Kansas City Trip

We took the kids to the first Chief's game of the season. It was a pre-season game though. We take them to those, because it doesn't really count, (good thing, because they stunk!!!) so Jeff doesn't care that they won't sit through an entire game.

This was the boys' 3rd game, but Lily's 1st!

She was excited!

And she actually sat through half of the game! (she got wiggly after the half, but hey, she's 4! I was suprised she lasted that long!)

Our seats were pretty far up this year, but the boys liked using the binoculars, so that made it OK. =)

I like how Lily is peeking through to smile for a picture....such a ham.

Me & Riley. He loves going to the games. He gets so excited!

They all lasted about halfway into the 3rd quarter, which is pretty long. Especially since the game didn't start until 7:00 p.m.

We had gotten a hotel in KC so we didn't have to drive back that night.

The next day we let the kids swim at the hotel & then headed off to the T-Rex Cafe!!

The boys had seen advertisements for this & thought it would be a cool place to eat.

They had dinosaurs, a giant octopus, flashing lights, woolly mammoths, and lots of aquariums with real fish.

We sat on the second level in the "Ice Room". Every 30 minutes, the lights would change from blue to red during a "meteor shower".

The food was actually really good too. We got this giant dessert to share at the end of our meal:

It had a cup of dry ice that spilled out over the dessert. The kids really liked that!

Even though there were 5 of us, we could not finish all of that dessert. It was yummy too!!

Then it was time to head home.

We let Lily drive us:

Just kidding!! This was during a bathroom break & she thought it would be funny to come sit up front with me while Daddy was gone.

I think that is our last trip together for awhile. School starts on Wednesday. We have had a really fun & jam-packed summer!! I am sad that school is starting because I will miss getting to do these fun things all of the time with all 3 kids, but I am excited that school is starting, because I think we have all had a little too much together time. ;0)

Lily & Ares

Lily & Ares are one week apart. They share Birthday parties, and play together really well. Ares can't wait to come over to our house & Lily gets SO excited when she knows he's coming over. We got to have Ares come over to our house for awhile on Tuesday. We went to McDonald's, swam, and then just played and played.
I took pictures of these two little cuties with my camera phone (which I usually hate), but I have seen pictures taken with an app called Instagram and I thought they turned out really cool. The only problem is that Instagram is for an IPhone. I don't have one of those. I do have a Droid though, so I found an app called PicPlz that does the same thing. Here are some of the pictures I took of Lily & Ares during our day together:

These two do not always get along. Lily has been known to hide Batman (Ares' favorite toy at our house) so she can force him to play tea party with her. But, the majority of the time they get along great. They are so funny to listen to when they are playing. In the world they make up, Batman dresses up as a knight, dinosaurs rescue princesses, and Barbies yell at dragons to "Get out of our neighborhood!" (Lily seriously said this to one of Ares' dragons.)

Now that Ares lives a few blocks over, I am sure we will be seeing lots more of Ares. Which is just fine by us. =)

Mini Vacay

Last week, we headed to the booming metropolis of Hays, KS. Exciting stuff, huh? ;0) Jeff had a conference there (where he was one of the speakers; for the first time, and he did a great job!!). Sometimes we like to tag along with Jeff on his work travels if we can. Since school starts next week, we decided this could be a fun little getaway for all of us.
When Jeff was booking our hotel, he saw one with a cool indoor pool and water slide!!

We decided that this would be where we were going to stay. When we got there, we decided that we are hotel snobs. It wasn't quite what we were expecting. But, the kids did have a lot of fun in the pool and on the slide, so that's something......isn't it??
Anyway....they boys practically spent the entire time going down this slide:

Lily spent her time just walking around the pool:

When Jeff got back to the hotel, he talked Lily into going down the slide with him:

She didn't hate it!

She even went down a second time! But after that she told Jeff she would go again next year. (Whenever she doesn't want to do something she says she'll do it next year, no matter what she is talking about. "I'll take a shower next year, I'll eat that chicken next year....you get the idea.)

While waiting for Jeff to get done at his conference the last day, we found the Statue of Liberty!!

The kids were pretty excited to see it. I told them the real one was quite a bit bigger than this one. :0)

Then we headed to the Sternberg Museum. This was one of the reasons we went to Hays with Jeff. None of us had ever been & we thought the boys would find it interesting.

There were a lot of cool exhibits. This is a skeleton of a fish inside another fish!

Glowing rocks!

That is one big leg!!

There were a lot of hands-on things the kids could do too!

There was even an art project!! You know I made them do it!

You cut out a little world, wrote what you would do to help the earth on it, and then traced you hand and cut that out and then stapled the earth to the hand.

Zach & Lily wrote "recycle" and Riley wrote, "save water".

Then we headed to the dinosaur section! The kids thought this sign was funny:

The dinosaurs moved and made sounds!

Lily said this one was nice because it was eating leaves.

After the dinosaurs, there was a little spot where you could pretend to dig for fossils. They got to wear little hats and use brushes to brush the sand away.

When we were done at the museum, we headed home. On the way, we stopped in Victoria, KS to see the Cathedral of the Plains. We had been told by several people to stop and look at it since we were so close anyway.

It is a beautiful church. It is also one of the 8 wonders of Kansas. I didn't even know there were "Wonders of Kansas"!

They built it by hand, and it is pretty cool to see how big it is and how much work went into it and that it was made by the local people.

This is one of the beautiful stained glass windows:

We didn't stay here long. One, the kids were NOT interested in this (and they thought we were going to make them go to mass), and a two, Zach was not feeling well by this time. In fact our trip home was not fun at all. Poor Zach threw up 4 times on the way home. :0( I felt so sorry for him. He was already feeling better the next day though, so I'm glad it didn't last long.

That was our mini vacation. It was actually kind of relaxing to just be away from home and not have anything that needed to get done, and the kids had fun just swimming and watching movies. I usually feel like I need a vacation when we get back from vacation, but not this time. =)

Sleepover & S'mores!

In our quest to cross things off of our summer fun list, we had our Logan cousins over for swimming, s'mores, and a sleepover! First, they all jumped in the pool:

After awhile, it started to get cloudy & we could hear thunder in the distance, so we decided to do the s'mores before it rained.

Poor Elayne was scared of the thunder, so she ate her s'more inside:

After the s'mores, it was clear that the rain was not going to hit us, so the kids jumped back into the pool to swim some more!

Then it was time for popcorn, candy, and a movie!

Finally, we got blankets and pillows out and got them all settled for bed.

We put on another movie, thinking that they would fall asleep during it. We thought wrong. ;0) They were still wide awake at almost midnight!! But they did go to sleep shortly after that, and were back up at 7:20. At least they slept that late...right??

I think they all had fun!