Ya'll Come back now!

Mt. Airy, NC, is the home of Andy Griffin. If I'm not mistaken, they actually filmed the show there, back in the day when it was on location and not a bunch of studio sets in California.

Aunt Bea has a restaurant named after her, as does Goober. Then, the downtown area has his barber and other tourist traps. One of our faves is The Emporium. 3 stories of shopping and eating. Normally, I would not take 4 kids to a knick knack haven, but Beth thinks I am Super Mom and she is Super Aunt, so she talked me into it. I'm amazed we didn't get kicked out...it wasn't exactly kid friendly:

They had a whole section of dog stuff - Katie found her Happy Place:

See the Monkey Backpack/leash? See it NOT doing it's job?
That rocker, by the way, was like $250!

Seriously, Katie's "happy place"

And this is my happy place :)

I have a friend that cut his twin boys' door in half, and put bars up the top half. He didn't go all the way up, and woke up one morning to find the couch, carpet, and walls covered in syrup, ketsup, and all kinds of fun stuff. They had climbed OVER the bars. That is totally a story I could relate to.

Mock up of Andy's police desk:

Hello? Hello? Could you imagine still using one of those?

Oh! funny story!
My mother in law laughed so hard telling me this: One day, when Katie & Ethan were with her that 3 weeks , after Chad's grandma died, the phone rang. Jody was talking to a friend on the phone when Ethan walked up to her and said "WOW! Grandma, how'd you do that?!" She whispered, "What are you talking about?" She said he just kept saying, "Wow, that is so cool! How'd you do that Grandma?" She finally realized he was pointing at the cord attaching the phone to the wall. She had one of those rotary phones mounted to the wall, with the cord plugged into the jack, and a cord to the handset. Ethan has grown up with cordless phones and cell phones -he was in awe and wanted to know how she did that. Now, don't that make you feel OLD?!

I just remembered...we did have one of those in Japan. Most cordless phones wouldn't work on base because of signal issues. But he was 4 years old when we moved here and apparently he doesn't remember it.

After a hard day of window shopping...cupcakes & Sprite!

This was our home for 5 days - Knights Inn:

I was very happy with the room and service. Especially with the cable tv :) It's been a looooong time since we had cable tv at our fingertips - and it showed!

Katie & the boys slept on the floor the last two nights, saying it was "more fun". I was made to sleep on the floor as a kid...I didn't think it was fun at all!

A little friendly wrestling going on :)

I think he was getting even with his big sister by making her smell his diaper.

Thank God for vacations. And cable tv. And tent meetings. And family. And vans with vcrs. And tylenol. Amen.