A Quick Trip

Between homeschooling, ministry responsibilities, BSF responsibilities, etc. I have been incredibly busy lately. That's why it was so nice to take a small break for Thanksgiving and head out of town to do something fun as a family. We recently learned that there is a museum in Houston hosting a traveling exhibit on the Chronicles of Narnia. Evan is my little Narnia fanatic so we immediately started planning how we could see it. With all of our responsibilities we decided that Thanksgiving would be best since everything would be cancelled for a few days anyway. I have some second cousins who live in a suburb of Houston so I gave them a call and asked if we could stay with them and spend the holiday with their family. They were thrilled so it was all set. We left Wednesday and traveled for a good part of the day. Thursday we had Thanksgiving with cousins, and many other family and friends. Friday we spent the day at 2 museums and could have easily spend the whole weekend there seeing the many fantastic museums but money and time restricted us to 2. We traveled home on Saturday to be back in time for church on Sunday.

The museums we saw were both the Museum of Natural Science but one was in Houston and one was in Sugarland which is about 1/2 an hour away. The Narnia exhibit was fantastic! At the beginning a wardrobe opened and you felt like you were walking into Narnia with "snow" falling and everything. They had tons of actual costumes from both movies, the White Witch's sleigh, the crowns of the kings and queens of Narnia, tons of information on how the strange animals and creatures were made, and much more. Unfortunately they did not allow photography which really disappointed us! The other museum had a fantastic dinosaur exhibit. Both of my boys love dinosaurs but especially Evan so it was really a great treat when a paleontologist saw us looking at one of the dinosaurs and came to talk to us, answering tons of questions and telling us about their most current discoveries and digs.

Another fun thing we did is went down to the Gulf of Mexico to see the beach and the water. It was rather chilly that night but it didn't stop Evan from rolling up his pants and running in the water! He ended up soaked but absolutely loved it. The rest of us thought he was crazy! Here are just a few pictures from our trip.

At the entrance to the Narnia exhibit...the only picture we could get!

Dinosaurs!


Our family with my cousin Sidney at the beach

Evan in the water and Clayton finding shells

Look how wet Evan got! So much for rolling up his pants!

Halloween

I've had such a great time checking out all of the blogs and facebook pages to see everyone's kiddos! We had a wonderful time last night! Surprisingly not as many houses were giving out candy this year and we figure it is a combination of the recession and the Razorback football game. More likely the Razorback football game! That just meant we had to walk farther which was no big deal since it was good exercise and a nice night. We loved having Larry's parents here and the kids had a blast. No one really knew what either of my kids were. People guessed that Evan was a pirate or a knight and one person knew who Prince Caspian was once Evan told them. People kept asking Clayton why he wasn't wearing a costume so he'd have to explain it, but once we got home and he was giving out candy there were kids who came to the door that knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish! One funny story.....Evan got his costume for his birthday back in July. He has been very careful with it, especially the sword. It is not the most sturdy thing in the world so he has treated it with great care, and even hidden it when kids come over to keep it from being broken. Last night about 1/2 an hour before the sun went down he was playing outside with it and broke it! We couldn't believe it. Luckily with dad and Pa-Pa around there isn't much that can't be fixed so we performed emergency surgery and the sword is now stronger than ever!
6 bags of huge bags from Sam's and we used it all!

Prince Caspian

Bakugan Brawler - notice the Bakugan on his shoulder and the ones clipped to his pants

Acting out the part!

Doing sugrery on the sword

Evan's loot

Clayton's loot