Thanksgiving in Dallas

We found out that our good friends, the Baileys, just moved to Dallas earlier this year. We met the Baileys when we were stationed in Florida. We instantly clicked and a friendship formed. Over the years we have had children within a month or two of each other and the same gender...imagine that! So, when both of us were staying in Texas for Thanksgiving, we decided to spend it together! It was fun to see each other and meet each other's kids. It was nice because each kid had a playmate...CJ and Hunter are the same age, Preston and Levi, and Aparri and Autumn. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving meal...thank you Baileys!!! They even remembered pretzel jello!!! After 4 years....wow. Then, on Friday we went to the Heard Natural History Museum which had a bug display...perfect, robotic dinosaurs..double perfect, and trails to run around and have fun...triple perfect. On the way home we stopped at a fabulous park and had a picnic lunch and played. We finished the afternoon off by going to the movies and seeing Tangled. Thanks Erin and Jed for a wonderful weekend.

Common Stop

We bought a season pass to the zoo when we got here to San Antonio...and it is becoming one of our favorite spots...we have a new adventure every time we go!!! This last time, we discovered a beach, water, play area and a nice grassy picnic area...these two areas captured our zoo experience, we didn't hardly see any animals, but that's okay, we had a blast, burnt lots of energy and hey...there is always next time!

First TP Experience

As we were going on our Sunday walk, the boys saw that a house in our neighborhood had gotten TP'ed. They laughed and then started asking all the questions...what is that in the tree, who did that, how naughty, etc... well, the boys were surprised to hear that Mom and Dad have done their fair share of TP'ing in their day....so then we had to explain that it is usually done by people's friends and that it means you like them. Well, you can see where this is going...they immediately wanted to go and TP someone's house THAT night. We were able to convince them to hold out for the next weekend, when it was their friend Zeke Fuller's birthday. So, after the party, we snuck to their car, and the boys had their first TP'ing experience...and they did pretty good. We then talked about how we keep it a secret...and they will never know who it was that did it...well, I guess we have to work on the secret keeping because that lasted about...oh 2 minutes after they saw each other. "Hey Zeke, guess what?"....yeah...you know the rest.

A Circular Nativity

The other day, we passed by one of our little nativities and saw that some of the figures had been moved. We thought it was arranged a little funny, and were about to put it back the way it was "supposed" to be arranged, but we stopped and asked Preston if he moved the nativity. He said yes, and we asked why. His response was precious, "They are giving baby Jesus a blessing" as you can see..he had placed all the figures in a circle around the baby Jesus. This brought a smile to our faces. Kids are more aware of what happens around them then we think. This was a suttle reminder to us that sometimes it pays off to stop and ask kids why they do certain things...you just might be surprised and pleased by their responses.

Christmas Decorations already?

Yes, this year we were definitely one of THOSE people. We put our Christmas decorations up atleast a week if not more than a week BEFORE Thanksgiving....yes, yes, we usually try to hold off until the day after Thanksgiving, but...we figured since Christmas decorations are really the only "decorations" we brought with us...might as well put them up right? The kids sure didn't argue! We had lots of fun dressing up as Santa, reindeer, and everything inbetween (yes, our poor reindeer got attacked by Santa, is that legal?)...Aparri had her moment of glory as she put up the Christmas tree top with Daddy. Now...we will see how long Laura can convince Clay to leave them up AFTER Christmas!!! Valentines day maybe?????

Free Museum Day!!

On Veteran's day, the San Antonio Children's museum, gave free admission to military members...so we took advantage of the offer and headed downtown. The kids loved it...and honestly, Clay and Laura didn't have such a bad time either!! There was a trolley, an amazing tube maze that sucked balls through it and filled up a container and then when the container was full all the balls dumped down, there was an airplane, house, a grocery store - full of groceries, shopping carts, baskets, and then electronic cash registers where the kids could scan the items (I thought that was perfect...I know my kids love to "help" us check out of the store all the time - by scanning the items, writing their names, pushing the buttons, etc.), there was even a cow that scquirted water, and last, but definitely not least, a tractor loader that the kids could control - make it move forward, dump the load and move backward....heaven...kid heaven... after a fun trip to the museum we finished the day off right by stopping in for some pizza, where Aparri got in some good driving lessons!