The Colorado Adventure

We went to our first (of many) library shows today. It was Doc Murdoch the magician. The kids thought he was funny, even Joel!

He did some sight gags, like this mouse trap on nose and long nose.

He did card tricks, magic batons, the dice trick, told a story with a magic book and had a hand pop out of his bag, see video.

The girls kept talking about it ALL day long. I’d say it was a hit.

Joel had early CAP for rocketry and he’s getting that promotion tonight.

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This weeks theme at I ♥ Faces is vacation/travel. The reason I chose this one of Grace is because of the backstory. We went to Florida on a work/vacation and spent 2 days at Disney world where I got shots of the girls dressed up as princesses in front of Cinderella’s castle. But, whenever the girls talk about Florida they don’t mention Disney world or Cinderella or the usual stuff, they talk about Winter the tailless dolphin.

You see Grace loves all cetaceans (of which dolphins are included) and I found out that there was an aquarium in Fl that had a rescued dolphin with no tail and they were trying out prosthetic tails on her. Well, I knew we had to make it there to see Winter. Grace decided that she would raise some money to take there, so she painted some whale pictures and sold them on E-bay. She raised $65 and we gave most of the money to Clear water aquarium and some to Harbor branch Institute. We didn’t expect anything when we went to the aquarium, we handed the money over and went looking around the place. The CEO of the aquarium and the media lady came rushing out to find us, they wanted to get a picture of Grace with the CEO handing the money to him. Winter was amused and wanted a picture with just Grace. They showered Grace with front row seats to the dolphin show, getting to see Winter up close, a bag of stuff from the aquarium and the media lady sent the pic off to our hometown newspaper (where it was waiting for us in an article when we returned.) So, that is the story of this picture and the happy little girl you see in it.

Ohhhh…..I just read that we can have as many pics as we want! So, here are more Florida pics:

Disney world

Rock monument

Liberty bell museum

Harbor Branch Institute

Nasa

St. Louis arch

Colorado:

B-17, Centennial airport

Crack cave, Picture canyon

Whole foods trip

Footbridge to Highlands, downtown Denver

Central park, Stapleton

Limon

Little man’s ice cream

La Piazza downtown Denver

Manitou Springs, soda spring

Colorado monument

Fruita, headless chicken festival peep eating contest

Ft. Lupton

Buffalo Bill’s grave, buffalo chip tossing contest

Bailey hot dog stand

Bishop’s castle

Georgetown

Burlington

Texas: Galveston beach

San Jacinto monument

The orange show

For other vacation pics go here: http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/

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We had a fun day yesterday. We went to church where I took notes and wrote some poems at the same time (I’m sure the pastor thinks I’m not listening, but if I’m so moved to write a poem right then, I have to do it.) I’m not finished with them yet though, so I’ll post them later.

We went downtown to the La Piazza del arte, an Italian street chalk art festival.

Maybe the food vendors were there on Sat., we tried to find some Italian food, but ended up at the Cheesecake factory for lunch.

Before we went there we walked by the artists and took pictures. Wow, look at these pieces of art!

The James Dean took the artist 8 hours to do. The art ranged from complete to halfway done. While we were at lunch it started to rain and then hail, I was so glad we’d seen the art already because I was sure it would be gone. However, after riding on the shuttle bus (or the crazy bus, look at those kids) it stopped raining and we went back by the festival.

Nothing was washed away, in fact, I think it glowed and looked even better.

As a treat for the kids we went over to the milk pail ice cream shop, I just found this place yesterday morning on roadside attractions, isn’t it cool? Your best best is root beer ice cream or espresso gelato, those were the bomb. There was a tornado that touched down in Aurora, but that was nowhere near us, we just got hail and rain. I did have some friends that had car damage and who were in the mall and near in the tornado though, very scary.

Back at home the kids played while James and I went to the gym, it was our free day (on our diet) but since we were going to eat pizza for dinner we decided to counteract it with exercise. We (James, Joel and I) are loving this new diet. We’ve been on it 4 weeks and we’ve lost 20, 10 and 15 pounds. It’s basically eating whole grains, fruit, lean meat, veggies and having 2 or 3 snack a day between meals (like a yogurt, fruit or cottage cheese or a meal bar) and then you get 1 free day where you can eat anything you want. We have found though, that we tend to make better eating choices on free day because our stomachs can’t abide by the crap we used to eat all the time. That’s cool though, because if I crave a javanilla shake (which I haven’t) I could have it on free day. Notice how our free days are lining up with the festivals each weekend? That’s no accident! That’s why I wanted to find some good Italian food at the festival. Oh well, next festival is the Rhubarb one with pancakes and rhubarb syrup galore and a trip to the Bailey hot dog stand (they have good ice cream there too.)

Little man’s milk pail ice cream is at 2620 16th st in the Highlands neighborhood, Denver. If you want a nice walk there, park at Commons park and walk across the footbridge over I-25 and go up 1 block, viola!

Video slide show of all the art we saw:

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