summertime activities

so its true. i am not a cool mom. i don't take my kids on daily trips to the zoo or the museum or the pool. instead, we read a lot of books, play a lot of games, go to the library, draw with sidewalk chalk, play in our own pool and swing. lame i know but aren't we just supposed to do our best? well, in my defense, that's exactly what i'm doing. it's not that i wake up and say to myself, "i am going to hold my children prisoner and never let them leave the house." i actually do the opposite. and it usually backfires. if an activity comes up i tell myself "last time i tried this i had to drag my kids away early and told myself i would never do it again but i will give it one more shot." then the cycle just repeats itself. mason is ok. it's sophie that is impossible. its just too hard to keep an eye on mason while i'm trying to wrestle a crying 1 year old. so judge me all you want, but i know that i am doing my best.

with summer on everyones mind, the activities are in full swing. as usual i decided to try and be a cool mom. our library has a summer reading program so mason, sophie and i go to the library a lot to get new books and read as many as we can. you get 1 ticket for every 5 books you read and you can only read 1 book 3 times. we have a lot of fun discovering good books, and not so good ones. at the end of the summer there will be a carnival where you can buy prizes with your tickets and even though i don't have to motivate mason to read he likes to see his progress on a simple piece of paper.

my pictures are a little out of order, but the first activity that the library hosted was the dallas zoo. they brought 8 animals, we barely made it through 3 of them. mason couldn't have cared less. he was more interested in taking pictures and climbing trees. sophie was hot and tired and cried the whole time so as usual we left early. 2 days later they had another activity. thankfully curtis was off work so i got him to go with me to help with the kids. since it was a two hour activity (the first was search and rescue dogs, the second was the ringling circus clowns) we skipped the first hour and just went to the second activity. as the dogs were getting ready to leave sophie kept walking up to one trying to pet it. the owners were really nice and let her have as much time as she wanted. sophie really wanted to pet her but then she would get scared and back away. it was cute :) both kids did well with the clowns....for about 10 minutes. mason began to wander, finding other things more interesting. sophie just sat with curtis and hung out. even if mason didn't find it fun, i thought the clowns were awesome! they had the whole crowd cracking up (minus my kids of course).      

 slappy and monday

monday is playing an actual saw

now the dallas zoo pictures.

this is an alligator

owl

armadillo

so that is our boring (and hot) summer so far. maybe i will gain up my courage by the time the next activity comes around and try yet again. until then we will enjoy our nice air conditioned house and hide and seek.