Botanical Gardens

Friday I took the girls the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It's a place downtown where there are different kinds of huge gardens with all kinds of plants, flowers and water feautures. Some of the gardens are indoor but most are outdoors.

Usually they will feature a new artist for the season with installations throughout the gardens.

Last year we went with mom and the artist feautres was Dale Chihuly. He has amazing glass sculptures. There are still a few of his scultures in the gardens. The floating glass balls that are in a huge pond are so cool!

This year the artist featured is Nikki Nights. She makes these enormous scupltures out of wire and fabric and then paints some of them but mostly covers them in mosaics. She uses glass, tile, rocks, and all kinds of other stuff. Most of them are interactive so the girls could climb up on them or go inside of them.

They were just stunning. And the ones covered in mirrors were so cool with the sun shining on them. Although I have to say these pictures do not do them justice. All in all, it ended up being the perfect day. The temperature was just right. We never got too hot and the humidty was abnormally low.

The girls had a great time. Although we had to rush back to get Olivia ready for her dance recital. She was soaking wet from the splash park that they have in the kids play area.The best part is that it only cost us $10 for all three of us to get in.

It's about time

OK so I thought it was probably time to create a family blog.
I was starting to feel a little left out. I love to see what my family is up to and all of the adorable pictures of my niece's and nephew's and I thought just maybe my family would want to see my adorable girls too!

Well,
We just returned from our trip to the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
It is close enough that we can drive there in less than a day and it less expensive than flying (although not by much now a days with the price of gas rapidly rising).
We always go with some friends of ours from Tennessee (Brian, Amy and Adam) and this year we added our friends the Martinez's (Antonio, Dede, Gabby, Chris and Josh).

The guys spent A LOT of time fishing on Brian's boat out in the ocean. But I can't complain too much since this year they actually provided us with some red fish for dinner. Yumm!!

I just bathed in the sun and enjoyed my time NOT working. The girls mostly played in the sand and made new friends with the neighbors next door.
We didn't get to do much swimming this year because the jelly fish were early this year. There were TONS of them. The first few days there were so many that you couldn't even get in without getting stung. You could literally stand at the waters edge and count them by the dozens.
Fortunately, the last few days they had cleared out for the most part. It took a lot to convince Madison to get in and it was pretty much over for Olivia. She was convinced that she would get stung if she got in (even though she watched me swim for over 30 min. with out incident).

Our friend Antonio caught a little sand shark from the shore and while trying to let it go, Brian got bit by it. For a small shark the bite was pretty bad. Not bad enough to get stitches or anything but it gives you an idea of what a big shark can do.






All in all, it was a good time. I wanted to stay a little longer but I think that no matter how long we stay that will always be the case.

We took tons of pictures, here are a few of my favorites (my camera is not as great as Christy and Leora's but it gets the job done).
Actually, Olivia did the majority of the photo taking. Since it is digital, I just let her go to town. She did a pretty good job and managed to even take a few of herself! There were two in particular that were so cute. One was of her own eyes and one of her feet. Somehow she managed to make them sepia tone, although they are a little blurry, they turned out really cute!!