Texas...

Here are some pictures from our trip. Grab some popcorn...there's a lot!!!

This is Gampie. He is Jeremy's grandpa. He played catch with Nolan and they became good buddies.

We drove to Houston one weekend to visit our friends the Lyon's that we met at BYU. They used to make fun of us because we were from Texas...but I guess they secretly wanted to be Texans themselves!!! This is all of our kiddos. Pretty much impossible to get them all to be normal at the same time. Click on the picture and check out baby Taylors face!! too cute.

Can you tell this is Austin???

I had to home school Jacks while we were gone and one of the weeks we learned about maps. So I took him to state line in Texarkana where one side of the road is in Texas and the other side of the road is in Arkansas. (Also where we used to "cruise" in high school!) Austin didn't want to go to Arkansas...I don't blame him!!

Spring Lake Park was such a fun place to go when I was little, so my mother in law and I took the boys there several times. The weather was so nice and the boys LOVED feeding the ducks and playing on the playgrounds. It took Nolan a few times of eating the bread before he realized to throw it to the ducks. He had no fear of the water, and Austin was very protective of him.

We had to bring Dad on his day off because the boys wanted to show him the ducks.

Secret to keeping Nolan happy in the car...red vines.

Nolan LOVES dogs, and my mother in law has a little dog named Max. He would take all his bedding out of his cage and sit in it almost everyday. I'm sure Max is glad we are gone!

One of my best friends from high school, Darcy, had quints. They only live about an hour from Jeremy's mom's house, so we went to visit them a few times. They are Austin's age, so we had one 7 year old, six 4 year olds, and one 1 year old to entertain. We tried to chat and catch up but we kept getting interrupted!!!

Did I mention the weather was awesome. We played outside almost everyday because Nolan would cry by the sliding glass door until we went outside. Dad gave him his own football so he wouldn't get in the way of the big boys' game.

Happy 2009!!! We were so tired, we rang in the New Year on New York time. We watched the ball drop and jumped on bubble wrap...it sounded like fire works. (really we just didn't want to do fire works)
Driving across Texas we passed lots of cotton fields. I thought they were so cool, so we stopped, took some pictures, and picked some cotton. I put the cotton in a glass jar (I'll have to take a picture because I LOVE it)on our book shelf and now Jeremy calls me a cotton picker!!

If you've never been to Texas, you're really missing out. Texans are very proud...notice the flag on the roof and the building painted as a Texas flag. These are just a few of the hundreds of building we saw painted like this. There are Texas flags everywhere and we even went to a McDonald's and the sinks were shaped like Texas. I never really noticed until I moved away and came back. I've lived in Idaho 6 years and couldn't tell you what the Idaho flag looked like and I bet neither could half the people who live here. Where's the Idaho pride?? I guess it really wouldn't be fun to paint this on a building....

I really thought the flag was black!! I'll have to buy an Idaho flag since I already have a Texas one!!!