Our second Saturday together ...

I've decided to completely give up editing these photographs and just post them as is ... I'm sure you won't care if they are just plain pictures! I get a little obsessive/compulsive about all of this stuff ... the free photo editing program I use (Picnik) is unbelievably SLOW tonight and I am just completely out of patience! The first two pictures have been worked on, but then I just loaded the rest and I'm going to roll with them as they are!

Emma was the first to wake up Saturday morning, so she came downstairs to find me. We decided we would make everyone some cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Emma loves to help in the kitchen and she is a valuable helper too! The pictures of Chris and Matthew were taken just after they tasted their first bites of our wonderful rolls (compliments Pillsbury!).

This was not the healthiest breakfast, but we did each have a bowlful of grapes to supplement the sweet roll. And then, since it was Saturday, we decided to play for awhile before getting out of our pj's.
I took down a bin of Lego's for the kids to play with. These belonged to Dylan (mostly), and some of them might be from Adam. Anyway, there is quite a bunch of them to play with! I realize that Lego's are a little challenging for Matthew and I showed him how easily they come apart. He was extremely impressed with the pathetic vehicles I had constructed and played SO carefully with them!
Actually, what Matthew enjoyed the most was digging through the bin and finding all of the space guys' helmets and visors and body parts ... we had quite a few headless spacemen (!) and he was only too pleased to search for their heads! We found every single one and put them together!
The picture above is of Matthew (headless) with the HUGE space lizard (that's what Christopher called it), coming to eat all of the space guys ...
Christopher kept saying to me, "These are SO cool, grandma!" He especially liked all of the wheels and lights and laser guns, etc. We had fun with Legos for a little while, but then I really thought it would be nice to get dressed and perhaps visit the Meijer Children's Garden before taking the kids over to their other grandparents house. Just as we were loading up the car, it began raining ... one of those dreary, steady kinds of rains ... hmmm ... now what? We quickly decided on Plan B.

The Children's Museum! I love the Grand Rapids Children's Museum. It's such a fun place for everybody! It's not terribly expensive, and you get a stamp on your hand that is good for the whole day! You can leave the building and go eat lunch and come back! The only negative is that Grandpa Jones and I had to keep track of three children. I think in order to get the very most out of the museum, you really need one adult assigned to each child ~ I'm serious ~ because each child wants to go in their own direction and do the stuff that really interests them.

Emma was interested right away in doing the "rubbings" with crayons on top of textured, stenciled pictures of butterflies, flowers, rainbows, etc.

Thankfully within eyesight, there was this cool musical apparatus that the boys and Grandpa Jones could enjoy together ...
There were gobs of children (it seemed like millions) at the museum (remember ... it was Saturday morning!) and so we really had to keep reminding our kids to take turns, share, wait, etc.
There is a very cool sand table there, and we managed to squeeze ourselves in for a little while of sand play ...
Here is Matthew all dressed in a life-jacket using a magnetic fishing pole to catch us a load of fish!
Emma and Chris were nearby racing these little wooden cars down these cool slopes ...

There is a pretty neat construction site with fake rocks, lots of building equipment, and even work gloves and hard hats!

There is a big model of a train engine that Matthew was "chugga-chugg-chugging" to make it go.
These mirrors were hilarious! Christopher kept cracking himself running back and forth and making funny faces ...

But by far, everyone favored the bubble area. Here are Matthew and Christopher making a HUGE bubble that they are actually inside!
There were lots of bubble tables with plenty of tools to let the kids experiment making bubbles.
Matthew was completely into it! I've never seen him quite so seriously intense! He really enjoyed himself here.
And even Grandpa Jones got into the bubbles! See him showing off his very huge bubble?
Emma and I were able to experience being inside a big bubble together. We had a lot of fun at the museum. We had to have the children home to Diana by 1:30, so we made sure the children's hands were nicely stamped ~ just in case Diana wanted to return with them later that afternoon. Everyone was pretty exhausted (mostly grandpa and I!) as we dropped off the kids. We'll see everyone again on Monday!