Sweet Sweet Estes

As if a trip through Yellowstone wasn't enough scenic bliss for the summer, we decided to trek up to Estes Park to the YMCA camp for 5 days with my parents.  They flew Dude home from Camp Nana and Papa and continued in their fun, Colorado style.  It's about an hour and a half to Estes, which is a breeze in comparison to the 1500 miles Tim and I recently completed.  We had decided on this get-away back in March since their 500+ cabins book up by 1:00am on April 1.  We successfully booked at 12:35am that same morning.

We've had a plethora of lovely trips over the course of our 14 years together, but this one ranks high on my list.  The land and experience the YMCA camp offers their guests is a rare jewel.  The cabins are nestled in pure beauty, surrounded by nature and wildlife, the free activities for guests of all ages are endless and unique, the all day kids camp was fantastic, nightly concerts offered excuses to walk down the hill, magic shows and drum circles entertained the kids....and then there's Rocky Mountain National Park just 5 minutes down the road.  We visited the park 4 different days for hiking, picnics and drives.  It was a gift of a week and we plan to make it an annual tradition.

 Deer spotting.  Enzo was also quite intrigued.  

 The front porch was our resting place.  Much of our time was spent playing games and reading out here.  

 Squirt's highlight was her pony ride on Strawberry Shortcake.  Darling.  

On our last day we dumped, I mean dropped off, the kids at all day camp.  It was awesome for all of us.  They had a blast (Dude got to do a half hour mountain trail ride on Babe the horse) and the adults drove Trail Ridge for the day.  

 

We'll be back soon heavenly camp.  Very soon if I have my way.

Glorious, Beautiful, Speed Humps

Last May was bleak around here.  Dude's accident has us in a frenzy of dealing with the trauma of how to keep our littles safe, knowing we ultimately could not.  One thing we DID know is that we couldn't continue living in our house if something wasn't done to make our street more safe for the 12 kiddos who inhabit it on our small stretch.  We DID know that the city had ignored repeated attempts to make changes over the years and we DID know that motorists used Eudora as a super speedway of sorts, with no regard for the little humans or vehicles calling it home.  We DID know that we could do our very best to make a change for our family and many others and we weren't going to stop until it happened. That's what happens when your kid is hit by a car.  You go into super bitch protective mode with not a care who loathes you in the process.

We started by going door to door following Dude's accident, bruises, scrapes and all, and got signatures on a petition to do SOMETHING to slow things down.  He had a little speech that he wrote and we took Squirt with so that she could see that you can turn really scary situations into something really good.  This was essential for her after witnessing her brother fly off that windshield. She experienced just as much trauma that day as Dude did.  Naturally, everyone signed our petition (how could you say no?).

We filled out the city petition, included all the signatures and I called the city rep to explain our case. He very frankly informed me that it's next to impossible to get these things to go through given how many requests they receive each year.  I frankly told him that I wasn't going away and if they wanted a law suit on their hands, they could feel free to ignore yet one more application from our street.  I didn't feel like he took any of that very seriously, so I got copies of all the applications submitted by various residents on our street over the years and highlighted the one that mentioned that "if they didn't do something, a child would soon be struck."  We attached photos of Dude.  We also included a photo of the car that was recently WRECKED by a careless driver and put our threat of a lawsuit in writing.  We then took the liberty of ccing the Mayor and our local council person.

What do you know, our application was approved shortly after and we became the city's NUMBER ONE priority on the list of traffic calming measures.  Just like that.  Community meetings were organized and I'll admit, they were not pretty.  In fact, when you get a community of random neighbors together who don't know each other well and have different ideas on what the calming measures should be, it gets downright ugly.  But we forged through, risked hurting some feelings and ended up in agreement that speed humps and bike lanes would be our most effective measure.  It took a year to get there, but we did reach success.

 One of the three humps in in front of our picture window.  There's also a "Hump" sign in our yard, which I find to be amusing. 

The city rep told us that he has never seen this high of a percentage of neighbors coming together to make a plan and they've never had speed humps pass with the support we saw in our vote.  They're now using our street as an example of what can happen when a community bans together for the betterment of their street.

Over the past couple weeks, we've been jumping for joy over the noise and ruckus happening outside our house.  It's the most beautiful construction we've ever laid eyes on and our kids feel like an integral part of the end  result.  Now that motorists are getting used to the humps and are no longer losing bumpers and performing epic bottom outs that brought in inappropriate amount of joy to us, they're now avoiding our street and driving half the speeds they were before.  It's an amazingly beautiful thing.  Worth every annoyed city representative, every hostile phone call, every hour spent filling our paperwork and also worth the handshakes and smiles I shared with those same city representatives as the humps were installed and I told them they wouldn't have to deal with me from that day forward.

Success might be slow and tedious at times, but slow and tedious ended up winning the race this go round.