and I took turns making yummy dinners. Here is my fajita night!

 So much great time with her. Can't believe she's 5 months.

 Legos in the cabin. Stolen from the lodge.

Ice cream on our last night! This is in a nearby town called Crosslake. Henry had 'Superman' ice cream that night. Let's just say the bright colors combined to make for a shocking surprise in his potty the next day.

I am sort of convinced that part of why it was so great was that I 'went dark' for the majority of the vacation.  I could say I 'unplugged', but Jack Bauer would be so disappointed in me.  It was a personal decision, and I certainly didn't 100% adhere to this the whole vacation, but by and large I did not use the internet portion of my phone during our trip.  I took photos with it and used it to log a few runs I did while there, and did log in a few times while kids were napping or asleep for the night.  But I honestly haven't felt that present and a part of my own life for quite some time.  When Henry was playing, my phone was on a shelf in the cabin, as if it was (ha!) just any other material posession, equal to shoes or deodorant.  It wasn't in my hand or sitting nearby, just begging to be checked.  I wasn't painfully trying to get Henry to do something cute so I could Instagram it, or even worse, thinking how neat it was that people might be at work envying our super adorable family vacation.  I won't be making some bold statement about how I'm going to go back to my Motorola KRZR because being iPhone free was so liberating, but I certainly will take to heart that I was a better wife and mom during this week because I was a bad smartphone user.  I'll take that any day of the week.  That said, I did take photos of the vacation for the blog and our own family purposes.  Remember the good old days when you would develop a roll of film, choose the good photos and put them in an album and people might come over and flip through them while you had a (face to face) conversation? I kinda miss those days.  I do love having this blog for digital documentation of family events, but I also realize that our generation is undeniably headed towards quantity of relationships over quality, and I want to be keenly aware of how that is affecting my children and myself.
Has anyone else done a self-imposed media fast? What were your takeaways? Anyone want to make it more of a lifestyle change? I certainly am planning on that to at least an extent after this trip.  I have even researched some apps like this one that limit your notifications when activated so your phone isn't buzzing and distracting throughout the day.

I can't forget to mentioned the grand finale of our vacation--my brother's wedding!  We headed just a bit South of our cabin to celebrate with family and friends over the union of a couple great kids! It was beautiful and emotional and tons of fun!  Jer, Henry and I were all involved, so it was also very busy!  We are so excited about Kristi joining our family.  She's a great complement to my little brother and I am so glad he found a girl who can appreciate his crazy sense of humor:).

 Bridesmaids!

Chatting with the groom.

Today was an absolute vacation hangover in which I did little to be productive, and the kids and I all took 3 hour hangover naps and woke up still tired.  I did manage to get groceries, so at least it's not ketchup for dinner like it was last night.

Smitty, out.