Mall and Dance Costume

John and I celebrated our birthdays by taking the kids to the free carousel night at our mall (where you can go around about a million times for free). I think the most I've ever been able to stomach in one night was 9. Then we went out to eat at Red Lobster and stuffed ourselves with crab. Tori and James love the carousel and eating out so they made our birthdays a lot of fun.

Tori got her dance recital costume this week at dance and was super-excited to try it on, so I took a fun pictures of her doing some poses.

Jumping Jane's

After we went to the Mississippi river museum, we stopped by a place called Jumpin' Janes. It had a ton of bouncy castles and other fun places to play. The kids absolutely loved it and we had some fun, too. We were having so much fun, it was hard to get anyone to hold still for a good picture, but here are a few that we took.

Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium

John had a little time off and we decided that we wanted to take a day-trip someplace we hadn't been before, so we went to Dubuque, IA (just about 1 1/2 hr drive north). We all had a lot of fun at the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium. They had some great exhibits and a fun water play area for Tori and James to explore (we forgot to get pictures of them playing with the water stuff). Here are the kids eating their lunch at the cafeteria.

James took a nice nap in the stroller.

We took our picture outside by the Mississippi river. Tori is holding a colored picture of a butterfly in some of these pictures since a friend of hers that used to live in Iowa and moved to PA sent it to her as part of a school project. We were suppose to take pictures of it at different fun places/landmarks and answer a few questions about Iowa and mail it back. Tori had a ton of fun taking pictures all over of her and Megan's butterfly.

Below is a picture of Tori and the pretty cool octopus. He was moving around quite a bit and it was pretty interesting to watch.

I love Tori's face in the picture below - it's because we told her the giant fish behind her were going to eat her (what great parents).

Above Tori is touching one of the crayfish (I was impressed that she actually wanted to touch it).

We had to get a picture of Tori with the alligator, since the mascot for her elementary school is the Garner Gator.

One of our favorite things to watch were the otters swimming around. There were about 3 or 4 of them and they were wrestling and playing with each other and just going crazy. Their energy was amazing (almost like Tori and James ;)).