Joe's latest project

Looking for gnomes in all the wrong places...

My parents went with my brothers to Washington before he leaves for Iraq. They left on Thursday evening. I decided to take the girls to the Dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point. We decided to look for the 13 gnomes that are hidden throughout the museum. We only found 8 of the 13, but that is an improvement over the previous time.


They have changed the activity center. The kids loved it. We spent a good amount of time in there.

They almost didn't charge me for the girls. I have to bring up the fact that they are not on our family pass. It would have saved me $8, but I wanted to be honest. There have been a few other times that they didn't charge me for the kids and I have had to let them know.

The kids on our favorite picture taking spot...the protoceratops.

One of the gnomes hidden on the giant sea turtle. I guess they move the figurines on occasion. The paintings will always be there and I think that we found all of them.

Samuel likes the large dinosaur puzzle slots. He gets angry if you try to pull him away, especially when you try to take one from his hand.

Company party

This year Joe's company had their company party at the Hogle Zoo instead of Lagoon. It was closer and a lot of fun. Joe won a prize.


Do not feed the animals. Joseph and his hippo smile.


Joseph at the giraffe area. It was warm outside, so it was nice to get in a shaded area.


Samuel in his stroller. He seemed to have a good time, but he wanted out to walk.


Us on the carousel. Spinning makes Joe sick, so I went on with the boys. Neither of them wanted to get on an actual animal that went up and down.


We got to see lots of animals and the boys enjoyed themselves, Joseph probably more so than Samuel.

I am glad that Joe's company opted out of having it at Lagoon. We got to ride the train, eat some fajitas.

New words

"how are you?" (sounds more like howru)
"bite"

Pics

We had a big box for packing and the boys loved playing inside of it. I can't remember how long they were inside, but they played and played.

The cousins sharing some blueberries. Joseph's cheeks are stuffed to the brim with blueberries. At least he shared. :)

Nathan decided that Samuel needed some helping stuffing berries in his mouth, so he was happy to oblige.

All the Rankin male grandkids together for a family photo. We couldn't let them do it on their own, so here are the tired mommies doing some crowd control.

Our cute little nephew Christopher. It was great to meet him before he leaves for London.

More new words

Hi, papa (grandpa), nana (banana)

Strange coincidence...or a sign

So last night I woke up from a nightmare where someone hurt Samuel badly. I woke up and almost started to cry. I prayed and went back to sleep. The place where he got hurt was Riley Street. We are looking at houses and I woke up telling myself that we wouldn't buy a house on Riley Street. Of course, we weren't looking at any houses on a Riley Street, so no big deal. Right? Right. Well, we went to look at houses in Springville. One of the houses we went to look at (where the realtor had put the wrong address on the MLS, so we drove around to all possible coordinates with the same numbers) was an older home. As we walked up to the door, on the sidewalk written in chalk over and over again, was the name Riley. Doo, doo, doo, doo,doo, doo, doo, doo... Coincidence or sign?