Phoenix!

So last week I got to go to Arizona and visit my brother and his family. I decided that since I already had to ask for work off anyway, might as well make it worth while, so I stayed for 9 days. It was so much fun! I can't believe how big Jack and Kindin are getting, they have such fun personalities!
The first day I was there we went hiking, or, as Kindin calls it - Mountain Topping Climbing! We hiked up South Mountain to Kindin's 'castle', had a snack and headed back down. The view from the top was amazing! And we went early enough in the day that we weren't quite melting yet... but it was close! Of course, by the time we were heading down, Kindin was too tired to walk... It's a good thing she's so cute!






We also went to a wildlife park, and it started out awesome! We were walking past the Jaguar's cage and realized that it was sitting 2 feet above our head! They had a giraffe feeding area, we didn't actually feed them but we did hang out and watch them for a while. Kindin was pretty scared of them but she didn't want to leave. They had a few aquariums and you could touch stingrays in one of them, and I actually did it! It felt so weird, like thick jello or something. But way cool!


Dave and Mandy got a babysitter one night and we ate out at Cheeburger Cheeburger (awesome!) then spent a few hours at Dave & Busters. It turned out to be half price night, AND we had a buy $10 get $10 free, it was great!! Of course we tried to do every competitive game there, we played basketball, did a Nascar race, and a trivia game. I'm pretty sure I won all but one basketball game, and that was just warm up. They had a 'Deal or No Deal' game that I tried, and it's actually harder than it looks! I did really well the first round, and the deal was for 36 tickets (It only goes up to 300) But I was feeling lucky so I yelled (yes, yelled, it was loud in there!) "No Deal!!" hit the red button and got ready for the next round. Too bad the red button was to take the deal. Seriously - Seems like red should be NO deal. David was nice enough to let me try again, and I ended up getting around 60 tickets.

The Phoenix museum had a free weekend, so we went on Saturday and for some reason did think very many other people would be there. We were wrong... The line was about 3 hours long, and we didn't really want to risk that with a 3 and a 1 year old. But, we had already parked in a garage that wanted to charge us $12 unless we got a parking validation. SO what to do... Well Mandy conveniently found a doll museum that only charged $3 for us, and for some reason we decided to try it out. (I'm thinking Mandy has been wanting to go to this for months and just couldn't find anyone else to go with her, so she had to trick me in to it.) Either way, it was pretty freaky and definitely gave Kindin and I nightmares that night.
Other than that, we spent a lot of time playing dress up, going to parks and just having fun! Dave and Mandy were such great hosts and I am so glad they put up with me for so long! Thanks you guys, can't wait to see ya in July!