Snow play day on the Mogollon Rim because “WHY NOT?!”

Arizona snow is lovely. A couple of hours in the car to get to high elevation and we can play until we are too cold and tired and come home to the nice warm weather. This time, the snow was just perfect for packing in to bricks. There just wasn’t much of it.

An attempt was made to make a fort.

Fire to warm up fingers and toes

If we had a week, we might have made an igloo

Trevor has the tools

We had a bin that made the perfect brick. It just took too long.

“You need how many of these?!”

High elevation means lots of breaks for Brendan

He did a lot of exploring

Nice white patch..

But we don’t make snow angels

We make snowy owls!

“I am going to WRECK IT”

Kid fail!

A couple of last hits and then it was time to go!

Yay!!! With this post, I am caught up to the present day! I am not sure why I got so far behind on posting updates. When I finally got through picking all of the pictures, I had some WordPress database issues to iron out. Just today, I finally published the last 10 blog posts and adjusted the dates to fit where they belong. If the last post you saw was the Thanksgiving trip to the beach, then these are all the new ones I did today to get caught up.

December 5th
December 12th
December 19th
January 2nd
January 13th – Birthday Portraits!
January 13th – Holiday Portraits!
January 15th
January 27th
February 13th
February 18th

And on with the most recent post… for now

President’s Day – no school! We decided to use a gift card for the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch that we got for Christmas. (Thanks Jon, Shannon, Kieran, and Malcolm!!)

We didn’t realize that there would be 35mph winds all day. But at least the ranch was not busy!

First, feeding the miniature donkeys

Brendan would say, “Cutie-cyooo!!!” (he spells it QTQ)

Next stop, Parakeet swarm

They breezed past the deer and the goat trailer was down because of the wind. So we went straight to ostriches.

They heard the food hit the little dispensers.

“Faces of Ostrich”

On to feeding the bunnies

Then Brendan dropped his food cup

These ducks are naughty biters! Good thing their bills are sort of rubbery

Brendan LOVES ostriches, but it is hard to compete with the lorikeet feeding area.

They are helping

Trevor really enjoyed the lorikeets but for him, nothing tops the stingray feeding pool. Out of all the places we have gone to pet stingrays, these rays are the friendliest to people and come right up for food and petting. Trevor just adores them. He fed four cups of chopped squid.

We had a super day in the wind and the boys played well the rest of the day. But in the middle of the night, Trevor woke up with one of his croup attacks. He was able to stay calm and control his breathing. He ate a big cup of ice chips and had some ibuprofen and went back to sleep. No emergency hospital visit!
He has missed two days of school because of fever, but his coughing is much better. Brendan is still well for now! I got a letter from the school saying they are experiencing a lot of absences this month and that there is Strep, Fifth’s Disease, Pink Eye and stomach flu going around on top of regular flu cases. I hope we are done with illnesses for now!

February 17th –

Because the boys loved their fake fishing so much, I picked up some new real poles for them. We bought some before but left them in Missouri! Oops! We headed to the park near the house to practice casting. They got good at it quickly!

They occasionally had to stop and chase the ducks away.

The next day, Trevor wanted to go and practice again so we went to a slightly bigger pond.

And we found a big playground they had not been to.

February 18th –
We have not been roller skating since the last Hopekids private skating party. The boys are bigger, but skating is still really tough!

Hopekids books the Skateland roller rink in Mesa.

There is no way that I could help the boys while on wheels. I didn’t skate. There was a volunteer photographer taking pictures of everyone, so I didn’t need to bring the camera!

Trevor needs a little encouragement after a few wipeouts

Bill got to do a few laps himself. He brought his own skates. 😀