Gentlemen... Start Your Engines!

Happy (as far as the blog is concerned) Belated Birthday to my husband Levi! He turned the big Three-oh! I am now married to an old man ;)! Since his birthday was one of the "big ones", I thought I better do something spectacular for him! Something that is a little wild, reckless, and fun as a way of saying Goodbye to his 20s! So, I got him a Richard Petty Rookie Driving Experience at the Lowes Motor Speedway!

(Not to be confused with a Tom Petty experience, which is what I kept accidentally saying, which would be a whole other thing entirely and would also be very illegal)!

He got a little orientation on how to drive a race car, they put him in a racing suit, put a helmet on him, and had him follow and instructor around the track! He got up to 130 and is quite proud of himself! He said it was a lot easier than he thought and wished he could have passed the instructor and is already looking forward to doing some other kind of driving school some time... in the distant future!

We were going to bring just the 5 older kids, but our babysitter backed out 10 min after we were supposed to leave to go there! So we quickly dressed the girls and took them along and we were pleasantly surprised with how well they did! I swear sometimes they seemed to enjoy it the most! And it was quite family oriented! They let the kids all sit in a race car, they took all the kids in a van around the track twice at 75 miles an hour, and they took their picture with a race car and gave them each a copy! They loved it most of the time! The only problem is there was some downtime after Levi was done and the temperature dropped. So the kids were ready to go home for the last 1/2 hour, but in general they were fabulous and they all had a good time cheering on their daddy! So here are some pictures from our fun family evening broken up into 2 different posts because Blogger was not appreciating how many pictures I was putting in one post!
(PS If you notice the awesomeness of the pictures, that is because I have a new beast of a camera, but that is another post entirely)


In the orientation room! They showed a video to start the day off!

Silas said he wanted a race car for Christmas. Not a toy one, a real one! I told him it was illegal for him to drive before his 16th birthday, so Santa would probably not be bringing him one! It was hard getting a good picture of Lettie because she was making an "engine noise" and turning the wheel side to side with her whole body! She is such a silly goose!

For some reason the guy who placed Callie in the car freaked her out! So although she enjoyed being in the car, she kept looking back and him and giving him this expression!
Nolan was not supposed to be putting the helmets on, but since he did I thought I might as well take a picture!

I love this picture! I just think it is cute! I love the look on Silas' face!

My silly silly kids! They are a lot of fun!

Look at Lettie giving that little boy a "schmoopy" look! I don't know what got into her?

Do I have a handsome boy or what?!?

I love this picture! Not just because Ruby looks cute, but because of Silas in the background! He spent most of the time pushing that stroller in circles with different kids in it! I suppose he figured if he can't race cars he can at least race a stroller!

Callie joined her dad for the last-minute instructions! He learned all about the flags and what meant what! He had to get the 3rd gear flag once... meaning he forgot to shift up to 4th gear. The amazing thing is, he was still going 120 in 3rd gear!