Although I was a little concerned to hear that the people who man the petting zoo area do it as community service and so I spent the next ten minutes eyeing the guy up suspiciously. In the end I just love to watch my kids have a good time. And I love all the girls in our ward. You guys rock my world. 
Anyone who knows anything about me at all knows that I am a voracious reader. I love reading and yesterday was no exception as I read three books, two start to finish and the other one in a more skimming fashion. This book by Janet Evanovich was released yesterday. I had already put every single copy at the library on hold in anticipation. I still am cheap: come on people do you know me at all? Anyway...after a good laugh with my librarian friends they handed over this book. I snatched it with energy so cataclysmic that my daughter said, "Sometimes it seems like you love books more than your kids." After calming her tender fears we headed to the pool. Not conducive reading ground since I am trying to watch kids and they think getting me wet is funny. Once I got them home I put them to bed for naps and embarked on the journey of a well told story. 
Wilbur Chocolate Company
Yeah everything in that picture is edible.
Swimming/pool time with cousins and at the local pool.
Swimming with family is so fun. The kids play so well and I don't worry about how I look in my swimsuit. I love family.
The community pool is more kid friendly but invariably I see people who I would rather not have seeing me in my swimsuit. The kids teachers, principals, friends, neighbors, etc...
Engaging in America's Favorite Pasttime - Baseball.
Body painting - Nana in Texas got the kids bath paints. They are the biggest hit in the tub, on the trampoline with sprinklers, and with Kody any time he can find them. 
Is this not the cutest little I've been caught face. And I know you're going to take them away from me.
Feeling sad knowing that today is our last full day and that tomorrow we would be leaving. 
Then Julie's, another cousin, husband, Mike, came over to clay pidgeon shoot. 
We headed home for naps and Travis and I changed our temple reservations because we knew we would miss our four o'clock appointment. Yes you heard me. The San Antonio temple is a small temple that does a session every two hours but it is by reservation. And Wednesday night they are closed and Thursday morning because of lack of attendance. But after changing our reservation to six and going through it is now my favorite temple. It is beautiful, amazingly beautiful. So new and clean and the stain glass everywhere is so breathtaking. And the murals are awesome. And the details are phenominal. 
Travis and I went to the temple, while Nana watched the kids. They went hunting for fairies, built fairy houses in the woods, and ran around. She then took them to play in the sprinklers in the front yard afterwards. Then she got them bathed, fed them snacks, and then that is when we got home. We put them to bed and then talked, laughed, and watched our way through the basketball game. 
Travis and his brother Rocky left for a bit to help their Uncle move some furniture back into their bedroom since they had it remodeled. On the way home they saw a bobcat on the property and so they rushed home to grab a gun and go back to shoot it, but with no luck - it had disappeared. It seemed this was the mood of the day as earlier the dog had found a snake and Rocky went out to see it and found that the dog had trapped a coral snake. Apparently this is no big deal to them. But it got away before they could kill it and they all reassured me how not a big deal it is. Whatever. And that is not to speak of the several scorpions Travis had been finding and squashing along the way this week. Eeks creepy crawlies scare me. I ended the night by finishing my fifth book this week. What a vacation. I loved it. I hadn't brought more but was wishing I had. And then headed to bed for some restorative sleep.
Then we headed out to visit Grandpa. As we headed into town to the nursing home where Grandpa is we prepped the kids about being quieter. The conversation was struggling, the kids were getting bored and misbehaving, and Nana suggested I played the piano because Grandpa loves music. Of course I hated this. But seeing him only once every couple of years softened my heart and I played. The older people started to gather in the room happy to hear someone playing. Such a simple thing and I couldn't believe how happy they were. 
After naps we headed over to Travis's cousin Grace's house. She also has a little boy Kody but he is four. They had a swimming pool and all the second cousins had a crazy swimming party. It was super fun. We then toured their new house which we had never seen. Her husband is a cabinet maker and so there were these incredible cabinets but not only that but she had this amazing furniture that he had built all over the house. 
After we headed back home for a dinner and a little birthday party to celebrate Travis's birthday since we are never in Texas in January. The kids had an early bedtime to get ready for our next big day. After the kids were in bed the adults laughed and watched basketball. Just being with family is so much fun.
Bella was pretty exhuasted from the previous day and so by ten she was ready for a nap. Kody also stayed at the house with me since he still hadn't woken up from the previous day. He had fallen asleep at eight the night before as we left the river. And slept clean till eleven the next morning. At around ten I started getting nervous and antsy and would sneak my head in his room to check on him and peek in. He was still breathing the heavy breath of a toddler with his almost snoring sounds. I just let him sleep it off. 
Bella having napped waited for the boys to go to bed and then Nana, Travis's mom, took her to get some more groceries and shopping for some new clothes. Bella got in touch with her girly side and just lived it up. On the way home they shared a chocolate milk and Bella thought she was in heaven. 
We headed over to the riverwalk. Our family went to Rocky's work, building a new hotel on the riverwalk, and Travis got an inside tour. The rest of us headed down to buy tickets to take the boat/barge rides tour of the riverwalk and to learn the history. Coolest fact, they love to save the historic buildings and so they floated a three story hotel totally intact from one spot down six blocks in six days on air filled tires. It made a world record being the first entire building to be floated down a river and repositioned. 
After that we came home late and had cereal for dinner at almost nine ice cream for dessert and headed off to bed. 
Monday was a blast. Travis was antsy to get down to his favorite pasttime. So Monday morning we drove out to the arrowhead mounds and got started. We all went as a big family including William and his son Ben. We hadn't planned very well and so we didn't have enough tools for every child to have his own set. This created some fighting since everyone wanted to find arrowheads. Travis is the pro and found some rather quickly. 
After that he would throw the heads he had found in the kids' next shovelfuls of dirt so they thought they had found them. What a great dad. In the end each kid walked home having found an arrowhead. Wyatt said, "Dad you are not very good at finding arrowheads. We all found some and you found none."
After we were all sweaty from that we came back and got ready to head over to the Medina River another property they own about forty five minutes away. We took the camper so kids could take naps, people could use the potty without squatting in the woods, and we could bring oodles of river toys and food. Travis's Great Aunt Wanda, Aunt Terry, and Aunt Anita all came. They all had spouses, kids, and loved ones along too. Since it was a work day people were coming and going from noon to eight pm that night. 
We played, waded in the river, searched for crawdads, went fishing with our bait of crawdads, bbqed, and just ate ourselves silly. 
It's always fun to see the extended family and I love how close they are. My kids have now met a Great, Great Aunt of theirs. It's amazing to see the four generations coming together so frequently when we are here. That night the kids fell asleep in the camper on the way home and we just let them sleep there. We plugged it back in once we got home so the air would go and Travis ended up sleeping out there with them. 
The kids played outside with the dog, Boomer, apparently hitting him with a piece of rebar somewhere along the way and he ran off to the neighbors house to hide, which is actually Travis's aunt and uncle's house. After all of this we drove to the peak, the highest point on the ranch (the last post has a picture of the peak), but the next county over technically divided by the creak that runs through their property. We got in this old jeep and the rest loaded in the Ford F150 and we started our country dream. We got near the top, hiked the rest of the way up, and enjoyed the view. We had a small run in with red ants, but was avoided successfully from being a full scale attack. We found tons of ant lions and just played for a bit. 
On the way back we hit up the creak, the swimming hole, that was drying up at an incredible rate due to the drought, and to see the fields and other parts of the property. It is over three hundred acres so even in a car it takes some time to catch up with Travis's favorite spots. We got close to the one neighbor's fence to spot some Zebras and Ostriches. And we had seen at least a half dozen deer already. We got home and cooled off. And then all engaged in taking a personality test from Lacey's, Travis's sister, psychology class. It is the Kiersey test which is pretty famous and I took the quiz although I had a pretty good idea about myself. But it was amusing to hear everyone else's results. After more talking and playing it was time to get some sleep to prepare for tomorrow.
