Old Faithful

Our Yellowstone adventure continued onto Old Faithful.

While at the Fountain Paint Pots, Seth and Eliza got the biggest kick out of the geyser there, so we knew that Old Faithful was a must before heading back home to rest up for the beginning of the 3rd International Babywearing Conference.

Chris knew what was in store at Old Faithful, so he wasn't as amused.

Until I brought him inside the Old Faithful Inn which he had only seen from the outside when he was a little kid.

Needless to say, that's his kind of architecture and kept taking pictures:

It made the whole trip worth it to see the look on his face! Check out this online photo gallery to see what I mean.

He LOVES exposed beams in architecture.

After going up a few floors to get different angles, Eliza was getting quite squirmy, and Old Faithful was due to erupt within the next 1/2 hour, so we decided to treat ourselves to some ice cream in their little shop.

We got a pre-show with another, much smaller geyser that went off while we were settling into our bench eating our ice cream.

Happy and content with some assorted flavored ice creams to try, we enjoyed listening to the different languages around us until Eliza decided she was done after two minutes and Chris strapped her back on her back.

We were sitting next to a sweet Japanese family that kept themselves highly entertained with our little monkey on her daddy's back!

And then, after all that waiting, it erupted!

The continued eruption was oohed and aahed by the international crowd. We heard Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, German, and many other languages mixed with British and different American accents from around the U.S.

Having Yellowstone so close by makes it fun to see all these different cultures and nationalities right on our doorstep!

So what did the kiddies think of it all?

I accidentally cut half of his hand off while taking the picture, but when I asked Seth what he thought about the geyser, and he just looked at me, smiled and gave a thumb's up.

Good enough for me!

And then it was time to go home. Too bad we missed being able to see the new Visitor's Center currently under construction (it's scheduled to open sometime in August this year), but we'll just have to come back!

Stay tuned for the first day of the Babywearing Conference, in which I was manning the Registration Table and forgot to take pictures of my own, so I'll be "stealing" pics from fellow babywearers. :)

Babywearing in Yellowstone

Today I've been nesting, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to share how amazing last week was with the International Babywearing Conference.


We went for a day trip to Yellowstone on Tuesday with a few early arrivals, and when I volunteered to help with that I was NOT pregnant so needless to say, sitting in a car nearly all day was not a favorite for my little bun in the oven.

We stopped and got some Burger King breakfast sandwiches on the drive up though, so the other kiddies felt like royalty with their BK crowns!

Seth took the crown quite literally and wore it in the car pretty much all day.


Eliza also took her crown literally and purposely put her sippy cup so shield her from unwanted photography. SUCH a princess!


Then, we arrived using the West Entrance through West Yellowstone to the park, where others in our group spotted a bear while we glanced bison, pronghorn, and some various birds (they just looked like spots on the camera, so sorry, no pictures!).



We also enjoyed road construction and traffic jams, but I didn't think it was necessary to take any pictures of THAT experience!




We set up our "make your own" sack lunch area sponsored by:


Olives and Applesauce baby carriers, and so we had applesauce to go with the lunches (we thought about olives but didn't have a feasible way to store them in sack lunches).

Some of the fellow babywearers getting loaded up with food for the day. We had roughly 100 people sign up for the day trip, but only a 1/4 showed up for the free lunch, so we used the leftovers for lunches during the rest of the conferencel, which REALLY helped us keep to our budget (we had SO many generous donations, but more on that in another post!).

Chris is on the right with Eliza strapped in his camo mei tai mostly so she wouldn't escape (she has the nickname "Monkey" for a reason!) so there's a lot of practical reasons to babywear.

Everyone grabbed their goodies, introduced themselves, showed off all the different kinds of baby carriers (which is nothing compared to later on in the week!), and eagerly headed off into the park.

All fully stocked with delicious sack lunches, we took off to enjoy the sights of Yellowstone!

We stopped at the fountain paint pots, which had thermal pools of a beautiful turquoise that also smelled like rotten eggs (Seth nearly gagged and held his nose...he also didn't think I was being funny when I tried blaming the smells on him).

Stay tuned for more pictures and fun from Yellowstone soon. I don't want to overcrowd the posts. :)

In the meantime, here's our Idaho Babywearer's post on a bit of the day. We all had SO much fun!