Songs

Cole was singing this cute little song from church today about listening and obeying. It's repetitive, of course, it's for the 2 and 3-year olds. Makaila says to him, "Cole, can you stop singing that, you're getting it stuck in my head." This is coming from the same girl that has been humming the song from Jeopardy constantly for the last week. )And all the VBS songs the week before!)

Bucca de Beppo

My mom came through for a few more days on her way from Trinidad to home. We went out to enjoy some good Italian dinning at Bucca de Beppo. For anyone who hasn't been there the resturant walls are covered with pictures and postcards and stuff. Many of them are famous, but a large amount are not. We were looking at Vince Lombardi hanging right there at our table when Chad got this funny look on his face. I look up to see what he is looking at and there is a picture of soccer players huddled up. He starts standing up to see it closer as I say, "Is that YOU?" We don't know how, but a picture of the soccer team at Point Loma Nazerene University in San Diego from our sophomore year was hanging at Bucca de Beppo. It just happens to have Chad in the picture. It just happened that we were sat at that specific table. The waiters weren't sure if they should believe him or not. I think our waiter did, especially when he saw us taking pictures of it. Crazy. I have a feeling we will be visiting it again next time Mom and Dad Swank make it out to visit.

Chad is number 5

Blackberries 2009

We had lots of fun blackberry picking for our second year in a row. This year my mom was visiting. We are having our 4th day of 100 degree weather, so we got out there early and were picking by 9:15. Good thing, it was quite hot and we weren't the only ones out picking today. Coincidence was that Mom, Makaila and Cole were all wearing green shirts today. So they encouraged me to change so I'd have one on too. This orchard has the best soft serve strawberry and peach ice cream ever which was a great way to cool off.

Working out

Just thought we should work on Cole's Core strength a little.

Last Day of School

Makaila's school had an outdoor kindergarten party on the last day of school. There were water games and activities outside like the obstacle course and 4 square. Most of the kids loved going to the water gun station.

Helicopter

Helicopter. It is my current favorite word to hear Cole pronounce. So I had to take a video of it.

Grammy's June Visit

So I've been a bad blogger this week. My mom came out to visit for Makaila's first week out of school. The kids were just fighting for her attention from the second she got in the car. After picking her up from the airport we got some pizza and came home to eat dinner. Both the kids were almost too excited to eat saying to Grammy, "watch this" and "let me show you something".

For our big outting we went to go to a Children's Museum. I went on line to print some maps and had trouble finding any current exhibits. I knew there was some construction going on, but it still looked open. After an hour drive, it turned out to be worse than I thought. The Museum of Science and History was totally under construction. They had moved the Children's Museum into the Cowgirl Museum. We went in there and they had taken down 2 of the 3 sections of the Children's Museum to change them to new exhibits. So, since we drove all the way out there we decided to just do the Cowgirl Museum. I wouldn't say it was the most exciting thing I'd ever done, but there were some interesting facts and the kids were entertained indoors (on a hot day) for a few hours. After that we went on a mission to find a chocolate factory that was really more of a chocolate store. But we did come across a HUGE Barnes and Noble's and my kids love books so we checked that out too. It was a decent days outting. We did alright negociating Ft. Worth, but the worst part was we forgot the camera. I know, a blogger's nightmare.

We were hoping to go pick blackberries while mom was here, but we got a serious storm the night before and morning we were supposed to go, so we ended up a Chuck E. Cheese. We also signed up for a summer reading program and checked out some books, played out back in their dyno pool and just enjoy summer. Of course Mom and I had to sneak away for a little mother daughter shopping too.

Grammy spoiled the kids with some new books and a few clothing items. She gave Cole a basketball outfit with basketball shorts. He wants to wear it everyday and gets on me to wash it when it's dirty. Makaila had been begging Grammy to make "Dirt Dessert". That is what they are doing with the hammering and worms.

Butterflies

So these are our Butterflies. They are painted ladies. All 10 of them came out of their chrysalis. Except one of them must have gotten out too easily and it's wings dried bent. That one can't really fly. Kind of like the butterfly version of Dori (for those Finding Nemo fans).

Makaila got to take them to school to show them off. The whole class was a little grossed out by the "blood" red stuff on the walls of the pavilion. How do you explain to them, "it's not really blood, it's meconium." You don't.

So after taking the butterflies to school and feeding them all weekend (Sugar water, watermelon, oranges. You know you wanted to know.) we decided to let them go. Here is the letting go. I took a ton of pictures and never got a great pic of one in flight.

Caterpillars

Okay, so Cole and Makaila's Grammy is a teacher. That might explain why she got them caterpillars for Easter. We got them a few weeks after Easter. 10 of them. Crawling all around. They come in these little cups that have their own food. Truthfully it was both interesting and gross at the same time. Here they are after eating a few days. Picture 2 is them hanging from their chrysalis in the cups. (who wrongly taught us it was called a cocoon? all these years we were wrong I guess). The last picture we hung them inside the Butterfly pavilion.