End of March

For mommy school we are working on "The Runaway Bunny" and one of our activities was to reenact the part where the momma bunny walks a tightrope with an umbrella for balance. James was all about this because this kid has an unnatural love for umbrellas. He will play and play and play with one until it is broken beyond all repair and then cry and beg for a new one.

One of our mommy school crafts was gluing cotton balls in the letter "B" shape and there was a rare 5 minutes when both boys were sitting at their table doing their own art project peacefully. It was amazing! Rett had full reign of the color wonder markers (those things are amazing, totally takes the stress out of letting your kids color!) while James did his gluing.

Anthony took one of the baby crabs that ended up in the shrimp net and gave it to James to play with while they were out cleaning the boat. A few days later, I found this Easter egg in James room and when I opened it I found a stinky dead crab! I wish I could say that I was surprised, but it is so normal for me to find dead bugs, lizards, frogs in random places that it didn't faze me in the slightest. I was just surprised that James let me throw it away. Usually he cries and demands to keep whatever dead thing we found.

Rett has decided that he loves to dump out this bucket and run around with it on his head. Then when he gets tired of that, he puts it on the floor and stands on it to see what the world looks like a few inches higher.

The Saturday before Easter a nearby church advertised a morning egg hunt for kids. I had never gone to one like this before, but I was so glad that we went! The boys had so much fun, everyone was very nice and kind to each other and it was an all around feel-good experience, which was such a surprise because I really dislike the city-run egg hunts. Those always end up with kids and parents pushing everyone down in their desperation to get more eggs and I just hate the atmosphere of it. This was totally different and so much fun!

The little ones went first to their roped off area and Rett loved running around and picking up eggs.

While I was with Rett, my mom went with James to the 4 and 5 year old area. James could have gotten a lot more eggs, but he was picking up mostly green eggs for the first part of it. Towards the end he picked up whatever he could find, but according to him his favorite color is green so he needs all the green eggs!

He ended up with two special eggs with stickers on them so he got to pick out two prizes from the prize table. On top of that, each kid got their own goodie bag with treats and small toys! When we got home, we had so much fun just going through everything and playing with it all. We will definitely go back next year!

Rett still isn't that interested in sitting still for stories at bedtime, but every once in awhile I try to see if he will sit through one. He lasts about 3 pages and then he is up and running around. I can't wait until he loves to sit and read with me the way James does now!

Shrimping & Silver Springs

We've caught the shrimping fever at our house this season! Last year Anthony and his parents bought new nets and new lights to prepare for this year. Anthony has been watching the tides and the shrimping reports and it finally looked like a good night to go. They left the house around 5pm so that they could get a good parking spot at the boat ramp. Once the sun set and the tide started going out, the shrimp started coming!

Anthony has a net that stays on the back of the boat to catch shrimp while everyone else is on the front of the boat catching shrimp with their own nets. When he pulled it up to check on it, they were all shocked to see just how much shrimp were in there!

They got home around 11pm and at first they tricked me and acting all disappointed like they hadn't caught anything. Then they opened up the cooler! There were so many shrimp! They caught the limit, which is 5 gallons per boat.

Since the shrimp are only running a few months out the year and the tides were still good, we decided to go out again the next night. This time I got to go and see what all of the fuss was about.

Here is Anthony, getting the lights ready before the sun goes down.

Me and my honey!

The sunset was beautiful to watch while we were waiting. Everyone gets their boat into position and gets set up and then you just sit and wait and watch for the shrimp to start swimming by.

It was hard work scooping the shrimp through the water with the long poles for hours, but it was so much fun, you just didn't want to stop. If you did stop to rest a little bit, you would see all these big shrimp go by and think, "Man! I could have gotten that one!" In a few hours we got our limit of 5 gallons and we headed home by around 10:30pm.

After we got home, we had to rinse and separate out the shrimp into freezer bags. Look at the size of some of them!

I was completely exhausted, but we had a lot of fun catching our seafood for the next few months at least. Our freezer is so full that we aren't sure what we are going to do with any more that we catch this season. Anthony has sold some of it to some coworkers, but I think we are going to break down and buy a freezer for the garage so we can have a place to put all of it!

The morning after wearing myself out on the boat, I drove to Ocala to meet my mom, have lunch, and visit Silver Springs. Rett was not a happy camper on the car ride, but they were both really excited to run around at the park. James was also excited about going on a glass bottom boat ride!

Rett had so much fun running around,  the only problem was that he kept tripping over his feet and falling flat on his stomach. It doesn't seem to bother him though, he just gets up and keeps on running.

While we were waiting for the boat ride to start, I took a picture of all of us. I love these crazy boys!

The water was really clear and it was so cool to hear all about the different springs, how deep they are, and how long they have been there. James liked to see the fish, but his favorite were the turtles. If a turtle swam by, all the kids would yell, "TURTLE!" and get really excited.

The boat captain pointed out this tree on the tour. It is a palm tree that has grown out, down, and then up again making a large "U" shape. It is called horseshoe tree and the tradition is that if you get your picture taken inside the U, then you will have good luck. So we did!

It is pretty easy to feel lucky with these awesome boys of mine. I love going on adventures with them!

Chuck-e-Cheese, St. Augustine, & Helicopter Rides

We had a coupon for some free tokens at chuck-e-cheese for St. Patrick's day, so we decided to go and have lunch there. There were only a few kids there, so the noise was at a very manageable level :) When Chucky himself came out to dance with the kids and give out free tickets, there was only James and one or two other older kids. James didn't want to do the dance, but he agreed to do the "spin around" part. Afterwards, an employee came up and gave me 5 tokens for their "golden ticket" for James since he was the only one who participated. Score!

 He was a little scared of Chucky, so I had to be with him to get a picture.

Rett had fun walking around with us and trying to climb and get into everything. I lost track of him for just a few seconds and I found him climbing up the ramp of the ski ball games! Later he took a dive off of the seat and bit his tongue and there was blood everywhere. After that he just wanted to snuggle with Grandma.

James found a bag of glitter that was in his science experiment kit that he got for his birthday. (I think it was supposed to be for making a tornado in a 2 liter bottle so that you could see the water better). At nap time he decided to break into it and spread it all over his body, around his room, and on his bed. He wasn't wearing any clothes at the time, so it got alllll over him. I asked him why and he said because he "wanted to make me happy". He cried and put up a fuss when we got the vacuum out to clean it up because he wanted to keep his "sparkles". He also go upset when he had to take a bath and wash them off. So funny!

Anthony took a few days off of work to use up the rest of his vacation days for the year before he renews his contract in April. He wanted to do a lot of fishing, but I demanded that one of the days be spent as a family going to St. Augustine. We have never taken the boys and I knew they would have so much fun looking around at everything they have there.

On the drive there, James put a bowl on elephant's head and demanded I take a picture and send it to Grandma. He was laughing and cracking himself up about it. Later he would laugh and say, "remember when I put a bowl on elephant's head? Silly!"

We went to the Castillo de San Marcos fort first and James was very excited to explore the "castle". He especially loved the drawbridges.

There is a little place you can climb before you go into the main part of the fort, so James and Anthony checked it out. It was too narrow and steep for the stroller so I stayed behind with Rett.

 Rett wasn't too happy about having to stay in the stroller most of the time. It was just too crowded to let him get down most of the time.

 James loved the second, bigger drawbridge but the sun was in his eyes when I asked him to turn around for a picture, so this was the best I got:

 You can't take a stroller up the steps to the top of the fort, so we left it and let Rett run around with James. James had to go up to each and every cannon they had and pretend to fire it, so we definitely saw every corner. This was one of the little towers and Rett could not take his eyes off of the ceiling, as you can see.

While James was "firing" this cannon, Rett ran up and tried to sit on it.

While Anthony took James off exploring, they found a large wasps nest in a part of the fort. James insisted on taking a picture of it!

After exploring the fort, we walked around the historic district and ended up at Flagler college. We threw pennies in all of the fountains we came across and made sure to make a wish. James wished for "frogs" (the fountain shot water out of frogs' mouths), Anthony wished that we would have a good day and have fun, and I wished for hamburgers (I was a little hungry). The inside of the college is so beautiful and historic. It used to be a fancy hotel. Can you imagine going to school here?

The next day Anthony went fishing in the morning and in the evening we went to a carnival that was in town for the weekend. We walked around first to see which rides James was willing to ride. He didn't want to ride most of them, so we only got a few tickets. First up was this giant slide! James was too little to ride by himself (which he wanted to do by the way!) so he rode with Anthony. They both loved it!

Next was a semi-truck/train ride. He was the only one riding it, but he was focused the entire time on making sure he was steering correctly. He was also singing "All aboard the choo-choo train" as it went around.

Rett just chilled in the stroller and watched James do the rides. He was pretty sleepy, so he didn't protest staying put this time.

The last ride was this spinning dump truck ride. He was excited to drive the truck and at the end of it he had a long conversation with the ride operator about the mirrors on the truck. He was pointing to them and talking to her and she seemed kind of confused. I'm sure he was informing her that the pretend mirrors were not sufficient for safe driving :)

After we finished the rides James initially said he wanted to ride, he insisted that he wanted to ride more of them and that he wasn't scared of the bigger ones anymore. We were ready to go home by then and we didn't want to buy anymore tickets, so we told him that we needed to go home to get some sleep so that we could come back the next morning to have even more fun at the city expo! As we were walking back to the car, we were getting some funny looks and laughs, so we looked at Rett and found him lounging back like this:

Saturday morning we went to the city expo where all the local businesses set up booths and you can walk around collecting business cards, coupons, and free stuff. A lot of them have fun things for the kids and we ended up with a lot of balloons, candy, coloring books, and small toys. James spun a wheel at the booth for a local martial arts studio and he won two free private lessons! They had signs for helicopter rides, so we decided to check it out since James insisted that he wasn't scared anymore of the tall or scary rides. It wasn't that expensive and they didn't have an age minimum, so James and Anthony got to go!

Here they are, taking off!

Anthony got some good pictures while they were in the air. They both had such a blast!

James was so excited when he got off the helicopter, he ran straight across the field towards me spinning his "propeller arm"

He was telling me all about how they flew up in the air, then went sideways, and then flew straight down.

After the helicopter ride, we had to head home so that Anthony could get ready for a priesthood leadership meeting. We were walking quickly down the sidewalk to get to the car and a boy stopped us to give James a large bunch of balloons (I think they were taking down their booth and getting rid of their decorations). As we were tying them onto James arm, Anthony told James, "Oh no! Are these balloons going to make you fly up into the air??" James immediately reached over to grab onto Anthony's pants and looked a little worried. Then he thought about it for a second and grinned and said, "No way! I won't fly away because of gravity!" I love our little smarty pants!

That night everyone was pretty tired out. James feel asleep almost immediately after we put him to bed and Rett was extra snuggly. He climbed onto the couch and leaned over on me to watch what I was doing on the ipad. He didn't move a muscle for at least 10 minutes!

It was a busy, but very fun long weekend for us!