We Win Fabulous Prizes

 The little hotel arcade was the kids' favorite thing about the trip, I think.

 While Jay and I were at the concert Friday night, my mom and dad took them to the arcade and both of them won on the prize claw--Alice on her very first try and Jack on his third!  Jack said some day he was going to write about this in his autobiography and call the chapter "We Win Fabulous Prizes."  When Alice woke my mom up in the night for a drink of water she stayed up another hour talking about the prize claw.

 We went back the next day, but there were no prize claw masters.

 They wanted to go one more time before we left Sunday morning.

Jack put his last tokens in and won a ball!  They are never going to believe us now when we tell them they won't win on those things!

Date Night in Dallas

 Friday morning we got up super early and did a lot of driving!

 My picture of the Welcome to Texas sign isn't so hot because I was in the very back seat with Alice and it was raining.  So if you can't tell, we were going to Texas.

 One of the most exciting things?  Culver's!  We had one about a mile from our apartment in Omaha and it's a good thing I never tried it the first two years we lived there or I would have been about 400 pounds by the time we moved.  It is just. so. good.

 My mom and dad came with us to watch the kids and Friday night Jay and I went to see Depeche Mode.  I really should have taken some pictures of the route the GPS sent us on to get there, but I didn't.  Let me just tell you that it took us about an hour and we toured much of Dallas--including its not-so-nice areas.

 The concert was at the Gexa Energy Pavilion and we had great seats!

 I enjoyed the concert, but it was really a big thing for Jay.  I had a lot of fun people watching since the woman at the end of our row was carted off at one point and the guy in front of us had Kody's haircut.  (Yes.  I just admitted that I have watched Sister Wives enough to know their names.)  Most of the people looked either fairly normal or like refugees from our junior year of high school.

 My favorite was probably Enjoy the Silence though the yoga ladies kind of creeped me out.

And you can't go wrong with Just Can't Get Enough.  So even though I saw way more of Harry Hines Boulevard than I ever cared to (twice), we had a great time!

Alice's First Car

 Alice decided she wanted a car, so being the creative child that she is, she got to work.

 Jay donated a steering wheel from a video game and she made good use of the packing tape to keep it on.  I gave her transparency sheets for her windshield.

 The finished product!

 She even added a shoe box trunk and a road.

If you ever have any large boxes you don't want anymore, send them our way because we've got a girl with a whole list of ideas!

Look! Up In The Sky!

 Yesterday the kids were helping Jay in the yard when they spotted some hot air balloons.

 It's kind of creepy to see a giant beaver peeking over the trees at you!

 They looked like they were going to land in a field behind our house, so the kids took off.

 As we were walking back, some neighbors popped out of the tree line!  Since there are so many trees there I sometimes forget that we're actually fairly close to several houses that we can't see most of the time.

 This one briefly touched down but then took off again.

Alice woke up talking about the balloons this morning so it must have made a pretty big impression.  We're going to have to try to get to the Gatesway Balloon Festival some day!

Spiro Mounds

 Today we took a little field trip.  (Cue traditional road trip picture.)

 Our destination?  The Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center in eastern Oklahoma.

 They have an interpretive center with many items from the mounds.

 Jack's favorite was this armadillo cup.

 They had several stations with information about the mounds and the Spiro people.  It was interesting enough that Jack read it all!

 Grinding corn

 Alice used it like a tiny sand box!

 Inside there is a large model of the site with the trails and mounds--I labeled them so I would remember.  (Though as you can tell by my labels, I have already forgotten some details!)

 The kids were running when we started the trails.  By the end they were all hot and tired and dragging.  We reminded them that it was not nearly as hot as it was when we went to Quartz Mountain.

 The scenery was beautiful!

 They have a replica of a house on one of the trails.

 Some of the mounds are just small bumps.

 Others are really big.  We were able to walk across this one.

 After lunch Alice found what looked like a piece of an old antenna.  She told me it was "old, old, old" and was probably something a "leader person" used.

We had a great time!

The First Two Weeks

 Our first two weeks of school have been busy!  In addition to our trips to the children's museum and the aquarium, we've actually been getting some schoolwork done.  Alice has been doing a unit on Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales (more on that later!) and Jack is studying the human body, history, Oklahoma geography and history, spelling, and math--we'll be adding in a couple more things over the next few weeks.

 Alice got to help with some cooking for school one day!

 Jay had to work the entire Labor Day weekend so we kept with our normal school schedule Monday, but that evening we went to my mom and dad's to eat dinner and play.

 Alice spent most of the time saying she was cold!

 This week we had our first tea time and artist study.  We're learning about Seurat this month!

 We also started PE again this week.  Jack was so happy that they played dodgeball!

This is Jack's third year to be in PE, which means it is Alice's third year to wait through PE--a total of four hours each week.  Thankfully she's usually pretty good about it.  There are other little brothers and sisters to play with and she has a good time.

Next week we will hopefully find out when Alice will be going for speech and then we can finally figure out our weekly routine!

The Annual Aquarium Visit

 Today we went for our annual aquarium visit.  Each year they have coupons for kids' tickets in the summer reading program booklets, so we go after public school starts.  It's fairly expensive, so this is the only time we go each year.  (I really thought this picture was in focus, but when I put it on the computer I noticed that it was blurry and the kids don't appear to be looking at the camera.  Whatever.  There's always next year!)

 In the past, Alice hasn't been too crazy about the touch tanks, but she loved them this year!

 

 Feeding the shrimp

 Since our visit last year, they have opened the Extreme Amazon exhibit.  You can crawl into a small area that has windows to view the fish from another angle or you can climb up little viewing tubes.

 Can you spot Alice in the tube?

 Jack in the aquarium!

 I didn't even notice this window for a while!

 Alice found another touch tank!

 She was finally lured away from the starfish by this funny guy.

 Jack came running back from the ray touch tank to tell me about one of them flopping all over.  I wonder if it was the same one that we've seen before.

 I waited a bit and he jumped up at me!

Of course we had to watch him do it over and over!

We had a picnic afterward and then headed home to escape from the heat that has finally arrived now that it's September.  Hopefully this weekend I will be able to post a bit about our first couple of weeks of school!