More City Museum

Because it was only 24 degrees outside, we were not able to do any climbing outside at the City Museum.  They have an amazing, fantastic climbing structure inside and out and we managed to find plenty of places to climb, crawl, slide, and explore without even stepping foot outside where the old airplane, and human habitrail towers high over the earth.

Getting ready to have some fun!

We spent the day at the museum doing lots of fun things...

Played in the balls

Cut out a duck snowflake

Unfolded it

and liked it so much she did it again with a dophin snowflake!

Ryan made a duck snowflake too!

 I made a dragonfly snowflake-So simple and so fun.

Playing in the balls

Emily met up with a Sumo Wrestler

Skate-less skateboard park

Wheee!

More Fun in St. Lou

We bundled up and went to the  Kids Science Museum...

We got to look through the walkway to the freeway down below.  There were radar guns so we could tell how fast the cars and trucks and busses were going.  At first Ryan was afraid to step on the window to the street.  It must have seemed like he might fall through!

Delaney

Reesie

Caroline

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Ryan and Emily Looking through the radar gun

My four little loves

City Museum, St Louis, MO

This is the seven story slide, you climb up a spiral staircase to the top of the building and slide down seven spiral stories! Wow! It is fast and dizzying This Sea Monster greets visitors at the door, Yep, totally recycled materials, those are shock absorbers painted by kids.

You can barely see the pipe organ in the shaft between these two buildings. When the organ plays while you are coming down that long slide, it is really cool!

Emily, Ryan and Caroline

Me and the kids at the magic show! It was silly but fun!

We spent the day at the City Museum. Such an interesting, active, creative place to spend the day. This was my second visit and we saw things we didnt even know were there. Like the seven story slide which used to be the chute in a shoe factory that they would send shoes downstairs in the space between two buildings-with the ginormous pipe organ which plays while you are sliding down the slide!

Loveland Honey

This Christmas, we were the lucky recipients of a few little bottles of liquid gold.

LOVELAND HONEY!

Janeese's dad Greg, keeps bees and harvests honey, and it is the most delicious honey ever.

It is fab on homemade biscuits or toast and a great relief for sore throats, disolved in a mug of hot, hot water. The flavor of this honey is out of this world!

Thanks for sharing, Lovelands, we think of you every time we enjoy your sweet gift!

Snow! Again!

In addition to
a White Christmas on Christmas Day,
and a "White Christmas" the day we celebrated Christmas with all the kids (except Scott)
This is the third snow storm we have had this winter. Finally, all the school kids who were hoping for a snow day got their wish !
In addition to having the day off from school,
there was plenty of snow to sled, build snowmen, and have snowball fights.
It was fun to see everyone out playing in the snow and having fun!

Thursday

Friday

View from our front porch!

Our Street! Covered with snow.

Ft Worth Stock Show and Rodeo

We went to the Stock Show & Rodeo last night.




Ryan showed the baby piggies the cowboy boots that auntie Kelly gave him!

We petted the pony

We saw the baby piggies all twelve of them!

We saw the baby chicks hatch!

Ryan was excited to be there~

Caroline was happy to be there~

We saw the bucking broncos!

As rodeos go, this was one of the better ones we have been to, last year, we went to the Ranch Rodeo which was not nearly as interesting or exciting. This year at the FWSSR we saw all the favorite rodeo events, calf scramble, broncs, trick roping, chuckwagon races, pbr bull riding and lots of great cowboy and cowgirl fun! yeee haw!

artists in residence-self portrait

Emily had a great idea for my Christmas Present. She got a small canvas for each of us and assembled paints and brushes.
We then sat down with a few mirrors and painted self portraits! None of us have any real painting experience, but I think we did a pretty good job. It was a lot of fun, way more than any of us expected when we first sat down to paint!

We were all pretty happy when Delaney was able to identify everyone in the paintings!

Delaney also painted her self portrait and had a great time doing it!
It occured to her no one had painted Satch, so we recycled an old canvas and she did an outstanding job. Apparently she thinks he is all legs!

We look forward to the other little ones being able to paint their first self-protraits in the coming year!

Kissing a Kangaroo

Ryan ran up to the kangaroo and began kissing the Joey then gave hugs to the mama kangaroo.

Beacuse of our recent cold weather, some of the exhibits at the zoo had some spectacular ice. The zoo personnel were working to knock it all down, but some pretty scenes were still frozen solid. I didn't take a photo of the elephant enclosure, but a big log that usually floats in the enclosure was laying completely on top of a solid pond of ice. It was funny to watch the elephant play with the gigantic ice chunks in the pond and drink the icy cold water.