.: Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

On September 4th, we left for Pigeon Forge, TN to celebrate Leanna's birthday. It was only about a four hour drive for us from North Carolina. Here is a picture of the view of the Carolina Mountains.

Here is the view from our cabin:

Devin wouldn't stop talking about the jacuzzi in our cabin so Mom decided to throw him in all clothed! He was mad at first, but quickly got over it! Here are the photos of my soaked little boy! LOL

The first night we went to The Comedy Barn. I don't have any pictures from that, but the next morning we went to the Ripley's Aquarium. We used our homeschool discount which was wonderful! Here are some of the photos of our morning:

Nicholas seems to think that he needs to kiss everything around him!

The below pictures, I did what I could to "save" them. They were very dark to the point of not being able to see them so I put them in a picture editing program and did the best job I could to where you could actually see the subjects, but now they are very grainy. I didn't get many pictures of my oldest so I really didn't want to delete them off my phone.

After the aquarium, we took Devin to go on a pony ride. This was really a big deal for us because he is our "shy, afraid-to-do-anything child". We could not believe that he actually got on the pony! We were so proud of him!

There was a sweet white pony named, Snow White, that the kid's can't ride any longer because she is too old and sick. Leanna fell in love with this pony and stayed at her side for at least thirty minutes and was so upset when we had to leave her. She is my horse loving little princess. I have still heard everyday for the last week about Snow White.

Then we went to the Pigeon Forge Gem Mine. This was so much fun, but so expensive. You pick the size bucket you want and use the shovel to put the sand in the "sifter" and run it through the water to sift through the sand.

We found so many neat gems. In Leanna's hands are a "pretty rock" and a ruby.

When you are done sifting through the sand, you go inside and sit with one of their "gem experts" who tells you what you found. You can then choose to have any gem you want cut and set into jewelry. This is where I spent way too much money. I am still waiting to get my jewelry in the mail though. I will post pictures when I receive all of it. I had a necklace and ring made with the Citrine I found since it is my birthstone. My husband also had a ring made with the Smokey Mountain Topaz he found.

Here is my sweet Nicholas trying to kiss a statue again! LOL

There are doll stores all over Pigeon Forge. Of course, we had to go in all the doll stores. Here are some pictures of the beautiful dolls in the Three Bears Gift Shop which was right outside the Gem Mine.

Here is an Alice in Wonderland doll.

Here you can see Nicholas standing right in front of one of the dolls in the previous picture. The doll was the size of a 3 1/2 year old.

The following day, we went to walk the streets of Gatlinburg. Our first stop was go-carts. Brittani went with Nicholas and Michael (Brittani's boyfriend) went with Leanna since the kids were too young to drive their own.