Living Planet Aquarium

Paul had the day off on Veteran's Day and we wanted to go out and do something as a family. Since there were all sorts of Veteran's Day deals for Veterans we decided to go do some. We went to lunch at Texas Roadhouse and Paul got his lunch for free since he's a Veteran. Then we went over to the Living Planet Aquarium. The aquarium had free admission for all veterans too. The girls and I have memberships to the aquarium. It wasn't too busy, and it was fun!

The Stingray were pretty active in the touch pool and kept going up the side of the pool.

Kaylee and Paul stayed at the touch pool for quite a while but Gabby wanted to go over to the Coral Play area.

After we left the Stingray pool we went over to the penguins. The penguins were really active too. Almost all of them were in the water swimming around. It was fun watching them jump in the water and dive, swim around, and then jump out just to do it again.

Playing in the snow

Last weekend we got quite a bit of snow. The kids were so excited to go out and play in the snow. They went out to the backyard and built a snowman, then another, and another, and just kept building until they had 5 different sizes of snowmen. They came inside and warmed up and then went out and built a super tall snowman.

The giant snowman tipped over so they decided to use it as a surf board...or a snow board. Anyway, they were surfing in the snow. After they were done surfing they made it into a table and chairs.

They played until my parents came over after they had visited my grandma to see if Kaylee and Gabby wanted to ride with them to their house. They jumped at the opportunity. Then they built a snow stage in my parent's back yard. They loved playing in the snow!

Halloween Fun

I'm a little behind on a few posts...I've been busy with life. I'm back posting a little bit. So, here we are back on Halloween fun.

On Saturday, October 29 we went to Trunk or Treating and the Chili Cookoff at our church. We signed up to decorate our trunk and hand out candy for the trunk or treating. Paul decorated the trunk and had lots of fun. He found a motion activated spider that goes up and down. He put twinkle lights up, Kaylee's pumpkin that she carved, spider webs, and lots of little spiders on the spider webs. We didn't know when we got there, but they had trunk judging for who decorated the best. Our trunk won for the scariest trunk award. Paul won a McDonald's gift card for his excellent decorating skills.

On Halloween we went to my dad's office for trick or treating around his office, and for lunch. Roman and Hudson also went trick or treating around the office with Kaylee and Gabby.

My dad even got into Halloween dressing up in Gabby's Witches hat.

Murder Mystery Party

My cousin Tiffany LOVES to party. She can find ANY reason to have a party, and she is good at finding an occasion for a party. I love Tiffany. She is definitely one of my favorite people. She invited us to a Murder Mystery party that was on Saturday (the 22nd) and made sure that we would be there. The Murder Mystery party had a myths and fairytale character theme. There were fairies, vampires, werewolves, and Camelot characters. There were also "watchers" which were humans responsible for making sure the mythical characters remained hidden from the human world...anyway, now that I've got the basic story line down...We had dinner, socialized with the other characters, and find clues to figure out the mystery. Here are a few pictures of the different groups in their costumes, as well as almost the whole group (missing Tiffany, me, and my Aunt Nadine because we were all playing with our cameras.)

My Aunt Nadine with her amazingly delicious witches brew (actually she was Morgan LaFay from Camelot, and it was delicious root beer)

Tiffany really went all out with the decor. It was amazing.

The whole group (except Nadine, Tiffany and I...we were fiddling with cameras.)

The Camelot group: Nadine: Morgan LaFay, Andrea: Morganna, Tim: Merlin, Josh: Arthur, Sarah: Guinevere

The Watchers Group: Melissa, Kelsey, Paul, ?, and Amanda?

The Vampire Coven: Brandon: Prince Allendro, ?:Natasha, Amelia: Cynthia, Samuel: Gregori

Fae Court: King Oberon, Queen Tatiana, Puck, and Nineve

Werewolves: Sam: Seth, Jill: Bastet, Kelsey: Isis, ?

Spook-A-Palooza

The other day Wendy called me and told me about a Halloween event at the South Towne Expo Center sponsored by the KUTV Kid's Club. It looked like fun so we decided to go. It was a lot less crowded than the Witch Festival at Gardner Village.

The first thing the kids caught sight of when we walked in the door was the Massive bounce houses. We headed toward the back corner to play at the bounce houses and happened upon Trick-O-Treat Alley. We decided to go through there before it got to crazy as the day went on. It was mostly free kid's meal coupons, and vouchers to get people into the businesses. Wendy and her boys caught up with us there.

After the girls played in the bounce houses for a few minutes we decided to head over to the princess area to see the princesses. They got to make bracelets, listen to stories, and dance with the princesses. Kaylee even got glitter put on her face by Rapunzel.

After we were done seeing the princesses we got a call from Tiffany saying that she was just getting there. We met up with her, and then found Wendy again. We looked around at all the many vendor/business booths and we came upon some clowns that made balloon shapes. We were going to participate in a photo contest thing, but after it took a while Wendy went to look around, and we stuck around a few more minutes, and my kids were getting anxious to look around again so we went exploring through all the booths some more and found Wendy at a face painting booth. Roman wanted the Superman logo painted on his face, Kaylee wanted an swirly design, and Gabby wanted a flower. They turned out pretty cool!

After that we met back up with Tiffany and her boys and it was time for more bounce house fun. Hudson LOVED the bounce houses most of all. After more bouncing fun we were ready for lunch and we headed out of the Spook-A-Palooza.

Gardner Village - Witch Fest

It's Fall break in Utah, and all the kids are out of school for the weekend. We decided it would be fun to get together with some friends and family we don't see nearly often enough. We went to the Witches Festival at Gardner Village with Wendy, Jessica, Nicola, and Wendy's neighbor Amy. It was an Excellent idea that I think EVERYONE in the Salt Lake Valley had at the same time. The place was PACKED...P-A-C-K-E-D...PACKED! We made the best of it, and had fun looking for all the witches on the scavenger hunt. We found all but one of them but it was really time to leave and get away from the crowd, so we didn't worry about the last one.

My girls were especially excited to go this year because they are both dressing up as witches for Halloween. They dressed up in their costumes to go to the Witch Fest, and loved it. We got there early and decided to look around while we waited, and I took some cute pictures of the girls while we were waiting. First my little witches found a cauldron to stir up some brew.

The kids were saying they were hungry pretty much as soon as we got there, so we pulled out our picnic and found a spot to enjoy our lunch before looking for more witches. We had SOOOO much fun seeing our friends Nicola and her kiddos again. We have had a really hard time getting our schedules to match, and we were finally able to get together again. Her kids have grown so much since we last saw them.

We got all the kids together on a brick wall and managed to get a picture. We didn't however get a picture with all of the kids looking at the camera...and there are 2 kids missing that were with us. Wendy's friend Amy's kids didn't make it in the picture.

Here's a picture of Kaylee and Gabby with their cousins that came with us. We LOVE going to do things with my sis-in-law and her kids.

By the time we were done my little witches needed to sit down with one of the Gardner Village witches and "sit-a-spell" before heading back to the car out in the far field.

We had so much fun, but next year we will be sure that we don't go when it is fall break, and everyone else in Salt Lake is there too.