Parties and trips

 The last couple of weekends we have been pretty busy with parties and other trips.

Memorial Day weekend we had 2 birthday parties to attend, plus, we had Brett and Andy over for dinner on Sunday.  We are so blessed to have such great people in our lives for us to celebrate with.

The first party was at a bounce house-type place called Cosmic Jump.

Our kids were so excited to go jump some energy off (and they definitely did!)

 Once the kids figured out they get much better traction with their socks OFF, they ran like crazy all over the place!

 Maggie is that little blur at the top of the slope, she was trying so hard to make it up there

 She made it!  Hard work!

 Colin was taking a little rest from the action - that place wore him out

A different part of Cosmic Jump had huge inflatables to play on - you can't really tell, but they are standing on top of a very big slide.

After this party, we had cousin Olivia's 5th birthday party on Sunday at Michael's arts and crafts store.  

The kids had a lot of fun personalizing their own flower pots and decorating sugar cookies.  

They even got their face painted (or their arms, in Colin's case), which was a lot of fun!  There were many tears that night when I told them they couldn't sleep with their body art on.  Mean mom, party of 1!

Then, on Wednesday, I attended at work conference in Orlando, Florida for a few days.  It was super hot and humid there, but I had a blast meeting up with my friends from undergrad and graduate school.  There seemed to be a lot of topics this year that related directly to my job - always a good thing to stay current on the research.

Here are 4 of my closest Exercise Physiology friends (we all had the same advisor at Truman State) and we've all stayed in touch all these years.

I ended up getting sick one day in Florida (must've eaten some bad fish tacos), but I did a 5k Fun Run the next day and the headed home on Saturday.  The flight back was ridiculous, we were delayed both legs of our return flight for more than 3 hours (that we spent on the tarmac, stuck with a bunch of screaming kids and families coming back from DisneyWorld!)

But, I was able to get this awesome caricature of the kids drawn by some talented artist in the Orlando airport.  I absolutely love this thing - I got a frame yesterday and had Brian hang it up in the play room.

I think Colin looks identical to this picture - Maggie's face is much thinner in person, but the artist did a great job of capturing their personalities in the picture.