Get Your Kicks...

We had a crazy fun day yesterday!  This post is going to be heavy on pictures, light on text, so settle on in and get ready!

First, we went to an Easter egg hunt put on by the city.  It was insane.  Here's a rundown of how it all went:

Visit Easter bunny:

Do first egg hunt for 5 and 6 year olds:

The field was empty of eggs in under 2 minutes.

Play on the bounce houses while mommy waits in line for face painting:

Pet the animals at the petting zoo while mommy waits in line for face painting.

Do the egg hunt for the 3 and 4 year olds while daddy waits in line for face painting.

This hunt was much calmer than the previous one.

The haul!

Finally, get faces painted!

The snow cat cub.

Spiderman!

Then we hopped in the car and headed out to Route 66!  It runs right through town here.  Our first stop wasn't historic, but it was pretty cool.

We went to Pops.

It's a gas station that also happens to have hundreds of flavors of bottled pop for sale!  The whole front of the store is glass, and the windows are lined in pop bottles.

Look at them all!!

They have shelves and fridges lined with all different flavors of pop arranged by color and flavor.

We picked out two six-packs.

We ended up with: Fizzy Lizzy Pineapple (super good!), Boylan's Creamy Red Birch Beer (bleh, Anton liked it though), Round Barn Root Beer (the local brew), Leninade (had to get since it was in Russian), Maine Root Sarsaparilla, Gale's Root Beer, Dog n Suds Root Beer (notice the root beer trend?), Cool Mountain Black Cherry, Carousel Green Apple, Capt'n Eli's Blueberry Pop (okay), Gardena Grape, Americana Orange Creme (can't wait to try!).  It was tough to choose what flavors to get, and I'm sure Anton would have walked out with all the root beers they had if I'd let him.

They also had a burger grill, so we had lunch there, and it was pretty good too.  We ended with a giant ice cream sandwich sundae that about busted our guts.  Yum.

Then we headed slightly down the road to visit the famous Arcadia Round Barn:

It's 113 years old and completely round.  Fancy that.

It's been refurbished, so it's not original materials, but that's how it would have looked.  Up inside the top of the barn it had really cool acoustics.

Alex loves to hear his echo, so he could have played in there all day.  But we were pooped and needed to get home.  

We drove a little bit farther down Route 66 before turning around and heading home.  Here we crashed on the couch and watched Tangled and called it a good day.

Random Funny

(Random picture of Ella.)

While talking with Ella about what Easter means, I was describing why we have Easter eggs:

Me:  What comes out of an egg?

Ella:  A yolk?

Me:  No, what does an egg make?

Ella:  Cookies!!

The Goings On

Just a random catch-up post of things that don't necessarily deserve a post of their own.

The other day Alex wanted to do my hair, and was quite adamant about how he wanted it to look.

He was sure that two ponytails were not enough.

So I got three.  I had to help do the ponytail holders, but he divided it all up and told me where to put them.  He's a nut.

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There's a place here in town that has a bunch of bounce houses and swingsets inside.  I had a 2 for 1 coupon so I took the kids last week when Ella didn't have school.

My camera was not cooperating, so most of my pictures ended up looking like this:

See Ella slide!

Still not good, but that's as good as I got.  But when attempting to get a cute one of the kids, they were losing their patience waiting for me to get the camera functioning right and I ended up with this:

My vampire babies are too cute!  I had to leave the red eyes just to make it more authentic.

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And in light of the recent scandal with the air traffic controller falling asleep on the job, I just had to post this.

Anton went to an informational meeting for NATCA, the union for air traffic controllers.  They gave out a bunch of free stuff, including tickets for two free alcoholic drinks at the get-together.  Anton also came home with this:

Note the bottle cozy and the bottle opener key chain sitting on top of the folder with the big word "Safety."  Do you sense a theme here?  From conversations I've overheard and people I've met in the ATC world, it would seem that drinking is a major life theme for a lot of these guys.  Someone in Anton's class even asked the instructor what the legal blood alcohol limit was for coming in to work.  Now won't you feel safe next time you hop on a plane?  :)

Princess Ella

At the Medieval Fair this last weekend Ella saw the stand where they will braid your hair for only three monthly payments of $19.99!  I'm way to cheap to pay someone to do what I can in theory do myself, so I told Ella I would do her hair in braids later.  Well, I lived up to my word, and while we were watching General Conference, I braided away.

I've never been good at French braiding, and Ella has fine, wavy hair, which makes it that much harder to do, but an hour or so later, and I had success!

I got this cute idea from the Princess and Her Hair blog.  Lots of fun stuff there, but it will make you feel like a bad mom for not making your kid's hair cute everyday.

Sadly, we own no hairspray, so by the end of the day her braids were all fuzzy and flyawayie (sp?) and she needed a bath, so she only got to be a princess for half a day.  But I've promised to braid her hair for school tomorrow, just not so fancy.


UPDATE:  So doing fancy hair in the morning before school is not the best idea.  Ella was almost late, but that was partially my fault for messing up her hair and having to start over.  But it came out cute in the end.

A little French twist action.  She wouldn't let me put a flower in it to hide the tacky hair thing.  Oh well.

She's cute either way.  :)

Medieval Fair!

We love medieval and renaissance fairs.  We found out about one this last weekend and dropped all our plans to go.  It was a pretty big one as far as these things go, but definitely not the best we've ever been to.

Our first stop was the jousting field, where the kids had horse stick races while we were waiting for the main event.  Alex decided he wanted to race.

He regretted his decision pretty quickly after volunteering, but he went through with it anyway.  He doesn't like to be the center of attention at all, so when he heard us yelling for him while he was racing, he got really embarrassed:

He cracks me up.  My sister says he's a cartoon character with all the funny faces he makes.

Our knight ended up losing the jousting after getting into a sissy fight at the end.

Plus, what kind of knight takes tips from the audience?  I've never seen that happen before.  But we took a picture with him without leaving a tip.  We're terrible.

After a little bit of wandering we went and waited in line to get some food.

Normally I love fair food, but this was not very good and seemed more expensive than usual.  $8 for a gyro?  That's insane.

Then we went and waited in line for the kids to ride....

... a camel!  They loved it.

By this point I was all tired out and had a raging headache.  All that line waiting wore me out.  So after a quick browse through the artists' stalls, and two magic wands purchased for the kids, we headed home.  I was the big party pooper.  But we're already looking at which fair we can go to next!

He's An Old Man!

We celebrated Anton's 30th birthday a couple weeks ago.  He told me he could feel himself getting old, which I guess just makes me geriatric.  :)

There wasn't anything in particular he wanted for his birthday, so he opted for a nice dinner out.  We went to a sushi place and had some really good sushi.  The restaurant was all feng shui, which was pretty cool.

Then we came home and had some cake.

His cake was the lazy version of this one that I made a few years ago.  I wasn't in the mood for fancy this year.  But it still tasted good!

So besides the kids giving him a bag of Reese's Pieces, that's about all we did.  But a birthday with sushi and cake is always a good one in my book!

The Answer Revealed!

So the reason for my previous post/poll is because of a disturbing trend I've been noticing here in OK.  Since moving here I've had two people tell me that I don't look old enough to have a six year old.  So that would make me, what, about 24 at the oldest?  I had to bite my tongue to keep from reply something along the lines of how hard a decision it was to keep my baby when I was only 16, but it was totally worth it in the end.

But the one that got me was the lady who asked if I was my kids' babysitter.  Really?  I look like a teenager? I don't think so.  I may look young, but not THAT young.

It really bugs me that people assume that I'm young because they then treat me that way.  Someone five years younger than me will talk to me like I'm new to life and the great big world, and someone my age will say something like "When you get to be my age..."  I don't know why it bugs me so much, but it does.  Can't people just treat me like a person?  I know ten or more years from now I'll be glad that I look younger than I really am, but for now, I'm just going to stew.

And as for the poll, most of you were right.  I'm 32.