Grandma and Grandpa and KENZIE come to visit!

Okay, I have been terrible about blogging lately. I am really feeling like part of being a grown-up is feeling like stuff is always falling through the cracks. We're never DONE with everything we're supposed to be doing. And definitely not like blogging is something I'm SUPPOSED to be doing, it's just something I'd like to do in order to keep in touch in the most basic of ways. We have been making a lot of progress lately on other things in life, like getting close to getting our house kind of put together, and dealing with other things like doctor's appointments and oh yeah, our two demanding kids, so taking care of our pictures is not working out like it used to. I haven't blogged because our pictures are just PILED UP on our computer in unnamed folders and not organized in any fashion. It's just too overwhelming! But here's a stab at it for now...

A few weeks ago Tommy's parents and youngest sister Kenzie came out to visit us for a week. Kenzie had only a few days of school that week and we were super excited to have guests to have an excuse to do fun things with. There are some cool places here in the Dallas area that we never go to because they are a 45 minute + drive away, and are too expensive for me to want to go with just the boys and myself on a regular day. But we had lots of fun plans for when our fun visitors came. We showed them all the best things we could, did some fun things around our own neighborhood, and tried to stuff them full of all the best Texan food (barbecue, soul food, and tacos) we could find. And Greg and Jackie are the best kind of visitors--happy to play with the kids and do nothing, happy to go do stuff, and really happy to stock up our pantry full of food from Costco, which was definitely appreciated :).

We've always heard great things about the Dallas Arboretum, but it falls into the far-away-and-expensive category, so we'd never gone before. We had SUCH a good time there! They have a Children's Garden dedicated just to kids (kind of like a huge outdoor science museum) and we all really had fun.

They also had an enormous fall "pumpkin village" with tens of THOUSANDS of pumpkins, which was really cool. We didn't get any GREAT pictures because it was already way past Dane's naptime at this point and he was totally not able to cooperate any more, but it was really fun to look at.

On Monday, October 12--MY BIRTHDAY!--we went to the Texas State Fair! As you can imagine, it was ENORMOUS and crazy and PACKED and really fun. We went to a kids' petting zoo, Dane went through a little toddler play farm where they got to pretend to be farmers and do all their chores, we got a lot of fried food, and rode on the HUGE ferris wheel. 

Feeding the camel with Grandpa!

Graham was such a good sport. He was totally exhausted with no regular naps from all these outings but he would eventually just go to sleep on Tommy's shoulder and look so dang cute.

Big Tex--the mascot of the Texas State Fair. My cousin Ethan said, "He's really big and creepy, and he has a bottom chin. Ew." Hahahaha. Enough said.

My main goal for the day--eat fried fair food!

Riding on the giant ferris wheel. Boom!

Some fun snuggles with my boy on my birthday. Love this boy.

Graham really loved being held by Grandpa. He fell asleep on him like this several times.

We took them to Babe's Chicken Dinner House--the best EVER--and we all did the hokey pokey when it came on!

And since it was my birthday the day before, I had to wear the chicken hat while they sang happy birthday to me!

Leiningers--UNITE!

Dane loves his Grandpa.

We also took them to the Heard Museum to see the dinosaurs there--we knew Kenzie would love it as a recovering dino-holic :) Dane was VERY BRAVE and didn't act totally terrified this time. As long as Grandpa was there to hold him as he walked past each dinosaur, he was okay.

We also took them to our favorite pumpkin patch and carved pumpkins with them!

AND made doughnuts from scratch!

Of course, since we're in Texas, our carved pumpkins were rotting within three days because the sun was beating down on them in the 90 degree October weather. But they looked awesome while they lasted!

The big hurrah--on their last day we took them to the Fort Worth Stockyards to see the cattle and the cattle drive. This is the most stereotypically Texan thing I can think of to show anybody--the Texas of the 1800s, at least--and it was a lot of fun to go together. Dane really wanted to wear his cowboy hat and was very proud of himself.

Another day, another petting zoo--what a lucky guy. This time he let the llama eat out of his hand and he was really brave about it!

Dane's reaction after being licked by the llama.

Reenacting his cute picture from when we went to the stockyards a year ago. 

Watching the cattle in the cattle drive. We met up with Tommy's cousin and family there to watch the cattle drive and have lunch before Greg and Jackie had to take off to the airport. 

We did more fun things this week with the Leiningers visiting than we have for the last three months--not even kidding! It was awesome and of course it was so nice to just be able to spend time with them. Dane and Graham were both so happy to get so much attention and to have so many fun playmates around all week. Thanks so much for coming, Grandma and Grandpa! Come any time!!