A visit with Cousin Joyce

This past week, my mom's cousin came to visit. Joyce is my mom's 1st cousin (so that makes her my 1st cousin once removed? And the kids' twice removed? Is that right, all you geneology people out there?) Anyway, we were excited to have a visitor, especially for a WHOLE WEEK!!! We all had a wonderful time.

Still not a great picture of the 3 of them, but as good as I could get this time around.

Reading library books with Joyce

The first day she was here, we went to the local Children's Museum. I had a Groupon for it, which I had bought back in October and by using it, we only had to pay for Bria (it covered 4 admissions and she was the cheapest one to pay for). The kids had fun, but I think it was a little too old for them (many of things talked about the how and why of all the activities (velocity, gravity, etc.)). Perhaps when they are in school and learning about those things, it will be more interesting to them.

5 months old bear picture

On Monday, the 4th of July, we went to the zoo. We were going to go on Saturday, but after spending the time at the children's museum on Friday, Bria caught a very slight, short, minor bug that caused her to dry heave about 4x Saturday morning. Even thought she was completely fine after that, we decided not to go walk around the zoo in the heat and wait until Monday. I'm so glad we did! The weather was much more tolerable on Monday...not quite as hot as it had been, though still very warm and not quite as humid either. The kids had a great time, with the exception of Cameron, who is my son when it comes to heat. He hates it. But despite being fairly miserable, he was a champ and didn't complain the whole time. :)

The polar bear exhibit (which wasn't finished last year when we went) was the highlight of the day for most of us. She kept doing backflips and performing for everyone. It was awesome!

Matt took this picture...pretty cool, don't you think?

Always checking his map...Tyler wanted to be sure we saw everything we needed to!

Bria was absolutely fascinated with the lioness. Not that I blame her, I love them too. Especially their big ol' paws. :) Matt snapped this picture as well.

Thanks, Joyce for coming to visit! We all had a great time and we're so glad you were able to spend a whole week with us! We're looking forward to seeing you again next month!!!