Labor Day Weekend

We had planned on taking the kids to the Phoenix Zoo on Saturday morning, but woke to find it raining, so we postponed our zoo outing 'till Monday and enjoyed a lazy rainy day. Actually, the kids and Jon enjoyed a lazy rainy day at home, while I took the opportunity to run some errands.

Jen Edwards came to visit me last week while her husband was doing some training in Phoenix. We had a great visit! It was fun seeing Jen- she hasn't changed a bit! Her daughter Samantha is such a sweet preteen (she brought her bead box and made Sally the cutest little bracelet) and she watched my girls while Jen and I went to IKEA because Jen had never been there and wanted to see what all the buzz was about and she wanted to get some gift cards there. We had such a nice visit while walking around IKEA that, while Jen got a very cool solar powered lamp, we completely forgot to get the gift cards. She ended up staying and visiting almost the entire day and was in a hurry to pick up her husband when she left so she ended up forgetting her phone as well. So some of my errands on Saturday included picking up gift cards at IKEA for Jen and then mailing them and her cell phone at the post office.

Later in the afternoon, I met up with another friend, Jacki Hancock (one of my Laurel advisers from church when I was a teenager), for lunch. It was great catching up with her and spending some time away from the kids :)
Jon had spent a lot of time studying and doing homework the day/night before, so he even indulged me with a nap and let me finish my Charlie Bone book. It was a great day :)

Sunday was stressful with antsy girls in Sacrament. Sally didn't want to wait to go to Nursery (she loves playing with her friends in Nursery), and Sophie wanted to scream out just for the fun of it and kept trying to escape under/over the pews, so I ended up taking the girls in the empty Nursery room and let them play until Sacrament meeting was over. I know it seems like we are rewarding them for bad behavior, but I feel that they are too young to try to force or persuade to sit quietly for an hour and it's best not to try because it will only cause frustration and a loss of patience on my part and some hurt feelings on theirs. We were also practicing for the Primary Sacrament Program and of course Shule can't resist goofing off when he gets in front of a microphone. Once we survived church and got home we had a really pleasant Sunday afternoon/evening; Shazer practiced piano and Shule trombone, the girls played nicely and we were able to get all the kids to bed by 8 with the promise of needing to wake early the next morning to go to the zoo before it got too hot.

We managed to get there before 8am and it was fairly pleasant weather for the first hour or so. We enjoyed being there early enough to see lots of animals eating their breakfast and lots of animals were out and about who normally are sleeping when we come in the afternoon. We had a great time at the zoo and finally convinced the kids to go home for lunch around noon. Monday night Lorin & Brenda and their kids came over for pizza and ice cream and Jon (playing guitar) and Lorin (singing) enjoyed doing some Beatles songs together. All in all it was a very nice way to celebrate a rest from our labors :)

This was Shazer's idea: to make it look like he was holding the giraffe in his hand. So silly ;)

Tiger taking his morning bath.

The lion and tiger's exhibits are back to back and they were having an entertaining conversation of roars. We joked that they were bragging about how many visitors were there to see them and we came to the conclusion that the lion won because he had the last word. Here he is mid roar.

We had a special treat from zoo keepers who showed us some cool birds up close. This one is the Hyacinth Macaw. A beautiful bird with an amazingly strong beak.

This one is a local Harris' Hawk that crashed landed in the zoo, they think he had gotten caught in some electrical wiring that messed up part of his beak.

Taking a break to play.

We took almost 200 pictures, so it made it hard to choose which ones to share.

After the kids saw all the animals they wanted to see we let them play at the Yakulla Caverns splash playground. There's a large "tropical" cave with water slides inside and waterfalls and stream outside. The kids love it!

Sophie is warming up to the idea of water shooting up out of the ground spontaneously.

Jon took Sophie inside the cave- but she wasn't too sure... Jon ended up getting totally soaked as he kept watch of little ones. He and I took turns either watching Sally or Sophie. Somehow I managed to just get the bottoms of my pants wet. Which was fortunate because Sally HAD to have a ride on the carousel as we left and you must be dry to get on. Usually Jon takes her but I got the pleasure of spinning around and around and around...

She plays coy with the camera but she LOVES the carousel!

Bye, Bye!