Field Trip: ZOO

So much fun! We met Heather and Cisco at the zoo and had a blast. We saw the trainers and the tiger, the baby elephant playing with a stick (sounds familiar... what little boy can refuse a good stick?), went to the petting zoo, craned our necks to watch the beautiful giraffes and got wet in the splash area. (not to mention crawling in a tunnel with pirahnas all around and watching the bats up close.)

Cousin Lovin'

We were lucky enough to have the cousins over for the evening. We found a magical formula to keep everyone smiling. Playing at the park+ pizza + popcorn & a movie = a happy little crowd.

Music to my ears

This is our piano that was built over 100 years ago. After a lengthy ordeal to get it up to Houston, my parents gave it to us for Christmas. It came from an old church in Corpus Christi and we're sure has many stories to tell. It still needs to be tuned and to have some keys fixed, but what a cool piano it is! Brooklyn just started taking piano lessons, so it gets lots of love these days.

Everything is Bigger In Texas

I'm sure you've heard the popular slogan about everything in Texas being bigger and better? Well, I don't know if I believe all of it, but I would definitely say they can claim that about the BUGS!!!

We have had this huge spider living on a bush right outside our front door. He is the closest thing we have to a pet. The web is very unique, it has a cottony-like area throughout the middle that is VERY thick. I looked him up on the web (no pun intended), he is not poisonous (thank goodness) and he makes that special area of thickness so that the birds will not fly through his web and ruin it. This is what he does:

• Spins giant web


• Sits in middle waiting for prey


• Eats misc. bugs


• Finishes off dinner by eating his web, which provides him with extra protein

I just hope he is there for Halloween, it would make things WAY more interesting!!!

Proud to be an American

We had the typical fourth of July celebration...parade, BBQ, family & friends, and FIREWORKS!!! It all began the night before when we hit the humongous fireworks store off of Northpark where you can buy fireworks of any shape or size... Tyler talks about that store year round, even though it's only open now and at New Year's time. We took our small selection of "extra-safe" fireworks to the register where the cop was standing to query where each customer was planning on lighting off at. (Fireworks are illegal in Kingwood, but since we live outside the boundary, we're OK) We had fun with the little snakes, poppers, and sparklers.

The Fourth in terms of weather was a huge BUST! It rained practically all day, that didn't stop us from going to our first parade. We met up with some friends and had fun, nobody complained about the rain, I'm guessing because there was so much candy to go around...
We went home and had a delcious BBQ, Jeff has become VERY proficient at the grill, which I love!!! After we had stuffed ourselves, we met up with more friends and went downtown to the Shell Houston Fireworks program... which happens to be the largest land based show in the country. WOW!
Notable events at the festival:

• Jeff's partner giving him a special access code for parking (which we thought we were really cool to have and invited our friends to use too)----It didn't work...that's embarassing! We had to call the security guard 2 times.



• Buying snow cones for the family and it costing a small fortune



• Getting to put our own flavors on the snow cones at the flavor station and Tyler's ending up being more flavor than ice (yikes!)--- and him loving every bit of it!



• Tyler and Jeff drooling over and taking pictures in front of the real NASCAR race car (previous to this, Tyler had thought the coolest race car ever is Jeff's car )



• Watching an amazing firework display to rival any...

Priceless---a day full of fun memories with our family and good friends.

Summertime News...

This summer has been a blast so far! We have been lucky enough to have Jeff's sister Heather and her family move here to Houston! YEAH!!! This move was in the works for quite some time, so we are glad to finally call them neighbors, not to mention the kids having cousins to play with. How much more fun can one summer get??? Well, throw in a trip to Grandma and Papa's, fireworks twice, a baseball game from the 3rd row right behind the catcher, almost every other day at the pool, LOTS (and I mean LOTS) of popsicles and you've got a pretty smokin' summer!