Splash Pad

According to the camera, we visited the splash pad on May 31st. It was our first Stephen's Lake Park outing of the summer, and the facility is really very nice (and free!).

The kids wear rash guards to cut down on the need for sunscreen and the potential to burn. They look like iminiature surfers. I've been noticing more and more kids wearing them. Amelie has a regular swimsuit for evening and indoor water play, but she asked to wear her "trunks" to indoor swim lessons this morning.

Sam the Horse

It's a good thing the kids have Dada because the likelihood I'd let them ride around on me like a horse approaches zero.

I can't help it with the gifs. I love her momentarily freaked-out face in this one.

Trike

Little Gymmers at the ARC.

This picture is blurry, but I like it anyway. My camera is good (in fact, it's better than my photography skills) but  I end up deleting a lot due to blur.

We met up with our friends Kara and her daughter (who's almost exactly in between Amelie and James in age) and she's the one walking the balance beam in the background here, which is kind of funny. We were the only ones at the gym for a while.

Madelynn was very interested in the carrying capacity of the tricycles. 

Shauna took this one with her phone on another visit. We decided it looked like an album cover. (And also somewhat like the kids put themselves in time-out.)

Amelie Paint Monster

Why is painting oneself so much more appealing than painting the butcher paper?

MORE GIFs!

Bootheel

When we were in the bootheel, we visited my great aunt Helen (who is 99 years old!) and my grandpa Leroy in the nursing home. James climbed right up into her walker like it was a stroller, so she obliged and pushed him right around.

 Amelie climbed a tree.

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Nana Jana sent me some of the highlights of the kids' visit with her while we were in Mexico: 

We went to the Bootheel Youth Museum in Malden. Favorite thing to do was climb & cross the bridge but alas no pictures because it was all Nana Jana could do to keep up.

There was more tree climbing. 

And the best part of having a brick house is the opportunity to decorate with chalk. AJ said this was an elephant.

We were all worried that James wouldn't sleep well, but I rocked him while reading a book with much success until he figured out my m.o. and from then on he wanted to read on the couch.

I was also afraid I wouldn't be able to decipher his speech, but when he cried in the bathtub & I asked if he wanted out he replied very plainly that no, he just wanted Amelie out.

~~~

Aunt Lana kept the kids at the daycare a few days. She had James in the building with the babies and Amelie was over with the big kids. I got this picture while we were on the plane waiting to leave for Mexico City: 

More pictures of James sent from Aunt Lana. He got a lot more attached to his "Minky" when he weaned and then he got super-duper attached to it while we were gone.

This is how he sleeps at home, too.

Somebody's having fun!

I asked Amelie what she liked about visiting the bootheel and she said playing with the kid in the red shirt at Sunshine School and also the bridge at the fire station (which I believe was the part of the trip to the Bootheel Youth Museum that mom wrote about, too).  The night we called after they visited the museum, Amelie immediately shouted, "I MILKED A COW!!!" with no context or anything. 

Flossing

James is a huge copycat, which is not always a bad thing. He is also *really* into brushing his teeth, which is definitely not a bad thing.

Baby boy wanted to floss!

Vacation!

There was a request to put these pictures straight on the blog and not just Facebook, which is probably good because having them on the blog is really the only way pictures make it into the family photo albums I make (eventually).

At the airport in D.F. Apparently I cracked the code for the wireless password outside the Taba Bar and forgot to let people in on it.

At the Governor's Palace.

It was humid. There were murals.

Best dinner, even though we didn't get the fancy bag-holders everyone else was getting.

It's always fun to see the huge numbers on your balance at the ATM. We got something like 13 pesos to the dollar. 

This was one of the art pieces in the house we rented. Here are more and better pictures of the house from the VRBO listing. 

At Sabrina's taco stand. 

Sabrina! (Who was warmly written about in the New York Times.)

Crystal drinking Cristal soda.

Why did I take so many pictures of people with food? Oh yeah, because the food was amazing. Breakfast tacos.

Churros.

Almost all of the pictures are from the day we went to the ruins at Uxmal.

In front of the pyramid of the magician.

This is the back of the pyramid (or maybe it's actually the front?) that we were standing in front of earlier.

We went with our friends Kade and Caitlin, who planned the whole thing because they are awesome.

Note the elephant trunks. Our tour guide assured us that these were due to primordial mastodon memories in the Mayan people. (Also that the Mayans came from space and that the handprint of Jesus was visible inside one of the arches.)

The top of this arch, in fact.

I'm fairly certain this was the courtyard of the birds (or something). I also found out on the trip that my Spanish has deteriorated completely. That, and everyone saw me and my fuzzy hair and immediately decided to practice their English.

Kade took lots of pictures, too, and some of them made it onto his blog: http://citizenkade.com/blog/

A dude picture.

Chick pics.

Super-cool view after we climbed up another building. Some of the ruins you could climb on and some were off limits, but the lizards scrambled up everything. I imagine I looked something like a tourist in Missouri excitedly pointing out every squirrel when I saw an iguana. (But the blue ones were really cool.)

Sam says, "Take a picture! It looks like I'm going to fall off!"

Here we are waiting on it to get dark so that the light show can begin.

There was a light (and sound!) show.

And now on to even more pictures of food! Note the two boiled eggs.

Sam and his mole.

We had a great trip, and the kids weren't even traumatized (though Amelie told me when we got back that when she was a grown-up, she was taking her kids with her everywhere). Plus, we saw Usher at the Atlanta airport on the way home.