Puerto Rico

Clarke and I just got back from a trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate our 10th anniversary, which was in June.  It was awesome!  I cried when I dropped the kids off with my mom, but once we were actually in Puerto Rico, I was fine.  We missed them, of course, but they had the best time with my parents for two days, and with Clarke's parents for the rest of the time.  We sent texts and pictures back and forth, so it was fun for us to be able to see what they were doing.  And it was just so relaxing and amazing to be with my awesome husband in a beautiful country with nothing to worry about except what fun things we want to do and what delicious food we wanted to eat.

Here's the outside of the little condo we stayed at.  It was inside the Wyndham Rio Mar Resort property, so we could just walk down to the beach and there were lounge chairs right there, but it was much quieter and less crowded than just down the beach at the main resort.

Our own little stretch of sand and sea.

We spent plenty of time soaking up the sun and reading by the ocean.

We hiked in El Yunque rainforest and saw some cool waterfalls (and took some bad self-portraits).

We explored some historical sites, like El Moro and El Castillo de San Cristobal in San Juan.

We walked around Old San Juan and loved all the beautiful colored buildings.

We went to see the largest radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory.  I thought it was boring, but Clarke liked it because it was in the movie GoldenEye and in the James Bond video game he and his friends used to play.

On our last day, we went rock climbing, rappelling, and zip lining in the Rainforest near Caguas.  

We also kayaked the bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, went to an art museum, saw the new Batman movie, and ate lots of good food.

It was a great vacation and I can't wait for our next one!

Shutterfly Long Live Summer Contest

Summer means lots of picture taking for our family - but, really, what season doesn't?  I love taking pictures and trying to preserve our precious family memories, and Shutterfly is my very favorite online photo site for making photo books - I've already started one for this summer!

Right now, Shutterfly has a Long Live Summer Facebook Photo Contest going on.  The best part (to me) is you can win instant prizes just for submitting a photo!

Here are the details:

Long Live Summer – Facebook Photo Contest details - 7/9 – 8/12 Multi-week summer themed photo sweepstakes with instant win prizes.http://bit.ly/sweepS

Win a trip for four to The Bahamas and a professional photo shoot so you’ll remember your vacation forever.  All you need to do is upload your favorite photo and caption based on the theme of the week.  Get a gift from Shutterfly just for entering! You can enter at any point during the 5-week sweepstakes period.

PHOTO THEMES

•       Week 1(7/9): Americana

•       Week 2 (7/16): Great Outdoors

•       Week 3 (7/23): Water Fun

•       Week 4 (7/30): Sports & Activities

•       Week 5 (8/6): Parties & Celebrations

PRIZES

•       Instant win prizes just for submitting a photo!

•       Weekly prizes (contestants can enter one time/week)

•       Weekly featured photos: up to 5 weekly entries will be selected from the gallery and featured on the Facebook fan page and awarded a $500 gift card on Shutterfly and a copy of the new Lonely Planet travel photography book.

•       Grand prize: trip for 4 to Bahamas, 4 nights, family photo shoot

•       Shutterfly Sweepstakes - Official Rules

http://bit.ly/sweepS

So check it out, and enter a photo for a chance to win!  Yesterday my mom brought my nephews and niece over to go swimming with Huston and Arden.  Maybe I'll enter one of them for week 3's theme: Water Fun.  :)

My Little Swimmer

Huston is on his second week of his second round of swim lessons.  And he's doing so awesome!  Watch him swim across the pool (video from today).

Happy Fourth!

On July 3rd, we went to see fireworks with our friends, Jonathan and Ashlee, at the Mansfield Big League Dreams stadium, where we've seen them for the past 5 years.  It was such a beautiful evening - probably the nicest weather in recent memory for a night of fireworks.  Clarke took the kids to enjoy the bounce house, and then they just had fun running around and waiting for it to get dark.

Huston was so happy that his buddy, Wyatt, was there.  They kept chasing each other and trying to have "fights" with glow sticks and cardboard tubes.

The kids both loved the fireworks - Huston was dancing around when they started, waving his glow sticks, and saying, "Oh, yeah!  That's what I'm talking about!" and Arden turned to me and said, "These are the best fireworks I have never seen."

It was such a fun night, with fun friends, celebrating our nation's freedom.

The things they say...

Whenever the kids say something funny or cute, I try to write it down as quickly as I can so I don't forget it.  The only problem is that I write these things on random scraps of paper throughout the house and I'm always afraid I'm going to lose them or accidentally throw them away.  I finally gathered all the ones I've been collecting for the past month or so and thought I should put them on the blog.

Arden has fewer, as her ramblings are longer and harder to record, so I'll start with her.  First, she has this quirky thing she uses as an all-purpose introduction to whatever she wants to say: "nugga" or "nuggat."  For example, she'll say, "Nuggat, Baby Junior likes to swim?"  She uses it almost like "did you know that?" as in, "Did you know, Baby Junior likes to swim?"  The other thing that I've been loving lately is how, whenever I make squash and zucchini, she calls it "squash and bikini," and she'll say, "But I don't like bikini!"  It cracks me up and I always make her say it twenty times before dinner is over.

Huston has quite a collection of things that have been making me laugh lately.  First, he calls bunk beds, "Bonk Beds," and he really wants to get some "bonk beds" for his room.  He says "rememberies" for memories, as in, "Carl didn't want his house to burn up because it had all his rememberies of Ellie." He calls Pluto, "poo-toe," and it makes me laugh every time.

About a month ago, I was running errands with Huston and Arden one afternoon, and Huston made this observation as he looked at the sky:

"Lawyers just have to work all day while the sky is light blue.  And lawyers come home when the sky is dark blue."

How sad Clarke is that that's true.

Finally, while at Kid's Kamp, Huston noticed a poster with the two main characters from the drama.  Referring to one of the characters, he said, "Hey, I know that guy!  He was in the play!  Except, he just has a black head.  (cheerfully) Some people have black heads, and some people (trailing off in confusion)...just have...normal things.  (cheerfully again) Like my friend Enoch has a black head!"

Leave it to the little ones to be politically incorrect in the most innocent and hilarious way.

And now, because a post without pictures is no post at all, here's two pictures of the kids with my parents at their cousins' birthday party this weekend.

Day Tripper

Yesterday Clarke and I took the kids down to Waco for a day trip.  I have an unofficial summer bucket list (well, it's actually sort of official since I wrote it all out with my colored gel pens) and going to a splash pad and the Waco children's museum were both on my list.  

Our first stop was the splash pad in Cameron Park.  Conveniently, the disc golf course is also in Cameron Park, so Clarke played disc golf while the kids and I hung out at the splash pad.

Arden wouldn't get her face wet, but she had fun prancing around and singing little songs to herself.  She loves to talk about Baby Junior (her imaginary friend on her foot), and seemed to be talking to him a lot while she played in the water.

Huston was a lot braver about getting water in his face, and had such a great time that he didn't want to leave.

After the splash pad, we headed to Kitok for lunch.  It was soooo yummy!

The Waco Children's Museum was up next.  I was really impressed with it!  It was really uncrowded, until a birthday party showed up near the end of our visit, and there were lots of cool things to explore.  And it was waaay cheaper than the Fort Worth museum - $6 for adults and $4 for kids.

Huston had a great time pretending to drive this car in the transportation room.  He took me all the way to New Mexico (his favorite place to pretend we're going on vacation).

Arden looked adorable as a little fire fighter.

There was a room where the kids could practice lots of different styles of writing, like calligraphy and hieroglyphics, and there was one table with "hobo language" on it.  I made note of the symbol on the far left in the middle, "these people beat up hobos" just in case I ever become a hobo and need to look out for that.

There was a whole room with all these little cars that the kids loved driving around and filling up with gasoline.  This was where the uncrowded-ness of the museum was really great, because they had it almost all to themselves.

A pretend garden, which I thought was so cute and clever.  It was located right by the cars, so you could drive to your "house" which had the garden out back, and then go inside the house to the kitchen to cook your food.  It was really cute.

The music room had this big keyboard you could walk on, and a sound booth where you could play on a keyboard.

The kids loved the water room and had fun making channels with Clarke for the ducks and boats to go down.

Huston loved pulling this cord to make a giant bubble wall.  You could also stand on a platform and pull a hula hoop up to form a big bubble tube around yourself.  It was pretty neat.

The little tea party room.  Arden made tea for her special guest, Daddy.

There were lots and lots of other rooms I didn't take pictures of.  We played with magnets, levers and pulleys, explored the heart, saw a train going around a replica of Waco, looked at rooms full of animals, fish, and insects, and did lots of other things, and didn't even make it to a whole section that had dinosaur bones, or the special exhibit on the Mayans.  It really was a great museum - rivaling Fort Worth's for sure and I might say it was even better.

The kids were worn out by a little after 3, so we left the museum and picked up some frozen treats at Katie's Custard and ate them on the way home.  Then the kids passed out from exhaustion and we had a nice peaceful drive home.

We love you, Waco!