Planet Fun

On Saturday, we took Alyssa and Ashley to another Chuck E. Cheese type place. They have a lot of these indoor kid play places around here. This one is called Planet fun. There is a dinning area in the middle and then all of these tunnels and slides around the outside of the room. Alyssa had a blast climbing all over the room.

We went at lunch time, so we ordered a pizza and sat at one of the dinning tables while Alyssa enjoyed herself. The pizza was terrible. We know this because Ashley wouldn't eat it and she eats everything. Plus, we ate it too and it just wasn't good. Here is Ashley waiting for her food.
When Ashley couldn't stand sitting in the high chair anymore, I took her over to the toddler area and let her crawl around. We were amazed that Alyssa came and checked in with us everytime she came down the slide. We decided that we would go back to let the girls play, but we would never plan on eating there again.
Alyssa had a lot of fun and thanked us numerous times for taking her there and that made it worth the effort.

Ashley Walking

There is nothing cuter than when a baby starts walking, so we tried to catch a few of these little steps on video. Once again, I have to apologize for our ancient camera (or so it seems with how much has changed with cameras since we bought ours in 2004) and its lack of sound and poor picture quality.

Here is Ashley walking with Alyssa. Alyssa loves to help her walk, but isn't very good at keeping her on her feet. I love how at the end of this one, Alyssa glares at the little girl that knocked Ashley down.

Birthday Celebration

As some of you may know, I celebrated my 29th birthday on the 9th. Since Grandma and Grandpa Wheeler were coming on the 11th, we decided to save the whole cake and ice cream thing until after they got here. We convinced Grandma to make a chocolate-cherry cake that I had my eye on for awhile. Here I am with the cake and all of those candles.

Alyssa was very excited to help put all of the candles on the cake. The cake turned out very good and I was happy to enjoy a chocolate cake, which I never make because Danny doesn't like chocolate.
I had a very good birthday and I appreciate all of the birthday wishes that I recieved through phonecalls, email, mail, and facebook.

The Kady Trail

Towards the end of Grandma and Grandpa's visit, we started having some really nice weather. We took advantage of it and showed them one of our favorite outdoor spots around here. The Kady trail stretches from one side of Missouri to the other alongside a railroad track, that is no longer in use, and the Missouri river. The part of the trail that we went to is in St. Charles. There is a park there, with a Lewis and Clark Monument and there are some unique shops a block over from the park. Alyssa's favorite part of the outing was throwing stuff into the river. It started with rocks.

After the rocks were gone, she moved on to sticks. In the picture below, you can see a stick in mid air.
Ashley enjoyed walking with Grandpa.

Here is Alyssa walking on the railroad track. This is another one of her favorite things to do here.

And we can't ever get away with out letting her climb on the train that you aren't supposed to climb on.

The Butterfly House

Grandma and Grandpa Wheeler came to visit us this week from Utah. We have been enjoying the time with them and it is so much fun to watch the girls interact with them. One of our outings was to a place called the Butterfly House. It is hard to describe, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.

If you can't tell from our facial expressions, Alyssa is terrified and I am disgusted in the picture below.

Ashley is in front of a butterfly display here. Those are all real, dead butterflies behind her.
Let me take a minute to describe our experience of going through the butterfly house. When you walked into the house, there were a bunch of bug displays. Things like beetles, cockroaches, spiders, etc. They were all abnormally large and deadly too. After looking at the bugs, we watched a 17 minute movie about butterflies and where they come from. After the movie, we went into the large greenhouse-like room where the live butterflies were flying all around us. It was extremely hot and humid in there, but amazing to see all of those beautiful, big butterflies so close. You had to be careful not to step on them because some were on the ground too. Here are Danny and the girls inside the butterfly room.

Here is the whole group minus myself. If you look just to the right of Alyssa's arm, you can see a butterfly that snuck into the picture.

Here is another picture that caught a butterfly. I don't know how we managed to miss more of them because they were everywhere.

Here is one more with a butterfly in it.

And here is Grandma posing with the butterflies.

Here is a picture of the kind of butterfly I saw the most in there. There were other ones too, but mostly this kind. It was this pretty blue on the top of the wings and brown and speckaled on the bottom.

We all had to laugh that Alyssa insisted on taking her "Spying Scope" with her to look at the butterflies. The funny part about it being that you can't even see through the cheap Kid's Meal toy. But she carried it around with her anyways.

The pictures don't even do justice to describe the beauty in that room. I think Ashley was even entertained by them. The only downside was that it wasn't as big as we had expected and we were really glad we had "buy one get one free" coupons because admission was more money then we would have liked paying. We will post more pictures from their visit later on this week.

We Love Daddy

Here's one of the many reasons why our girls love their daddy.
He takes the time to play with them and this week their playtime involved the construction of a fort. The fort started small (1 blanket over a couple of chairs) and then grew into this.

As soon as it was done, Alyssa gathered up some books and the three of them sat inside of it.

Then Alyssa called me so that I could see their creation. I crawled inside (after Danny had crawled out. It was big, but not big enough for two adults) to take a look around.

And then, of course, the animals had to get in on the action.
The daddy in our house is so much more fun than the Mommy because he takes the time to do fun stuff like this. It's no wonder the girls attack him whenever he gets home. In Primary this week, they talked about Dads. When asked what kinds of things their Daddies do, Alyssa replied "plays games."

Someone's in the Kitchen WITHOUT Mommy...

On Friday, I woke up with an upset stomach. As a result, I spent a good part of the day laying on the couch trying to keep my mind off of it. I could hear Alyssa and Ashley somewhere nearby laughing and sounding very happy. After awhile I asked Alyssa what they were doing to which she replied "We're eating something." I quickly jumped up thinking of all the terrible things they could have been eating. I got to the kitchen and found this.
It was so funny to me that I had to get a few pictures. They were kindly sharing with each other passing the jug back and forth.

I think Ashely was enjoying it more than Alyssa because she would tip it backwards where Alyssa would only lick off of the top.

And Alyssa saw how happy it made Ashley, so she was very willing to share with her.

They must take after their Mommy to be interested in so much chocolate. This was the last picture I took after I had gotten the syrup away from them and closed the fridge.

That is what her hands looked like too. I'm suprised that there wasn't any on her clothes. They tried to go back for it a couple times since, but I stopped them before they got anything in their mouths.