Shiner and some Cousin Fun!

This weekend was the annual BBQ cookoff in Shiner.  Josh and his buddies have been going to this cookoff for years now.  In fact...Anna actually lost her umbilical cord in Shiner.  :)  There were more cookers this year than I've seen here before.  Lots of fancy set-ups and actual catering companies competing now!  Josh and his team have won with their brisket at this one in the past, but the competition is getting rather stiff...  

Most of the regular crew weren't able to make it this year, so it was more of a family affair.  That's Lily holding a very large and sharp knife.  Yikes!

Aside from his two buddies that showed up, Josh was relying on all of Sarah's kids to help him get everything ready and turned in.  :)

Lots of fun times with cousins!  Shiner had set up a free petting zoo with pony rides and a "train".  It was so awesome.  The kids could just run through it over and over again.  They all had a blast together, and it didn't end in Shiner....

Today we took the kids to a family friend's lake house in Marble Falls!  The kids and I had a fantastic time!  

These two crack me up.  The longer I had the camera on them, the worse and worse their posing got!  Haha!  Hayden is trying so hard to make sure Anna's not blocked, and Anna's trying so hard to make sure she's in the shot.  :)

So...turns out Meredith loves the water just like Anna!  

And Wallace appears to prefer the dock like me.  "/  We'll be sure to keep this one in swim lessons...

And next week we're off to the Frio!  Good thing these kids just can't get enough of each other.  :)  I got so many cute cousin pics I'm going to post a few more.  

Family Day!

Josh and I tend to stay close to home with the kids most weekends.  It seems like we've always sort of been homebodies, but since we've had the kids, now we are REALLY homebodies...  If there isn't a sporting event or a family function, we just stay home.  Meredith is not one to reckon with in public.  She runs away and throws fits.  "/  At a recent doctor's appointment with Wallace the doctor was asking me how he behaves when we take him out to eat.  My answer, "We never go out to eat..."  It's really not very relaxing to spend money so one of us can eat while constantly apologizing to the people in the adjoining booth for Wallace doing headstands against their seat, while the other chases Meredith around the restaurant, and then we just switch places.  It tends to really stress us out.  So, needless to say, it surprised me a bit when Josh suggested we actually take them somewhere today.  I was only looking forward to it a little...especially after he let Anna talk him into adding a second destination to our trip...  My weekdays have been stressful lately, so I really look forward to lazy weekends right now.  

But after breakfast we got everyone dressed, loaded up, and headed to the local children's museum.  :)  Josh went there with Anna for her school field trip this past year, and he figured the littles would really like it too.  He was right.  It's a neat place.  

As soon as you walk in (and make it past the gift shop where Meredith nearly had her first meltdown) there's a big train set!  Wallace just kept coming back to it over and over.

I love this.  Meredith is just not a hat girl.  Me either babe.   (On a side note...I was really struggling with my camera while we were indoors here.  There are all sorts of funny shaped things hanging from the ceiling that kept bouncing my flash all weird.)

Wallace wore his space helmet and pack for a while.

Lots of dress up clothes.

A giant Operation table.

And an old school radio that Meredith bogarted and nearly got in a fight with a kid over.  

I think this crank could use some WD-40 or something.  Ha.

This painting room was hilarious.  It has signs asking people to clean up after themselves...  Yeah.  Mine had paint on the floor, on their hands, shoes, everything...  We'd get one cleaned up and then as we were cleaning the next the first would be back in the paint!  Took a while to wrap it up in there.

This cracked me up, and as I was taking a picture Anna goes "Look!  It's like Yertle!"  Haha!  She's right!!!

So, after the museum the plan was to go on to Landa Park (the second destination that Anna added to the day) for them to swim.  But it was raining (thank goodness!).  So, we took them to eat, and amazingly enough, they weren't too bad.  No chasing Meredith around, and no headstands!  So, we took them to Landa Park to ride the train and called it good.  :)  Family day in the bag.  Maybe we'll start to venture out to public places with them more often.  Ha...who'm I kidding.  Yeah right.  ;)

Anna's B-day

Anna turned 6 last week.  I'm a bit late updating though.   "/  It's been rather busy around here.  Nothing exciting or anything, just life...  And Meredith is in a phase where she pretty much rules the roost around here...and she doesn't take too kindly to me just hanging out on the computer all that much.  But, tonight Josh offered to take the big kids to swim class, and Meredith seems pretty content sitting in my lap watching the Ipad for now.  :)  

Anna tried very very hard to get us to have a big party again this year.  She was really into the idea of inviting all of the kids from school and having her party at a place like many of them did throughout the school year.  We persevered though...through all of the tears and fits, we managed to just have a family birthday, and in the end, she didn't complain a bit.  

Her birthday fell on a Thursday, which is super annoying because I just really don't have time during the week to make her a cake, but she's very aware of what day her birthday is now, so I can't really pull a fast one on her and wait to celebrate until the weekend, so she got a small store bought cake of her choice on Thursday, and then I made a cake on Saturday.  :) 

A month or so ago I bought her a small point and shoot camera to give her on the big day.  I knew she wanted a surprise egg, but good grief, they don't just sell those things online and make it easy for you...you have to get all the crap and do it yourself.  And the youtube people are nuts with their very creative use of play doh to wrap the surprise egg.  So, around Easter I bought a set of big plastic Easter eggs in the hope of getting one put together for her.  But, as the day drew nearer and nearer, the surprise egg was looking like it would be less and less of a reality.  I didn't have any time to go look for all of the blind bags and stuff to fill it.  But on the 15th Josh called and asked if I could go "buy a surprise egg".  Ha!  Yeah right babe.  When I explained the problem he offered to go buy the stuffings.  He really had no idea what he was looking for, so I sent him some pics, and I'll be damned if he didn't try to wipe Target completely out of blind bags...  After I wrapped everything that night, I was fairly certain that her camera would get lost in the shuffle of surprise egg excitement, so I let her open one present early before I took the kids to Granny's for the day.   :)  

When I picked her up I had to take her to the doctor for her annual appointment and in all the excitement of it being her birthday, she completely crashed in the car on the way home and looked like this for about the next 2 hours after we got to the house.

...which was crazy because we were all ready to give her the surprise egg!!!

We finally just woke her up.

Notice how the surprise egg is not wrapped in play doh.  She didn't complain!

As expected, the surprise egg eclipsed everything else.  

It ended up becoming a group gift.  :)  They all got to open up packages of miniature toys.  

On Saturday I made her a big cake, but it wasn't nearly as big in reality as it was in my head...and I quite frankly made the selfish decision to make a chocolate cake and try to pass it off as a princess cake.  "/  It wasn't the prettiest thing I ever made, but once again, no one complained!  :)

I thought I'd have room on the cake for some of the princesses...not so much.

And Jasmine was a bit drunk apparently and kept trying to fall over.  I ended up propping her up with tooth picks.  

Anna attempted to blow out the candles from like 3 feet away.  She managed to get most of them.  :)

Well...I'd write more, but Meredith has lost patience with me being on the computer for now....  :(

Landa Park

This weekend Anna stayed up in Blanco with Big Mama, JoeJoe, and some of the kids from Josh's side of the family.  They hit a bunch of swimming places, and yesterday was Landa Park!  We met them over there and it was seriously one of the best days we've had in a long time.  The kids had a blast in the water, and there was a train to ride too!  How fun!  I honestly couldn't believe that the park wasn't overflowing with people considering it's the first weekend since school ended.

Landa Park has a nice little kid area with a couple of fairly gentle water slides.  After just a few runs Wallace was comfortable enough to go down without one of us having to walk him up the stairs each time.  He LOVED this water slide!  He could put his hands out and slow himself down, or go fast if he wanted.  He stayed on this thing for like an hour.  

For a while he just stood at the top and screamed when other kids went down the slide.  But he warmed up to the whole thing much faster than I thought he would!

He even got brave enough to go down right behind Cy...which was against the slide rules, so they both got whistled at by the life guard.  Ha!

Meredith didn't like the slide quite as much, but it was gentle enough that she could go down on her own.  

It was kind of a boring slide for the bigger kids, so they entertained themselves by making goofy faces and doing different poses as they came down.

Anna cracked me up.  She made the same exact face every time she hit the water.  Ha!

They had those containers that sit up high and slowly fill up with water until they tip over, and Meredith got this excited every single time one of them would tip over.  :)

The kids managed to devour the big pack of Skittles I'd brought along.  :)  

Landa Park made a killing off of us with the ice cream vending machine.

Meredith savored every last bit of her ice cream sandwich.  We had to dip her in the pool to clean her off.  :)

As we were driving up to the park we saw the kiddie train.  Wallace doesn't say much, but he made it perfectly clear that he wanted to ride the train.  It was the last thing we did before we left the park, and he waited so patiently for it.  

Anna had a good time on it too...she just happens to be frowning in this pic.  "/

It was adorable.  They held onto their tickets until the conductor came by and took them.  

Anyway... Landa Park.  Our kids are pretty much the perfect ages for these little kiddie areas they have!  Thanks for getting us out of the house Big Mama and JoeJoe!  I guess I didn't realize how much we've been holed up here with all of these storms the past few weeks.  

Swinging in Wimberley

This afternoon we met up with Big Mama and Joe-Joe in Wimberley for lunch, and the restaurant had all of these awesome swings!  Plus, you could just walk right down to the river and hang out.  It was great for the kids.  They didn't have to just sit there and wait on their food.  By the way they behave when we are waiting on food at restaurants you'd think we were torturing them.  We rarely take them out to eat because of it.  But this place was great!  And I brought along my camera, so I was super exited to get pictures of them on swings.  Nothing beats photos of kids swinging on an overcast day.  :)

Oh my gosh!  They are oozing cuteness!

Anna's such a poser now-a-days.  :)

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Can't believe none of them fell in!