Traditional Labor Day Weekend at the Circus

So Labor Day Weekend tradition in the Quad Cities is the Ringling Bros. & Barnam and Bailey circus. I've only taken Dylan once or twice before this year but wanted to go again so we had a mommy-Dylan date night together. We started off the evening with a visit to the tents outside where they keep the lions, horses, zebras and elephants. Our favorite tent was the elephant tent. We watched them cool themselves off by spraying themselves with dirt and hay.

And then is was getting close to showtime so the caretakers had the girls lay down to get blown off by a very powerful leaf blower before taking them under the tents for a nice hosedown. It was very cool to watch this massive elephant go from standing to laying and then back up to stading again. It's amazing what their massive bodies can do!
When we were done outside, we went inside for the all access pre-show down on the floor. We got to watch different preformers including the lead clown who walked around the floor on a big red ball. Needless to say, Dylan got a turn to try it out. He did an awesome job!!
Then the circus started with our favorite act, the elephants, of course! And the show horses who moved so quickly that I never got a very decent picture of them.And what is a circus without tightrope walkers to distract you while the workers clean up horse poo?And then of course the ADORABLE tigers. These guys/girls acted just like kittens the way they paw at the leader's whips. Too Cute! Dylan and I decided that we wished we could train our Guinea Pig to do tricks like these guys.And Bello the Clown is the lead "actor" in the entire show. The theme was "Bellobration" and at one point they were throwing Bello "wigs" into the crowd and Dylan caught one. Doesn't he look goofy?
And then of course more elephants. I LOVE this picture! If only I had gotten a little closer zoom!And they finished off the night with human canons. They are the two orange blurrs at on the left half of the picture. A husband and wife couple do this every year together!So that was our evening wrapped into a few pictures. I had more pics but figured it might get TOO boring to look at if I put too many more in there. :-) But all in all we had a great Mommy-Dylan date night together!

Saling

So a few weeks ago my dad bought a sailboat off of eBay. It's a 19 footer and pretty nice! He's had it in his driveway ever since he bought it. Well last night we got a random phone call and it was Dad asking if we would meet him down at the river just a minute or two away from our house. He was monkeying with the boat and watned to know if we wanted to test it out with him. So Dylan and I headed down there just after 3:30 on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. When we got there we had to set it up....this was the HARDEST part and took FOREVER!!!! (almost 2 hours) I was a little nervous about being out ON the Mississippi River in a boat equipped with only a trolling type of a motor (I've heard stories of the awful currents down there). But once I got my "sea legs" all was good and we were able to enjoy the beautiful cool weather, light wind and calm river. And the currents did NOTHING to the boat...only the few jerks on speed boats who got pretty close at a very fast pace and made huge wakes for us! So I took a LOT of pictures and thought I'd share a few with you! :-)

Here is Grandpa teaching Dylan how to steer the boat with the rudder (?)Dylan QUICKLY caught on and took over all by himself, lolHere we are headed away from the I-74 bridge (going downstream)Here's Dad driving the boat back upstreamWe got closer to the bridgeComing up under the bridge!! This made me nervous!Almost RIGHT under. (Jenn, Hannah would like this picture!!!)This is where Dylan spent most of the trip...up on the bow looking for fish, birds, sticks/logs, anything he could find floating in the river.And we ended the night with a perfect sunset over the Mississippi River while we were on the dock getting the boat put away (which also took a LOOOOONG time!)

My Baby is NINE years old!!!!

Okay, I'm officially old, now! I have a 9 year old son as of 8:04am this morning! I'll add more to this post as the day goes on.
Here is the LAST picture of Dylan as an 8 year old. Being a total dork, of course!

And here is the first picture of him as a 9 year old. Taken this morning at 8:04am which is EXACTLY his birthday. We walked to school right after this pic was taken. Poor guy has a test today, too. LOL.

After school the boys entertained themselves with my eliptical machine, go figure! They also managed to have a bouncy ball fight and played with little G.I. Joe type guys for awhile.As soon as Mark got home from work we headed off to the Lil' Mississippi Mini Golf.I think Mark was enjoying himself, too. A little stressed with FOUR 8/9 year olds but still had fun.After awhile, though, some of them started thinking it would be fun to hit their balls into the waterfall and streams running through the place. I wish I would have gotten a picture of it but one kid even lost his SHOE in the stream and they found it down in the pond!!When we got home we had Dairy Queen ice cream cake (which I forgot to take a picture of!) and then Dylan opened his gifts. Here is his Kung Fu Panda PS2 game from Grandma Carol/Grandpa KurtThe Wall-E movie from Mark and I, he also got a remote control Wall-E also but havent gotten a picture of that one, yet.A Havoc airplane from DawsonNascar Race cars from Trae ( in the background)

And of course us mommies deserve to celebrate the day as well, right? Since it was US that brought our babies here. :-) So this mommy got a nice little present as well!

THRID GRADE!!!???!!!

Here is a picture of my "baby" boy on his first day of 3rd grade, this morning. He was actually a little bit excited to get to school and when I picked him up after school he kept talking about how much FUN he had all day long! He ended up getting the teacher that he THOUGHT he didn't want. But after school he decided he got the "good" one after all b/c the kids from the other class were saying that they didn't have any fun today! I'm so thankful that he has such a wonderful and caring teacher in Mrs. Sebastain. It leads me to believe this is going to be a wonderful year for him!

Pump It Up!

On Saturday we had a busy busy day! I started the morning going to a baby shower for an old high school friend. It was so nice to see her and some other old friends that day. In the afternoon we took Dylan to "Pump It Up" for our neighbor's 6th birthday party. Pump It Up is a big metal building full of inflatable jumpies where they host a birthday party. It costs a whopping $250 for two hours reguardless of how many kids you have but you get the whole place to yourself and the employees do ALL of the work for you. The had LOTS of fun and there were TONS of kids there!! Here Dylan is coming out of the moon bounce that has one small slide and a few obstacle course things inside.

Here is the HUGE double slide. Kids and adults all had fun going on this one (among all of the other blow up things!)Dylan didn't stand still long enough for one decent picture.Here he and his friend Devon are climbing up to the top of the double slideHere Dylan is waiting for the finish line worker to tell him when to "GO" on the obstacle race course. Here he was waiting b/c he was getting ready to race........

HIS DAD!!! Even though Mark is shy, he even got in on the bouncy action, lol. Here he was telling some of the other kids that he was going to kick Dylan's butt in the race, lol.And here he comes...LONG after Dylan, lolHere he is coming out of "Basketball Bounce". One of his favorites. This one you could do regular moon bounce type jumping or there were two basketball hoops inside that you could play against other people.And last but not least Here is Dylan with the giat boxing gloves on. He was boxing Devon but Devon chickened out before I could get my camera out for a pic of both of them going at it. It was quite comical!

And I wish I had gotten better pictures of this room. But once their hour and a half was up in the bounce room they took everyone into the party room for cake, ice cream and gifts. Here is the bday girl, Caitlin (in the seat), with her two cousins (on the arms of the chair) waiting for the workers to serve up the cake. In here they serve cake, ice cream and snacks before opening gifts. While Cait opened her gifts one of the employees wrote down who gave her which gift (for thank you notes) and another worker put the gifts into a huge wheel-around tub for transporting to the car later on. Also, the party starts when it's supposed to start and when the invite says 5:30...everyone is out the door around 5:35...no unnecessary mingling afterwards which was nice when you have such a busy day!

Well, that was the excitment of our weekend! I hope to post a lot more on here now that I've FINALLY gotten a new camera!!

And obviously, due to a few blurry action photos, you can tell that I haven't QUITE figured everything out with it, yet. I'll post again soon! XOXOXO