Zoo

This last week we took our first "real" trip to the zoo for 2011. It was just me and the girls though, since it was a Thursday. We've upgraded our membership so they get to ride on the carousel as much as they want!! They love it. They could ride that thing all day long. Our new membership level also allows us to ride the monorail as much as we want too, but we haven't done that yet. We really love the Dallas Zoo. It's so much fun and the children's area keeps them entertained for a good 2 hours. The membership is TOTALLY worth the money.

Man I love my girls! We had so much fun. Another plus for the zoo, is that it wore them out just enough to make them sit quietly in the cart while we were stocking up at Aldi on the way home!

Brent is in his last week of this class. We're excited for him to have more free time next week. He's going to use it to install a rain gutter to the front and then put in some new nicer looking plants in our front yard. We hate what's there now and it looks horrible. He just put in a new brick border too that he's pretty excited about. It does look great. We're also going to be getting 2 shade trees for our back yard, because the sun and heat get pretty brutal back there in the summers, we almost can't go out there at all.

I'm really enjoying Brynley being older. She's starting to communicate better and better, which always helps. I'm not doing much, just trying to keep the house in order, mostly in vein! I've started to really want to bake and cook more. The problem is that it's expensive and makes me fatter. It's also an issue because when a recipe doesn't go right, I've started to become almost obsessed with tweaking it and making it work somehow... and that's costly! That's pretty much all I do. Other than taking the girls to the library twice a week, which is fun.

These videos are of Brynley doing the "clapping game" an her current favorite Barney video. This performance isn't her best... but I thought it was cute enough!

Our Big Girl!!

Brynley is officially a "big girl"! She has her new "big girl bed". She was so excited and wouldn't leave Brent alone for a minute while he set it up. She has been so excited to climb into it the last 2 nights.

Mariska is silly and decided to eat all her apple slices like one big sandwich.

Mariska had a few friends from down the street over to play one night. Do you like her make-up?!

Pudding for dessert.

Okay, so I know it hasn't been 4 months since Christmas...

Bla, bla, bla... yada, yada, yada.

I've been really bored with blogging lately. Not only does my life seem abnormally boring, but it's boring to write, and post pictures and think of stories to share, only to have the same 4 people comment each time. Not to take away from how much I enjoy them or their comments, on the contrary I love them. Although the fun of a blog is supposed to be to connect with people I don't get to regularly communicate with. And as much as I enjoy the comments from my 4-5 closest friends, I email with them regularly. So, anyway, I'm bored with it because it's not so fun talking to yourself much. Although I should add it does help with my journal writing. I generally just copy and paste my blog into a Word Document that is my journal. So that's good.

Anyway, I'm excited about one thing. We're going to switch to a cheaper health insurance plan. We've always just been with the insurance Brent's district signed us up with, BlueCrossBlueShield. The premiums are so painful and just keep going up. I was at a Valentine's party a couple weeks ago and the topic of health insurance came up, I shared how much we pay each month and our deductible and everyone there nearly fainted. They were all shocked. My friend with 5 kids yelled, "Holy cow, WE don't even pay that much!" - So I figured we should probably look around. Then I was lucky enough to be out with a friend at ChickfilA one day and we started talking about money and such again and she told me about their plan and their "insurance guy" that is fantastic. So I've called him and he's visiting with us tomorrow night. It looks like we should be able to shave a good $150 - $200 a MONTH from our budget AND our deductible will be about $800/year less!! So that's what I'm excited about.

Brent is stressed out at work. This is the worst time of year for us. The TAKS tests are getting closer and closer and his students aren't getting any more motivated to use their brains. It wears on him.

The girls are good. Mariska is excited to be thinking about kindergarten already, since we toured the charter school she'll most likely go to a couple days ago. Brynley is talking a bunch, although we're generally the only people who can understand her.

We went over to our neighbor's house the other night and played a neat game they and another couple they are friends with invented. At least I think they made it up. They called it "Rapid Scrabble". It was so much fun and I wasn't nearly as horrible as I thought I'd be! Although our friend James is a human dictionary and smoked us all. But anyway, you take all the letters from 3 Scrabble games and mix them all up, faced down. Each player (6) gets 14 letters to start. At the same time you all turn over your letters and make as many words as you can, they all have to line up and connect just like in regular scrabble. Once you are done using ALL your letters, even if a word is incomplete, as long as it's in part of a real word then you can say "draw 4" and everyone has to take 4 more letters and go from there. The first person to use all their letters (once all of them are in play) gets a bonus 10 points. The person with the longest word gets a bonus 10 points. Any letters you couldn't fit into your words count against your points. You add up your points and see who wins!! It was so much fun and seriously addicting! I had a great time and we're really tempted to run out and get a bunch of scrabble games!! I don't like regular scrabble, but I highly recommend this game!