A Mystery Dinner!

One of our recent church activities was a mystery dinner. We all dressed our parts.. it was really fun!

Tyler was a pro golfer, I was Alberta Newton, a smart but ditzy professor, his dad was a chef, and mom an heiress.

In case you wondered what our stuff looks like

In a garage.

This is about 98% of what we own, in a garage. It's weird when your life is reduced to a few hundred boxes. Simpler in a way.
And of course the girls when they saw me taking pictures wanted their pictures taken too.

Top things to do with kids at Cedar Point

Cedar Point is known for its crazy rollercoasters, so I really had no idea what we were going to do with the kids all day. But there are actually three play areas for little kids with rides and everything! There is a Snoopy play area when you first walk into the park, a Kiddie Kingdom a little further down, and all the way at the back of the park is Camp Snoopy. The kids all had a great time. Our kids are 3 - 18 mos. Of all three places I liked the Kiddie Kingdom the best because the kids could actually ride by themselves and an adult didn't have to cram themselves into the ride with the kid. All the wives pretty much stayed together while the dads went and screamed themselves hoarse. I don't like rollercoasters and neither does Jewel. Jenny is obviously PG and Neesha was watching her little girl. We also got fantastically burned by the sun.

The highlight of the day was Eli not wearing pants.

Ava driving. She was SO happy anytime she could drive a car by herself.

We just kept the kids on this ride for like 30 minutes telling the girl to just keep going and going. It was great.
Ava, Eli and Bella

Malayna and Violet.


Ava and Violet riding on the helicopters by themselves, going up and down, around and around.


Running through the fountains. This is how Eli lost his pants.


Violet of course conked out for about a half hour.

Ava insisted she drive these cars. She would not stop whining about driving the cars.
The Ridgeways. (Chad is one of Tyler's mission buddies that just moved into our old ward)



Here are a couple more Kalahari pics. I seriously recommend this place - Animae Conventions, lost dogs, and all. It was $150 including tax for our room and it included a pizza dinner that night. Sign up at travelzoo.com for this awesome deal.
Bella - out eating all our kids combined :)

Happy Birthday Tyler!

Tyler's birthday was last Wednesday and it was marked by many festivities. He got a ficus tree for his desk and some money to get a new desk when he gets to school. His birthday was also celebrated by finding out his sister in UT has swine flu!! I can't believe we actually know someone who has it. How funny. She's a high school teacher and was out for a few days, but unfortunately for the students sake, she didn't close the school down.

On Thursday we went to Kalahari, an indoor water park in Sandusky Ohio. It was really really fun. The rooms were nice - we got upgraded to a suite for free! I surprised him with a little party at night with our friends who went.

Wolcott Mill Farm Center

It's been raining a lot, and I was dying to get out, so today we went to the Wolcott Mill Farm Center. It's a metropark, but we didn't have to pay to get in, which was awesome! It was also very clean and well organized. Everyone there was also friendly.

Here is Ava on a tractor.

The baby chickens.

We heard roosters crowing. The girls thought this was funny.

This was the craziest thing. The cows get their hooves "trimmed" once a year. So they put them in this contraption to hold them still and then they shave down their hooves. Ava wanted to look at this forever.

After we saw a lot of cute baby goats, pigs and miniature horses, we walked down to a little pond. A little girl must have left her net, so we borrowed it and left it there for the next person. I scooped up some muck from the side of the pond and first try there were two tadpoles! They were pretty big and well-developed. You can see my stick is touching one of them. I also saw a huge turtle and some fish, but the girls didn't see them. Someday they will! This is the kind of science I really like. As long as I don't have to touch anything slimey I'm ok.