Beautiful Weekend!

What a beautiful weekend! The rain stayed away, the weather was warm, the sun was out, and we had some good times!

I took vacation from work this weekend and we really had a lot of fun. We took the kids to Six Flags on Saturday. Deidra had earned a free ticket for reading 100 books in kindergarten and it expired at the end of this month, so we wanted to make sure to go since she definitely earned it. Anyway, she was a little apprehensive about the big rides, but I took her on the Spongebob ride first (the seats just moved while a mini-episode played), but it was in 4D which she thought was a bit scary...she also didn't think she liked the moving seats...but then later she admitted that she did like it. Andy took her on her first real rollercoaster ride and she said that it was a bit scary, but fun. She rode a lot of rides in kiddi-land and she took me on the spinny things since Andy doesn't do those. Andy took her on a boat ride that was really cute (she took me on it before we left). And we watched the parade and got tons of pics with the characters (she found it to be a bit embarrassing...she really is growing up on me). Baby J loved seeing all the characters and wasn't scared of them at all. When I took him from Foghorn Leghorn he cried...he liked playing with his nose. lol. At one point, I thought I was going to get sick from the heat, so we went to cool off in Johnny Rockets (the only inside restaurant we could find) for awhile. Haven't eaten in one of those since our days of living downtown Chicago. The prices were way overpriced though...amusement park food I guess. But they charged us $9.99 for a plate of a hamburger and french fried and then the drink was separate. Geesh! It was good though and I felt a lot better after we cooled off and I got some food in my stomach. I was going to take Deidra on the big boat ride (you know the one, the log that you sit in...go down the big hill and it makes the BIG splash), however one side of the park experienced power failure and it shut down when it was almost our turn. She had begun to cry that she was scared in line half way through, but then after she talked to another little girl that had already ridden it and was about her size she said that she was going to be brave like Wonder Woman...and then it shut down. UGH! We wached the parade which Baby J loved and then Andy started not feeling so hot. He went and got some Powerade while Deidra took me on the boat ride. He felt better once we got off and I needed some Powerade after that. Deidra had wanted the Texas Size drink for $10 and at first Andy wasn't going to get it for her since it was $10, but then we found out that refills were only $1, so that cup paid for itself over and over with how hot it was and how much we needed to drink throughout the day. We took the kids to the carousel and I took Baby J with us and he absolutely loved it. I didn't even notice that I put him on one of the stationary horses though until I noticed we weren't going up and down. Yeah, the bolted down horse hoofs should have been my first clue. Oh well...he had fun anyway and giggled himself silly. On our way out of the park, Deidra spotted one more ride that she had to go on and since it was a spinny one, she took me with her. Andy got video of us riding the ride. It was fun, but combined with the heat, the fact that we had been in the sun all day (we were there almost 10 hours), my feet had blisters on the bottom, and it was past Baby J's nap time, it was definitely time to go. We had a lot of fun...snapped lots of pics...and a good time was had by all. That's all folks! (Well, for Saturday anyway).

Sunday, we got up and went to church and then headed home to eat a good breakfast before meeting back up with my Mom and my brother, Jimmie, to head out to the Fort Worth Zoo for the day. The kids all had fun seeing the animals and they had a really good bird exhibit (very similar to the butterfly houses that you can go in) with cockatiels and parakeets of every imaginable color flying around that you could feed and they'd come sit on your stick. Andy had more fun in there than Deidra I think. Baby J was enthralled with seeing all the birds though. We got some close up encounters with animals with them being right there on the other side of the plexiglass (one being a Mama Bear with her 2 baby cubs and the baby cubs were acting up trying to climb up the chainlink fence). We got to go in one of the little aquatic houses and they had a sting ray that you could pet (he was taking a break when we were in there), some sea anemones that you could touch, and they had all the facts of the sea coast in Texas there. My Mom said just from seing that she wanted to plan a weekend getaway to go visit the coast. It did try to rain on us a little bit, but it quickly passed. It did cool things off though, so that was good. We had lunch at Pizza Hut in Texas Town and visited the little shops around there. We got some M&M fudge and we all shared that. We went and saw the Arachnitopia exhibit with over 75 spiders (including the largest...the Goliath Bird Eating Spider) and then we took family photos in the spider web outside of the exhibit. For my fear of spiders...I did ok in there until someone dropped one of the specimen jars on the floor and I freaked wondering if one of the spiders got loose. It turned out that it was flat jars with preserved dead spiders in it so that you could identify them (brown recluse, black widow, regular house spider, that type thing). Anyway, we left shortly before the zoo closed and we all had a good time. Baby J loved seeing the animals and I think my favorite exhibit was the Mountain Lion exhibit...he was right there...we could have reached out and touched him if we wanted to...and he was beautiful. You could hear him panting too.

The weekend was beautiful (minus a fight that my Mom and I got into once we came home and the fact that Baby J pooped on the way home in the car and filled up his diaper, his clothes, and his car seat with it. Once we got Baby J all cleaned up Mom and I talked to each other on the phone for about 2 hours afterwards and Andy talked with her too and we worked it all out.