The prettiest of them all...

My silly boy. Believe it or not, it was his Daddy who helped him with his new look. Carter came in the kitchen and said to me "Now I'm the prettiest of them all." Indeed!



And here's some more pure silliness...

A to Z at the Park

Here's a creative & educational activity from last month! My friend Lisa had shared this link, which mentions going on an A to Z walk. I thought it was a GREAT idea for fun, free kid entertainment! So we grabbed the camera, a notebook to keep track of our letters, and headed to the park. Carter REALLY got into it, he thought it was tons of fun. Here's what we came up with...

A is for Air.


B is for going Barefoot.


C is for Carter next to a Cactus.


D is for dandelion.


E is for ESCAPEE!


F is for Frog.


G is for Grill.


H is for Hill.


I is for the Interesting part of the park.


J is for Jump!!


K is for Kid.


L is for Leaf.


M is for Mud.


N is for Numbers.


O is for Orange shirt.


P is for Pelican.


Q is for the Quiet part of the park.


R is for Rock.


S is for Swing.


T is for T-rex.


U is for Up a tree.


V is for Very hard. ("but not for me!")


W is for Wrong Way up the slide.


X is for X. hee hee


Y is for it's good to be Young.


and Z is for Zooming down the slide!


Yes some were a bit of a stretch, but we did our best. Fun day at the park!!

Bluebonnet Photos

I'm trying to play a little catch-up here on the blog, once again it's gotten away from me! This first batch of photos are from back on March 27. The show of bluebonnets was really great this year - these were taken in our neighborhood just as they were starting to peek. I meant to go out and try again, but I waited to long and now they are fading. These are a bit washed out thanks to the bright sunshine. Carter did GREAT in these photos - Courtney, not so much. She was having fun making "I'm not going to smile, you can't make me" faces. Grrr.


So my favorite shots from the day are more candid ones when she wasn't looking at the camera, like this:
And this:


Here's a few others....


And of course a gratuitious bluebonnet shot. So pretty!


The Indian Paintbrush were looking good this year too:


Hooray for spring in Central Texas!

Let's go fly a kite, up to the highest height...

Yesterday Aunt Laura, Uncle Brad & Morgan came over and brought their kite - Carter did such a great job!!! (Well, with lots of help from Aunt Laura, of course!) :-)



Thanks for stopping by today!

Trip to "Hueco" - Mammoth bones, geocaching & the zoo!

On Thursday of this week, Uncle Jon took the day off from work and went on a little daytrip with us up to Hueco - or Waco as it's more commonly spelled. I learned on this trip that Waco is named after the Hueco Indians who settled in that spot along the Brazos river, so I had to mention it in this blog post! :-) The main purpose of our trip was to visit the newly opened Waco Mammoth Site.


Here's Courtney along the trail that leads from the welcome center back to the dig site.


Columbian mammoth bones were found at this site back in 1978. For the past 30 yrs they worked to excavate most of the mammoths, so the site wasn't open to the public. Now they've built a shelter over some bones that are still in the ground - it's pretty cool, you're looking at a REAL excavation site!


Here's a close-up of some of the bones. We learned that Columbian mammoths were different than Woolly mammoths - they were larger, and didn't have the thick hair since they lived in warmer climates - Woolly mammoths were farther north.


Uncle Jon and I found this site to be pretty darn cool - first time we'd seen an actual dig site right where they discovered it! But, the interest level lasted for maybe about five minutes with the kids. So that was our visit!

Uncle Jon has taken up a new hobby - geocaching. Turns out there's this whole secret world of hidden treasure - there's probably some that you pass by everyday and don't even know about! How it works is you learn the coordinates of a cache from the geocaching website, and program it into your GPS. You go where the GPS leads you - hunt around for the treasure - sign a little log sheet and put it back for the next person to find. Jon checked to see if there were any hidden near the mammoth site, and sure enough there were! Here are the treasure hunters off on their quest...


Signing the log...


Carter and Uncle Jon are the Geocaching Kings! Or Kings of the Mountain! Or something.



The mammoth site is only a couple miles away from the Cameron Park Zoo. Since the whole mammoth visit and geocaching was finished pretty quickly, and we had done the two hour drive up to Waco, we decided a zoo visit was a grand idea too! The Cameron Park Zoo is really nice - I highly recommend you visit it. It has a lot of shade (key in Texas!), a majority of the animals can be seen by little people without having to lift them up to see over fences, and it's a good size - nice, but not so big that the kids are beyond exhausted when you're done (well, except mine were - but we started at the zoo kind of late...) :-) Here's Carter near one of the first exhibits - Lemur Island - but he was checking out the turtles!


Carter sitting on a komodo dragon - well ok, a komodo dragon STATUE!


Say WHAT?! This REAL komodo dragon isn't as big as the one I sat on?!?


Near the orangutan exhibit, my little monkeys tried to swing like the apes...


Mommy loved being this close to her favorite animal...


Courtney decided she needed a little rest...


...but she got her second wind just in time to do a little pow-wow in the teepee...


...while Carter checked out the bison.


Another thing the kids loved was this cool slide that goes right through the otter tank!


Here's my little bug trying to be a butterfly, but not quite getting where her head is supposed to go.


Still not quite right, but cute!


And finally, Carter hanging out in the snake tunnel. I told him to "peek" out of the snake's mouth for the photo - apparently he thought "peeking" meant "winking".


Hooray for Hueco!