We hugged our way through the field trip.
Bradley also thoroughly enjoyed the perks of having an adult to carry him whenever he got tired (often). How much longer will my little boy let me hold him? Actually I'm fairly certain he would allow me to carry him until he's about 10. They don't get much more cuddly than Bradley.
The teacher posted this picture of the bus ride home. Bradley is sitting with his friend Lorelei and apparently field trips are hard work even if you're carried a bunch.
I chaperoned Eleanor's field trip to Paradise Park the next week. It's sort of educational ... if you count scaring all the other adults with your climbing feats.
No other child did this. We weren't even certain it was allowed, but there weren't signs saying it wasn't so oh well. Eleanor also tripped and landed on her face in the padded ball pit area before this after she missed a small step so it was a little nerve wracking to have her follow up that level of coordination with climbing everything she could find.
There was a face paint area and Eleanor made herself into a beautiful butterfly.
Followed by more face paint.
The end result was a lot of face paint. And they got to do some cute crafts including one after this that was a snack. Some kids didn't eat all of their frosting at the snack station but I'm proud to say that my daughter scraped every bit out of the little cup they gave her.
This was Patrick's and my version of a field trip. He helped me on my quest for good donuts in the Kansas City area! This is Hurts Donut and it was fairly reasonable but still not up to Top Pot standards. Patrick is eager to help me with more donut research.
Patrick with his crew of boys that we went to the donut shop with. Their mothers are far braver than I am and got them cookie monster donuts that were covered in bright blue dye.
Patrick is such a help when Eleanor and our sweet neighbor girl Addison are playing with chalk together.
Nathan has started a new family tradition "for the kids." Wednesday night is now video game night and he and Bradley work on Bradley's Mario skills while Patrick and Eleanor get to play on tablets. There is great enthusiasm for this new tradition.
Eleanor has been very jealous of all the cub scout events Bradley has been going to (even though she gets to go to most of them) and was very happy when we finally got to attend a girl scout sign-up night.
Watching her try to use a slingshot was hysterical and made me feel very close to her because my strategy is not far off from hers. She would pull the little ball back and then try to sort of toss it towards the target. She's definitely my daughter.
Meanwhile, the boys played 5 Minute Dungeon (our new favorite game) with Nathan at home. Oh Patrick.
Colleen came out to visit for a very fun weekend. Kerry hasn't been feeling well so he wasn't able to make the trip.
Eleanor and Grandma had a reasonably cuddly time.
And Colleen definitely felt Kerry's absence because without him there to run Patrick and read to him her time was much more active and there was a bit more competition for Grandma time.
As always, going outside was the answer.
For the record, I was gone this day at my Great-Uncle David's funeral so I wasn't around to enforce rules about not throwing rocks into the creek. Especially gigantic ones. The kids might not have missed me.
Closest thing to a calm group photo.
More games! We love game time, especially with grandparents.
And the big craft for the weekend, making tie-dyed shirts.
The kids were very excited about this cool project.
They got quite a few shirts decorated between the three of them and they have been wearing them regularly ever since.
Surprisingly, Patrick was the most into the activity and he made the most shirts. Poor kid, he's probably just happy to have a few shirts that aren't hand-me-downs from Bradley.
Lucky Grandma getting to read a Pokemon encyclopedia. To a captive and talkative audience. When will the Pokemon obsession end?
If Bradley's work he brings back from school is any indication, not anytime soon. Here he is skipping all the teacher's suggested high frequency words and writing his own, which are Frockee and Frogadier. Accurate that he uses this much more often than silly words like "lips."
And this is his subtraction story. His teacher is SO nice, she told me she wants to learn a bit about Pokemon so she can have something to connect with Bradley. It's the only thing he really talks about now, so good on her.
And the kids got to play with Grandma on the platform swing for the end of her trip.
We went back out to the creek later that day. There's no such thing as too much creek time.
Addison even joined the crew!
Patrick has been keeping up his tennis skills. Heaven help you if you make him wait more than a second to hit a ball, he shouts "let's do it let's do it let's do it!" on repeat until you throw him a ball.
He got to spend the morning with grandparents while I was with Eleanor on her field trip and apparently they played tennis for an hour and a half.
Let's focus on the solid hit and excellent form in this video and not that he's cackling like crazy after hitting my dad with a tennis ball.
But look how sweet he is, playing with the Doc McStuffins kit with his friend Mabel. They have weekly play dates after preschool on Thursdays. Both children like this quite a bit.
He's been taking some good naps lately, sweet tired boy.
The process of getting him to sleep and gently waking him up so he's not full of wrath can be a bit long and quite frankly a little annoying so the other day I told him he could just play alone in his room during quiet time and if he wanted to take a nap, go for it, if he didn't, that was fine we would just do an earlier bedtime. He begged for cozy reading time and a nap in my bed instead. Fine, fine, if you're so cute about it I guess we can do it.
Patrick and I go to a library story time every Monday now and he picks out books to check out for the big kids. There is great joy when they get home from school on Mondays and get to see the books.
Bradley had another cub scout event a couple weekends ago. We think he liked it.
Nathan is an amazing den leader and took nine 1st grade boys out to the park behind our house and ran them through an hour's worth of activities.
There's nothing quite like an excited group of 1st graders in matching uniforms.
Nathan even gave them all popsicles at the end. Best leader ever.
Wonderful Nathan also got off work early last Tuesday so he could go to a science class with Bradley at the Museum of Prairiefire and help him build a catapult.
He also taught Bradley photo faces ... no wonder this kid wasn't excited about boring school pictures. He ended up looking really grumpy in the official picture they sent home. He needed fun picture time with Daddy instead.
Building the catapult.
Testing it out. I can't believe he didn't eat the marshmallows. Why do these people keep using delicious food that you aren't allowed to eat as part of their science classes?? I'm told Bradley licked his fingers a lot while assembling the most yummy catapult ever.
There was extra time at the end so Bradley and Eleanor got to try out the virtual reality volcano video. Eleanor was very excited about this, it was her first time getting to do it.
And then we were off on our trip to Branson! We got to stay at a nice hotel with a yummy breakfast every morning thanks to Nathan's Hilton points.
And we spent our first day there at Silver Dollar City, the theme park. Open 10am-6pm, and we were there for 8 hours like the champions we are. No nap for Patrick. The kids were so good.
We were able to go on a Friday because of a school in-service day so there were virtually no lines and we went on pretty much every ride we wanted to. So fun!
It turns out that all three of our children are adrenaline junkies. Patrick's face is so great in this picture.
I unknowingly sent Bradley on a high speed 8 story drop ride because he was tall enough. He loved it and went on it several times and even made my poor dad ride it with him.
Eleanor cried because she wasn't tall enough to ride the death ride but I think Grandma was happy with the alternative ride they went on instead.
Then they went on a spinny ride and Bradley complained the entire time about it not being fast enough and hollered at the ride operator to see if it could go higher.
So we sent him on this. Eleanor too. It went fast, it went high, the crazy children were all smiles.
At least the kids tolerated most of the baby rides. No lines, and they were all very cute.
I managed to get a picture of my parents with the kids before we unknowingly went on a water fight ride and got absolutely soaked. They had spots by the fence all alongside the ride for people to soak you with these water gun contraptions. I didn't think strangers would shoot water at us. I was wrong.
But it was quite hot and getting wet was actually very nice for everyone, so the water rides continued!
Nathan's covert video, which wasn't covert enough because you can hear them telling him to put his phone away.
Cute little roller coaster for the little kids.
Family picture outside the entrance to the giant roller coasters. Eleanor did every one that Bradley did because she was tall enough to go if a grown-up went with her. Nathan said she was the smallest person on most of the coasters.
It was very very hot (almost 90 degrees) and the best decision of the afternoon was getting giant reusable cups that were expensive but promised cheap refills of frozen lemonade. I think we refilled them about three times each.
Frozen lemonade break.
Everyone but me and my mom went on this water ride which featured a thirty some foot drop into an area where you then got drenched with water. All of my small children loved this. I see a lot more theme parks in our future.
I thought it would be cute to get a picture of the kids "in jail" but Bradley desperately had to go potty and Eleanor was worried about the animatronic sleeping marshall inside that was making snoring noises so she refused to go in.
We wrapped up our day with shopping at the gift shop and were back at the hotel in time for a pizza dinner and Pokemon show for the kids.
The next morning was spent at Dinosaur Canyon, a putt-putt golf course.
It was HOT at 10 am and there was no shade.
We were very fortunate that there were two courses for people to choose between. Shockingly, all of the other people there chose to go on the course that wasn't overrun by children running all over the place so we had the Velociraptor course all to ourselves.
There were lots of cool dinosaurs to look at but the best feature by far was the volcano that would go off every 5-10 minutes.
We kept score for at least 3 holes before giving up and letting the kids play how they wanted to play. Everyone was a lot happier once this happened.
Seriously cool scenery. We're medium excited about mini-golf unless dinosaurs are involved.
Volcano! And yes, we got to walk through it and play one hole inside of it.
Good parenting.
Towards the end of golf time.
Patrick at the final hole. Bradley reached this hole and said, "This is all the golf they have? It's not much of a challenge once you defeat it all."
Family picture, hot and sweaty at the end. I really need to do these things earlier in our outings.
After getting so hot and sweaty we had some much needed pool time at the hotel to relax and cool off.
We had a very easy afternoon followed by Dolly Parton's Stampede for our dinner and a show. It's a country version of Medieval Times and it was very fun and cute. The man who jumped through a ring of fire while standing on two horses was particularly impressive!
Our best group picture of the night. Oh well.
Eleanor with her own rotisserie chicken for dinner. Bradley ate all of his. He told us many times on this trip that he was a carnivore and backed up this statement at meal time.
We watched a Great British Baking Show together when we got back to the hotel that evening. Eleanor may have been a little tired. Or she was just smooshed and gave in to the cozy.
And the next morning before we left for home we made one last stop at The Butterfly Palace. A surprise hit!
This is what three children in a mirror maze looks like. Except it was more chaotic. Only one child ran into his reflection so we're calling it a success. I wish we could say we didn't laugh when it happened, but to our credit the stranger down the path also laughed quite a bit when Patrick accidentally smacked into a mirror on our way out. He didn't even cry, he was startled but then never one to miss an opportunity to please the crowd, he ran into his reflection on purpose a number of times for the rest of the way out of the maze.
The kids loved the butterfly observation room. They had all sorts of cute gear in there for the kids and we didn't even smoosh any butterflies so it was a great success.
They like bright colors so I got landed on a bit.
They loved Eleanor's cute tie-dye shirt.
We think they liked the smell of the gum Patrick was chewing so they landed on his face a few times and he was not so much a fan of the butterflies getting close after that.
But from a distance they were wonderful.
This place was so cute and the staff were all exceptionally nice.
Eleanor holding court with her butterfly. They handed out little vials filled with gatorade with a flower at the top so the butterflies were very friendly.
The kids even got to release new butterflies.
The video! Lots of fun.
Bradley and I named this butterfly "Gigantor" and we carried it around for a good 5 minutes before handing it off to a little girl.
Patrick and Eleanor trying to trap a butterfly. We might not have been as excited about observing butterflies as we were intent on having them land on us in some manner.
Nathan's attempt at a cute butterfly video which turned into our children being our children.
Petting a blue-tongued skink before leaving.
Steak and Shake restaurant on the way home. Our first time going to one!
It was delicious, fast, crazy cheap, and very kid friendly (I took an armload of arts and crafts materials with me out to the car afterwards). We will be back!
Sweet boys together. It was such a fun trip. Good activities but also a good amount of rest time so everyone just had a blast together.
And a car picture on the way home. Maybe a couple people could have gotten a little more rest. Guess which child went to bed early and slept in an hour the morning we left?
Patrick woke up and cried when we confirmed that we were indeed going home and Bradley moped a bit this morning when I told him, yes, it was a school day yet again and we weren't just going to do fun stuff all day together. But good news for these guys, I'm trying to pack in as much fun as possible before the baby joins us and things aren't quite as easy for a bit. Lots of fun stuff planned for this fall!
