Temple Trip and Visit to Gainesville

We took a trip to the temple to walk around the grounds and have a family home evening lesson. It was hot and the sun was in our eyes, but we had a great time. Sometimes when you plan something like this, everyone is grumpy and it all falls apart but thankfully not this time! We really enjoyed it!

We weighed Baymax and even though he looks bigger since the last time we weighed him, he was about the same: 80 pounds. Maybe he is just growing more fluff?

Anthony decided to show off his trampoline skills to the boys:


The library had a visit from "Zoo Mom", a woman who has tons of reptiles on her property and comes around and does educational shows with them. I felt like she could be me in 30 years!

The boys and I drove to Gainesville for a few days for a small vacation with my family. Anthony stayed home since he was working, such a bummer.

They loooove the big shag rug at my brother's place. There is no way we could have a rug like that, it would be impossible to clean but it was fun to watch them roll around on it.

We checked out this awesome used bookstore my mom and brothers have been telling me about, and the boys convinced my mom to buy them pokemon toys. They were in heaven!

We jumped around at the Flip Factory (trampoline park) and then played their arcade games.

We visited a new hands-on museum funded by a grant from the guy who created Gatorade. The theme of the museum is innovation and invention. The favorite part was a room of robot animals:

Next to the museum is the most amazing park I have ever seen! It had so many different places to play, a shaded sand pit, a large splash pad, and anything else you could imagine. Even though it was crazy hot, the boys wanted to stay and play all day.

We stopped for dinner at my mom's favorite deli. I bought the boys a cookie to share and they took their pieces and kept breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces so that they could have "more" than the other. Boys!

The next day we visited the natural history museum and the butterfly rainforest. They have a really neat augmented reality screen on the wall that makes it look like prehistoric animals are walking around next to you. The boys loved it!

Butterflies!

Rett making a ridiculous face as usual!

More Summer Fun

We went to another magician show at the library. This time James got picked to be a helper!! He was so excited to finally get picked.

He had a lot of neat tricks, but this one he did with the spinning plates spoke to my soul. He was rushing back and forth trying to keep them all spinning and I just thought, "This is it! This is my life!!"

The boys have been taking turns pretending to be different animals on a leash and leading each other around.

One afternoon we decided to go bowling (air conditioning!!). The boys loved it and loved watching other people around us. James was obsessed with checking how much weight each ball was, and was very impressed when other bowlers would use heavy bowling balls.

After bowling we decided to check out a hot rod museum that I recently read about on a local mom blog. I figured they would love checking out all the antique cars and I was right. They loved it!

We decided to look at them all and then take their picture next to their favorite one. They couldn't pick just one favorite, so I let them choose a few.

I looked over one afternoon and the boys were watching tv like this. Rett was petting James and James was purring because he was pretending to be a cat. lol!

We decided to take a walk to the restaurant around the corner from our street and have dinner. We went there for my birthday last year and James has been asking to go back for a long time. While we were walking we saw this crazy looking flower! It even had what looked like citrus fruit hanging off of it. Anthony has an app on his phone that will identify what plants are if you take a picture of it, this turned out to be a passionflower. Neat!

Wearing capes to dinner:

The library had an 80's party, so we went and played 80's games, ate ring pops and pop rocks, made origami fortune tellers and listened to 80's music. We really have been loving the library this summer!