First Visit to Cascades Park (and Voodoo Dog)

Cascades Park is a new park in our town.  Well the space is not new, it is really old, but they have been working on renovating and rejuvenating that area for several years.  The result is a 12 acre space with walking trails, a playground, an ampitheatre, a splash pad and tons of green space. After gymnastics and a visit to grandma's house we decided to surprise you ladies with a visit to the park.  We didn't tell you where we were going, but we ran home and grabbed your bathing suits.  To say the place is amazing, is an understatement.  It is such a jewel, right in the middle of downtown.

First we explored the walking path.  There were quite a few people and dogs walking around.

someone had a remote control boat in the water

 After exploring the trails and green space we headed over to the playground.  It was a different kind of playground, one that you can use your imagination with.

After exploring Discovery, we made it over to the splash pad area.  In the courtyard there is an area that shows the state with all the counties.

Indian River County, where mommy is from.

Bradford County, where daddy is from.

Leon County, where you ladies are from.

Next we were off to the splash pad.  This is such a great addition to our area.  I can see us visiting this quite often.

 The longer we stayed the baggier your bathing suit bottom became.  At least they fit this year :)  You ladies burned up quite the appetite so we decided to take you a fun local place for lunch, Voodoo Dog.

 

 You ladies played Ms. Pac-Man

 You also had your first Voodoo Dog, The Jefferson.  Which is a bacon wrapped hot dog topped with mac-n-cheese.  You ladies loved it!

I call this a successful outing :)

I can see a lot of visits to Cascades Park in our future.

A Glimpse of Spring

There have been glimpses of Spring this week, but we have been stuck at school or work.  I was hoping that it would be a nice weekend after all the rain of yesterday and mother nature complied.  We had gymnastics this morning and Emma you were quite the monkey.  One of the stations was the rope and you were just supposed to hold on and tuck your knees into you, well the next thing we see if you have climbed yourself half-way up the knotted rope.  I really should have snapped a picture, but Daddy and I were a little shocked and laughing at the same time.  One of the coaches came over and got you down.

After gymnastics we had breakfast and came home.  It had warmed up since the morning and you ladies wanted to play in the yard and then asked if you could ride your bikes.  You have not been able to ride your bikes much since your birthday and today was a great day to do that.

what a gorgeous day

You ladies are getting much better at peddling and getting started by yourselves.  Emma you have even started to peddle without sitting to use all your momentum.

water break

sassy Lily

It is really nice that we live on the cul de sac and you ladies can just ride around in circles with very little traffic. Our neighbors even come out and move the cars so you have more room, that or they are afraid of you running into the cars :) Hopefully this weather continues and we can get out more often.  Maybe mommy and daddy will get  some bikes and we can all explore around.

Valentine's Day 2014

I love Valentine's Day.  It was Valentine's Day 5 years ago that we found out we were expecting and since then this has always been an amazing holiday for us.  I love putting together little love baskets for you ladies.

Daddy surprised you with cupcakes and roses for mommy :)

Since you were having a party at school you got to wear party clothes and your new bubblegum necklaces.

my loves on love day

Speaking of school this is the third year we have done the non-candy valentine's and it is super fun searching Pinterest to find what we are going to do.  Lily you brought loopy straws that we found and Emma brought pencils.  I think they turned out super cute.

When I got to work I had a present on my desk from Peggy.  When you ladies had your day of fun with Peggy and Chris one of the things that you did was paint a picture so Peggy and Chris took parts of the pictures you painted and framed them for me.  They are so sweet and I love them.

We decided to go out to dinner with the entire town and after 3 hours dinner was done and we were home. It was such a great day!

"Snow Day" Tally 2014

There had been whispers of snow in Tallahassee for a week now.  Would it come, would it not come was the topic of most conversations.  The last time there was any significant snow fall in Tallahassee was 1989. Since we had missed out on all the snow on our trip up north I was really excited about the prospect of snow.  On Tuesday things really started to look promising, the county closed schools for Wednesday and your preschool followed suit.  You ladies went to bed fairly easy with the bribe of being woken up if the snow came.  I stayed up late and kept checking the weather, it was an absolute mess in Atlanta and I didn't want that, but some fluffy stuff would be fun.  This was the projected forecast when I went to bed and as you can see it had 100% chance of snow at 6 the morning.

Well, the snow didn't come :(  However, with the rain that fell we did get a lot of frozen stuff around the yard.  I wanted to take advantage of the "snow day", so I made peanut butter waffles with chocolate ganache for breakfast.

After breakfast I declared that we were going on an "ice hunt."  We all got bundled up in layers and rain jackets and boots and set out to explore what had frozen in our yard.  Just as we got outside it started to sleet.

touching the ice pellets

examining a branch'cicle

mommy, the chair is frozen

Here are some items we found on the ice hunt.

After exploring the back yard we went to the front yard and discovered that both mommy car and daddy's truck were frozen and covered in ice.

I thought it might be fun to build an ice man so we scraped all the ice of the vehicles and built "Leon" in honor of winter storm Leon.

We attempted to give Leon eyes and a nose, but it is not easy sticking things into ice, so he had arms and that was it.  After building Leon, we had a ice ball fight and daddy joined in on the fun.  While it was not snow, it was fun.  There were also icicles on the trees and house.  The ones on daddy's truck were pretty cool as well.

After having fun running around during the sleet storm, having and ice ball fight and building Leon we were all cold and settled back inside for lunch and naps.  Although the snow never came, we had a great "snow day" anyways.