Fun With Cousins

In November, Darrell's cousin Krista was married.  Darrell's mom rented a beautiful huge house for everyone to stay in.  The kids loved it and so did we.  Here is a picture of some of the cousins enjoying each others company.  There was a huge pool, but it was too cold to swim...we had to tell the kids this at least a million times.  

Garden

My husband is very much a farmer at heart.  He stuffs as much food growing plants in our backyard as possible.  Every fall we plant snap peas because the kids love them.  The only vegetable Emily will eat is snap peas, so she gets her vegetables once a year when the peas come in.  She doesn't eat them if we buy them at the store.  So this is Darrell's latest brilliant idea for our little garden.  

Last year our peas got sooooo tall that they began to fall over.  Darrell constructed this trellis that will allow the peas to grow up and over the trellis to make a tunnel of peas.  It is very useful and beautiful.

Of course this time of year is wonderful because Darrell plants winter grass and it looks gorgeous.

Derek Creation

My sweet boy is always coming up with new

Lego creations.  This was a pair of glasses.

They could even fold up like real glasses

Sea Life Aquarium

There is an aquarium at the Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe.  They were having a homeschool week and so we went and checked it out.  They had a little class at the beginning.  The kids learned about camouflage and then made pictures of an animal camouflaging itself in the sea.  It was quite amazing how many different sea animals they had in the aquarium.  Fish of all different colors, sharks, sting rays, turtles, jellyfish, star fish and more.  

There was one display in which the kids could touch a few different sea creatures.  Small crabs, snails, starfish etc.  Scattered throughout the aquarium they had these little areas the kids could climb into and put their head up into a plastic bubble inside the tanks.  It was so neat.

This is Emily inside one of the bubbles.

Emily and Derek in a shark mouth

My kids called this tank (below) the Nemo tank.  They had the fish from the movie Little Nemo all in one tank.  The kids loved it.

For anyone that lives in Arizona, I highly recommend this aquarium.  I want to go again with Darrell so I can actually enjoy going through slowly and reading about the fish.  The kids of course are so excited they jump from thing to thing to thing.