Our Turn to Have Fun!

Us on our anniversary after eating for 2 1/2 hours!
Our friends, the Brunelles.
Dinner at Simply Fondue.
The Cattle Drive.

We had been wanting to go somewhere with friends and what better excuse than our 11th anniversary. We decided to stay somewhat close. We went with our good friends the Brunelles to Fort Worth for the weekend. We left our kids at grandparents houses and headed out early Friday morning in time to be at Six Flags when it opened. Our friend, J.P., had never been so it was fun to get to do that. By 4:30 we were extremely hot and had done everything so we headed downtown to our hotel to clean up. We checked into our hotel, rested, and got ready to go to dinner. Downtown has a free trolley that goes all over downtown...it's so cute. It's called Molly the Trolley and comes every 15 minutes. And we were thankful for the Trolley since it started raining. We found an awesome Mexican food restaurant downtown and had a great meal, then walked across the street to Coldstone Creamery(as if we needed to eat anything else). We did some walking around while we ate our ice cream and then headed back to the hotel. Saturday morning we leisurely got up and walked downtown again to the best Barnes and Nobles I've ever been in and stayed there for a couple hours before heading to the Stockyards to find some lunch and entertainment. Are you noticing a trend yet? We walked a lot & ate a lot! And all the eating was really really good. In fact, my mouth is watering thinking about it. So we found some lunch at a Steak Place in the stockyards...best burgers ever(besides James' of course). Then we walked around some shops, museums, Billy Bobs, and then we thought we probably needed another eating place for a snack while we waited for the Cattle Run down the streets. The snack was good and the cattle run was interesting. Kind of weird to stand on the side of the street while Longhorn walk in front of you. Afterwards, we were again very warm from walking all day and being outside so we caught the trolley back to downtown to our hotel so we could clean up and you guessed it.....go EAT! What a great schedule we had. No children, no schedule, and lots of good eating! So we got back to the hotel and made reservations for one of the downtown restaurants, SIMPLY FONDUE! I can't say enough good things about this place. What a great experience. A 2 1/2 hour dining experience. The food was perfect. Every bite was good. I look forward to going again. So afterward we walked around downtown which was full of brides and grooms on horse drawn carriages, twinkle lights along the businesses, and bachelorette parties. We got back to the hotel and played cards for a little while before calling it a night. On Sunday we came home all refreshed to our precious little boys.

Our Little Friends

The little kids playing w/out the big kids.
The big kids swimming to the edge.
Silly faces outside of the library.
Cason and Carter at a great park in town.
Carter and a friend in the treehouse at the park.

We spend a lot of time with 2 couples who have kids almost the exact same age as ours. They are so fun to watch together. They all get along so well and have so much fun together. They've pretty much grown up together. It is such a blessing to have great friends like this. We are able to swap kids and go on errands, etc. We've also been known to split up the big kids from the little kids and take them somewhere fun. Here are some pictures of them together this summer.
Last summer us 3 moms went crazy so this summer we made ourselves a schedule and had one or two "fun" things planned every week to keep the kids busy and wet since it was just too hot to be in our own backyards. Our city library has a great summer program for little ones so we spent time at the library, free splash parks, each others houses, movies, indoor playground at Burger King and anything else we could think of. It was a blast! I could make a whole book of all our summer pictures...I might just do that!

Always behind..

Here I am again catching up on 3 months of fun. We've had such a great summer. It has been lots of fun to have James home more. The kids have had lots of fun playing with Daddy and we've tried to do lots of good summer stuff to give them lots of memories and of course to make scrapbook pages:) I'm going to post all of it as time allows...starting now. Enjoy.

Lady Hornet Softball

We've been having some fun going to softball games. Emily, James' sister, is the pitcher for her high school softball team. They are now headed to state this weekend. James has gotten to go more than I have because of our schedule but all four of us went this past weekend to watch them win the games they needed to win to make it to the State Tournament. The boys had fun too. Carter got so excited. He really likes to clap. So everytime there was clapping or screaming he was doing his part to help. Cason has gotten really good at screaming "Go Aunt Emily".
We're excited for you and we're proud of you, and we love you! GO AUNT EMILY!

SIX FLAGS

Gotta have funnel cake
Look at all those empty swings...perfect day to be there
Cason giggled through this ride.
This year we bought season passes to Six Flags. We went with some friends at Christmas and bought our passes then and they will be good through the end of this year. We are really excited about it. Cason had a BLAST at Christmas. We were so proud of him. We were going to be in the area this weekend because my cousin was graduating from high school on Sunday. We figured since we were there we might as well use our passes and go. So Carter stayed with Grammy and Pepaw at my grandparents house and James and I took Cason to Six Flags. We had such a great day. He told us at the end of the day, "I sure did have fun with you guys." and he also said, " It was a great day to go to Six Flags." He didn't know how good. We were a little worried about going on a Saturday. We were shocked by the empty lines...there were some rides we got off and right back on. We couldn't believe it. It was absolutely perfect. He is such a good kid and it's fun to take him for fun days!

Memorial Day

Let's GO!
I realized recently that all the people we run around with go to church with us. WHAT A BLESSING! We have some amazing friends. We are blessed by all of them. We are so thankful to God for placing us here and putting all these people in our lives.
One of the couples had a get together on the Memorial Day holiday. So we spent a day in the beautiful sun, eating yummy food, and swimming. Cason really got brave and just swam like a little fish all over their pool. We had so much fun watching the progress of the day. When we first arrived that morning he just wanted to kick his feet in the water, put on his goggles, take off his goggles, go check on his towel,etc...but within an hour or so he was all over the place and by the end of the day he didn't even need us near him.
Carter spent the day at Grandaddy and Joy's because he had already been at their house by himself a different time and because we just weren't feeling like chasing him ALL DAY. We'll take both boys next time!
Thank you Dowells for being such wonderful hosts!

End of Preschool

Cason "washing" cars on Splash Day
Carter and his buddy Evan

Cason and his class performing
Carter's little class performing

Carter with his flashlight, "This little light of mine"

Preschool came to an end on May 21st. We had a really fun year. It was Cason's third year to be in a class(his fourth year to be up there) and Carter's first year. They both had fun. Carter finally adjusted to seperating from me every morning and that made things much easier. For several weeks it was just him and his buddy, Evan, in their class. Other little ones that age seemed to come and go this year.
We had our end of year program on Tuesday the 19th and our Splash Day on Thursday the 21st for our very last day. We were so excited that Grammy and Pepaw were able to come and watch the program. That was the first time they have been able to do that. Joy also was able to come(Grandaddy had to work). Papa and Minnie and Aunt Laura were cheering on Aunt Emily in the softball playoffs.
Both boys did a great job onstage...they both get a little shy once there are people in the audience but they both were precious. Then on Thursday they had a great time playing outside and getting wet all day.
Here comes summer!