The Brown Brick Road

Capturing our adventures one photo at a time...

Here fishy fishy

On Sunday morning, we all got up and were at the Georgia Aquarium by 9am! I’m so glad we got there right when it opened because it wasn’t too crowded yet and we were able to see the whale sharks and penguins without too big of a crowd around us…

fish

fish

fish

fish

fish

fish

We then went to see the Sea Lion show and the Dolphin show. Both were great – but we had to wait way too long for them! We got in line for the Sea Lion show at 10:00 and it started at 10:30. When that was over, we went straight to the Dolphin show and were in our seats by 10:50 but the show didn’t start until 11:30! It was THAT crowded that we had to go super early – but trying to entertain/wrangle Samantha in a seat for that long was not exactly fun. After the show, we made one last stop to see the jelly fish and the eels and then we hit the road back to Birmingham.

fish

Overall it was a great trip. I’m not dying to go back to the aquarium anytime soon but I’m glad we went. Mostly, I’m so glad this crew got to hang out!

atlanta

A fun weekend in Atlanta!

Hot-Lanta

We decided to take a little road trip to Atlanta for the long weekend to visit our friends, Patrick and Liz, and their cute kids, Henry and Evelyn. Henry is just about 5 months younger than Maxwell so the boys all played really well together. Evelyn just turned 2 and I think she enjoyed having a “baby” around that wasn’t her!  🙂 Our first stop was Taqueria del Sol…yum!

atlanta

We then spent the afternoon just doing around…seeing a train, getting ice cream, playing at the park, and hanging out. Perfect!

train

Pouty because everyone has ice cream but her!

atlanta

Brothers to the rescue!

ice cream

ice cream

ice cream atlanta

After some rest (including a solid 3 hour nap for Samantha in the pack N play! woohoo!), we headed to a park to run some energy out…

park

park

park

That night, the grownups went out to dinner and we left the kiddos with a very capable babysitter who said they all went to bed with no problems! I’d say our plan of wearing them out at the park worked!

park

Everyone slept great…almost. Samantha slept great until 5:30am when she woke up covered in pee and freezing cold. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. That just meant we were up and ready to go on our Sunday adventure! See you tomorrow with details!

Around here

Lots of fun going on!

Dressed up in our Sunday best…

sunday best

Gotten allergy shots…Spencer’s dinosaur (since named Brave!) got shots too!

allergy

Ridden the carousel at the mall…

carousel

Gotten haircuts…

haircuts

and suckers!

suckers

Jumped around at Towns’ birthday party…

towns party

Colored and colored some more – and learned to write letters!

letters

Played outside…

outside

and worked outside!

outside

We even found a bird’s nest outside!

outside

We got ice cream as a treat for working so hard.

ice cream

ice cream

We played at the playground…

park

and then played at another playground!

park

We unfortunately skinned our knees.

knees

We got to see the Dinosaurs at the zoo!

zoo

Choo-choo!

zoo train

We’ve definitely been enjoying these summer days so far!

Swim lessons

Like last year, we took some swim lessons from Coach Laura to get geared up for summer. This year we did 10 full days! Monday through Friday of two weeks every day. That’s a lot of swimming – and a lot of getting 3 kids suited up and over to the pool every day!  🙂 We made it though and the kids honestly LOVED it and showed fantastic progress.

I’m going to link to a few videos in this post. You’ll have to click over to Flickr to see them.

First day in a little bit of rain. Not the best – or warmest! – of conditions but we made it.

swim lessons

swim lessons

Spencer thought everyone did good!  🙂

Over the next week, everyone kept doing good! They improved every day!

swim lessons

swim lessons

Baby still wasn’t so sure about it all and cried whenever she had to get in the pool for the first 4 lessons.

swim lessons

But, that all changed on Friday of the first week! She decided it was pretty fun and did great. She would stick her own head under water and really started kicking those chubby little legs by the second week!

Samantha swimming and really kicking!

swim lessons

Also, please watch this video of her walking into swim lessons. She’s so cute I could just die.

swim lessons

Maxwell is a great swimmer and was practicing different strokes and swimming from one end of the pool to the other. He also spent plenty of time in the pool practicing his flips and other tricks!

Maxwell running jump and Maxwell swimming

swim lessons

Spencer was working on taking a breath without stopping and keeping his feet kicking. He also practiced what to do if he gets “stuck” in the middle of the pool. Answer? put your head down and start kicking! We still need to work on it but he’s getting there.

Spencer swimming and Spencer jumping in and Spencer doing TIMBER!

swim

I was so proud of all 3 of them! and I sure loved watching how much fun they all had in the pool together!

Here’s to a summer of swimming!