Wrapping Things Up

Well, final full week in Colorado.  That's a lot to take in.  We had a good week together, and there was a fair share of craziness towards the end of it.  Everything looks like it's progressing just right to get us on our way on Tuesday.  Yeesh, that's still crazy to think of.  Well on Saturday we were able to make it out to the zoo, and everyone got to ride the carousel which they were all very happy about, and they even all rode an animal that went up and down!  It was so fun we had to go again even. 

Jumping back to the start of the week, the next door neighbors roof was replaced, and the roofer stopped by to let us know they'd clean up our yard and everything, and gave the kids some tape measurers.  They have been quite the hit, and Grayson especially loves to wander around and measure things.

On Wednesday Monica took the kids to the children's museum.  We've never been when it's warm, and it looks like there were some fun things to do outside, like this water geyser.  

Grayson climbing into the apple truck and enjoyed driving it around town.

There's a big ropes course of sorts outside the museum that's only open when it's warm.  I went and looked at it a few times during the winter when it wasn't open, but the kids got to try it out.  They had a lot of fun exploring, but they told me they didn't dare go on the slides.  They're probably at least 60 feet long, and that was just a bit too much for them.

We had to return our propane tanks before we moved, so that meant it was time to grill up everything we had left in the freezer!  After I finished grilling I left the grill on for a bit to burn up so I could come scrape it off and clean it, and when I came back a minute later it had all caught fire!  That was pretty crazy.  This is why you never grill right next to your house!  I thought about letting it burn out, but it seemed pretty intense so I grabbed the hose.

After dinner that night we gave the kids some ice cream cones.  They all looked very cute, and like they get along all the time, while they were eating them.  It was a wonderful moment! :)

I went to a game night Wednesday night, and when I was driving home there was a big rain storm.  Not only that, but there was some intense lightning.  Unfortunately it was all at the start of the drive, and I didn't capture any of it.

Thursday we had everything in suitcases and it was time to live like a hotel because the movers were coming to pack our house!  Turns out they only came in the afternoon that first day, and just to pack up wardrobe boxes.  Still good we had clothes in suitcases, but we didn't need to be quite as ready to be packed as we were.  Anyway, as part of this endeavor, we went for simple and on hand foods to eat, which included cereal for breakfast.  Grayson quickly found his spoon to be a hinderance, and just went for it.

Monica took the kids to the library, and really to the splash pad out front.  They met up with a bunch of other friends there and all had a great time.

That evening, Jelly decided to explore her new domain.  She found the highest place she could perch in our room, boxes and all.

Friday the movers returned to pack up all of everything else, and roofers came to replace the roof.  Well, they ended up just ripping off the shingles and putting something down to keep it waterproof and leaving halfway through the day... and still haven't been back.  They were supposed to come yesterday, but didn't, and when we got home from church today we found them here, going through our dumpster of furniture we threw out.  They were going to work on our house, but since we were home they headed out to let us be...  I'm starting to get a little annoyed, and so help me if they don't get the roof done tomorrow while the movers are here loading up the truck!

We had some nuts rain on Thursday, and there were even two tornados around Denver.  Nothing right here where we are, but one was 5 miles away.  Anyway, we got some more hail and a lot of rain.  There were some places around here that got baseball sized hail, so I'm really glad it missed us.  On Friday Monica took the girls to dance camp, and then Grayson to the trail to walk around.  Grayson loves walking on the trail and had places he wanted to go.  However... things were flooded, and so they had to drive around and try different places.  Grayson's goal was to find and walk on the "brown bridge" which was a  bridge under construction, but they had to go by where we were playing the other day and I'm pretty sure the water was touching the bottom of the bridges there and where we played was all under water this time.  The water currents also look swift enough that I wouldn't have let the girls go wade into the middle of the stream this time.

Good news though, there were still plenty of sticks and pine cones, and as of coming home from church today, they're still in the car.

Friday evening Jessica Lilak and her husband Tony came over for dinner!  I haven't seen her in a few years, and it was great to get together and catch up.  I took a picture of all the kids and Monica with her, but Monica's eyes are closed tight, so we'll go with this picture instead.

Saturday we went to the zoo!  I really love going to the zoo.  When we walked in, a worker told us about an animal encounter thing happening in a half hour.  We thought it was for the bear, but it was for the white raccoons next door.  They are leucistic.  They were found as pups, and couldn't be released back into the wild because they'd just die being white, so the zoo took them in.  One of them really loves to sleep in the food shoot!

Here are the kids watching them dig food out of ice.  A keeper brought in a tub of ice with some yummy treats for them, and we got to watch them eat for a little bit.

We went in the tropical house, and Grayson loved the frogs.  Mostly the bright blue ones.  They have poison dart frogs there, and he didn't want to leave them behind.

When we got to the car we saw it was 90 degrees out today.  Not too shabby.  The good news is that I didn't think it felt too hot outside.  The bad news is that it's still a lot hotter in Texas right now.  Anyway, the zoo has misters out, and we definitely took advantage whenever we walked by.

At various places around the zoo they will have volunteers doing animal showings.  We walked by this one a few times, and earlier in the day the kids all touched some lizard.  This time there was a snake, and Brooke wanted to go feel it.

We also went on the carousel.  The kids had so much fun I let them all go a second time.  The sad news is if I had thought about it from the start, I could have got a 10 punch pass for basically the same price and they could have all had a third time too.  I could have even hopped on one on the last go around.

Grayson loved it.  The girls wanted to ride ones that went up and down, so he said he did too.  When I first put him on he sat up there for a little, and then started asking me to get him down.  But once it got going he loved it.  I think it's funny that he was nervous when it was standing still, but once it moved then it was great to be up that high.

And finally last night we went to Butterfields for some ice cream.  We all got cones.  I'm going to miss Butterfields, and I really hope we can find a good ice cream place around our new house.

It's pretty customary for us to try each others' flavors, and Grayson will do anything he can to get an extra lick.

And I mean anything.  He ended up commandeering Monica's cone with quite a bit left and alternated eating his "three" ice creams.  He's not always a good eater, but he definitely knows what he wants.

Friday we also had a roll away dumpster dropped off at our house so we could toss some old furniture we have.  When we pulled out the couch we were greeted with this.  Mind you, Monica cleaned under there not all that long ago.  I think our kids just try to put stuff under the couch.

Today was our goodbye Sunday at church.  Winry even got a picture of her with Mr. Brother Pez, who is now sometimes called something like exciting superman, or something like that.  I wanted to get Mr. Brother Pez in here though because I'm not sure he's been in the blog much.

Well, that's all I've got for now.  Tomorrow they're coming to pack up all our stuff, and finish our roof, and pick up our propane tanks... sheesh.  Hope it all goes smoothly.  I'm interested to see how far I make it through the day before they need to take my folding desk I'm using for work and my chair.  Should be interesting.

To Utah and Back

What a week.  Not only did we wake up in Utah to start it all off, but when we made it back to Parker it was time to get through our to do list of places we had to go again before leaving!  We even stopped at our favorite places on the drive, such as Little America for ice cream!  There's a chance we may never drive that way again... That's just crazy to think.  We got lunch there, and of course topped it off with ice cream, which everyone enjoyed.

While we were at my parents house I happened to poke in a drawer and find this!  I never did any document searching, I was just playing with Grayson next to it and happened to open it up.  It's from mother's day when I was 6.

On Monday mid-morning we went for a hike in Mueller Park Canyon.  It was super pretty, and a lot of fun.  We made it about a half mile, and then there was a snake on the side of the trail.  I got a stick to move the snake away so we could continue on, and it got it to turn around, but it was pretty fat looking, so I'm pretty sure it had recently eaten and didn't want to move at all!  Brooke didn't want to walk by it, so that's where we turned around.

On the way out, Grayson and I went down to check out the creek again.  It's a bit more fierce than the creek by our house here...  More on that later.

On Monday evening my sisters took Monica and the girls out to see the new Little Mermaid.  The girls LOVED it and have talked about it to some extent most days since.  It also looks like they got to go to one of those cool recliner movie theaters.

You may be thinking "did Grayson and Alex do something comparably awesome?"  And the answer is a resounding YES!  We... got out those pigs from the day before... :)  The important thing is that Grayson was having the time of his life with them.  Also, we turned on the NBA finals game and watched Denver win it all!  While we've lived here Denver has won a Super Bowl, a Stanley Cup, and an NBA championship!  It was really nice of the Nuggets to not let us down!

Oh, Grayson also started doing headstands that evening as well.  And no, he was not trying to sommersault over, he very much wanted to be up on his head.

On Tuesday we drove back home.  We wanted to get back for activity days that evening, as it was Brooke's last before we moved.  As mentioned, we stopped in Little America, and we ate on the grass next to the dinosaur.  We all had our fun on it.  Winry slid down the tail, and Brooke and Grayson had a snuggle ride together.  We also had to get ice cream, as they advertise that along the freeway, so it must be one of the big attractions.

Once we got back, Monica and the kids were busy all week making sure they got everything in one more time.  So Wednesday they headed to Monkey Bizness.  It's an indoor playground of sorts, with inflatables, and playgrounds, and all kinds of things to keep the kids busy.  They always have a super great time there.

On Wednesday afternoon they went to the Centennial splash pad!

Grayson... was not so much interested in the splashing.  But he was interested in floating a rubber lizard down the gutter in the stream of water.

Wednesday night Grayson walked up to bed on his hands!  I mean, I might have helped a little, but it was still pretty impressive.

On Thursday everyone headed to the museum of Nature and Science .  I'm just realizing that I never really heard anything about this trip.  I'm sure they had fun, and it looks like they got to spend some quality time in the kids play area!

  I went golfing early on Friday morning, and here we are finishing up our round just after 8.  I had a pretty good round of golf for the day, and it was pretty lovely weather.  No rain this time, but it was definitely threatening.

Saturday morning we all went to Poulette after breakfast.  We got all kinds of things to everyone's delight.

Once we got back from Poulette we had to eat things quickly because we had a birthday party to get to.  It was Halloween themed, so the kids all dressed up.  Winry was Ariel, Brooke was Anna, and Grayson was Buc-ee.  When it was time for cupcakes Grayson... got aggressive you could say.  Afterwards some of the younger kids there were over splashing around in water, and Grayson made his way over to get wet too!  It's kind of funny that he HAS to play in the puddle, after not wanting to go in the water at the splash pad.

Grayson also made sure he found himself a great lunch, and then carried it a safe distance away so his parents couldn't immediately take it from him.

Brooke was loving the zip along thingy.  Heck, I really enjoyed playing on it too!

Saturday evening we had a karaoke party with the Packers and the Westbroeks. It was a lot of fun.  Winry sang "Let it Go" and she really went for it!

Meanwhile, Grayson and I were in the basement playing.  We were upstairs for the first bit.  And we tried to pet their cat for a while.  Eventually we had s'mores in the backyard, and after that I had to go in the basement with Grayson for the rest of the evening.  We played many things, but eventually we found this big tube and started rolling a little ball through it, and Grayson did that on loop for the rest of the evening.

The girls went up to sing for Father's Day on Sunday.  They were wonderful!

Monica spoke in sacrament meeting.  Grayson did a good job sitting with me and being calm for most of the meeting, but towards the end he just had to go sit with Monica.  You can see the top of his head up there.

When we got home I got to open my Father's Day presents.  Winry made me a WHOLE BUNCH of awesome stuff.  She made a bunch of cards, and pictures, and crafts.  They were absolutely wonderful!

Brooke wrote a story for me.  The Girl with Laser Eyes.  It was pretty funny, and there were some really good lines in there.  Maybe I'll have to post pictures of the whole thing sometime, or a link to a pdf or something.

Saturday afternoon we all headed to the creek.  Winry really wanted to ride her bike, and she is getting really good on the balance bike.  I think she'll be able to learn to ride without training wheels pretty quickly once she wants to.  Here she is, rolling down by the creek.

Here are the girls standing out in the deep part of the creek.  There's been a ton of rain lately, and the creek is much higher than normal.  It was a lot of fun to go play there, but the only downside was that with the heightened creek the water was much more brown, so you couldn't really see in the water much.  When we were leaving I happened to notice two crawdads in a shallow part, but they swam away pretty quickly.

Grayson kept claiming to not be interested and wanting to go off somewhere else, but then he'd throw dirt in the creek and put his hands in and stuff like that.  He's also super in a "need mom" phase right now, so Monica always had to be the one to follow him around.

When we got back to the car people were pretty hot.  I think the high was 86-88 that day.  That's pretty warm, but in Leander it's 105 feels like 115... I am not prepared for that.  It is abnormally hot currently, but that's not really a consolation if you still have to be in it.  Hopefully it blows over by the time we move.  (I just checked... it won't)

And back at home we took in a haul from the garden!  Yay, our Strawberries are already coming in!  I'm glad we're at least getting something from the garden before we move.  That said, we knew early enough that we didn't plant most of the things we normally would have, so our garden right now is mostly things that came back from last year, plus some cold weather things Monica planted.  But still, free strawberries!

And that's a wrap for this week.  One more week until we move.  There's lots to do this next week, with the house getting packed, etc.  Should be busy, crazy, and hopefully good...