A Spooktacular Visit to The Jacksonville Zoo

It's that time of year again.  Time for our kids {and some of us grown-ups, too} to dress up in elaborate costumes and enjoy the festivities of the season, get a little spooked, and do some trick-or-treating!

As a parent, I try really hard to not be the overly paranoid type, but taking my two year old out trick or treating on Halloween with all of the older {read: insanely obnoxious and rude} kids in our neighborhood kind of freaks me out.  She's into it this year, though.  Picked out her costume and everything!  Who am I to stand in her way??

In comes the Jacksonville Zoo!  We are pretty lucky to have a great zoo here.  I mean, I know there are zoos all over the place, but this one is within short driving distance, and though I've never been to, say, the San Diego Zoo, I think ours is pretty nice.  Anyway, they put on this big "Spooktacular" event every year for Halloween.  Mitch and I took Sandra when she was about Sophi's age, so we thought it would be something The Sophster would enjoy.  Not to mention, it was cheap!  It was only $14 for all three of us to go.  Thanks, Jax Zoo, you rock!

So we bought her a Minnie Mouse dress and some shoes, and I tried to burn my finger off making the ears.  They came out great, though, and she loves them!  She's also much cuter in them than I am.

We were so excited to find out that my little brother and nephew {Justin & Jaiden} and our good friends Tabatha, Adam, and baby Ezra would all be there, too!

Justin and Jaiden were dressed up like zombies.  Their costumes were so great!  Justin went to Goodwill and bought some clothes, cut them all to shreds and threw red acrylic paint all over them.  Who knew my little brother was so crafty?!  He also did their face paint, which was awesome! 

The people at the zoo either loved them and wanted to take pictures with them or they were completely terrified.  Justin stayed in zombie mode pretty much the whole time, which made things even better.  

The Sophster was not a fan.  She eventually warmed up to Jaiden, but wouldn't talk to Justin the whole night!

I'm pretty sure that Tabatha had a different costume picked out for baby Ezra, but he decided he was going to be a puppy for Halloween.  Isn't he just the cutest puppy ever?!

The zoo had different themes as you walk through.  There was Charlie Brown's pumpkin patch with probably 1,000 pumpkins all lit up along the pathway, characters dressed as Charlie Brown, Linus, and Snoopy.  There was a Wizard of Oz theme with Dorothy's house, the yellow brick road, people dressed as Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion. There was a Nightmare Before Christmas theme with Jack and Sally characters!  I wish I had taken more pictures of the displays, but chasing after The Sophster the entire time led to not as many pics of much other than the children.  But you guys love to see pics of my kid, right?  I mean, I can't imagine you would be here otherwise!

Outside of the Range of the Jaguar, they had a DJ set up and the kids stopped to jump up on stage and bust some moves {aka burn some candy off}.  

After shaking their groove thangs, we moved along to the carousel.  This is always The Sophster's favorite part.  She HAS to ride the merry-go-round every time we go to the zoo.  Which is a lot.

After the carousel, things took a turn for the worse.  

The zoo had "scare zones" set up throughout our path.  You could choose to enter or bypass the scare zones.  We bypassed all of them...until I thought "How bad could this really be???  It's for kids, right?" Wrong.  I decided to hold {an already sleepy} Sophster and walk through the scare zone.  Of course, it had to be zombies.  She actually did ok until we were almost out.  A zombie jumped out at us and she even startled me a bit, which really scared Soph.  She started crying...and kept crying...for about 5 minutes.  Saying she wanted to go home.  It was around 9:00 by that time, which is past her bedtime, so we quickly made our way through the rest of the zoo and headed home.

Over all, we all had a great time at Spooktacular.  I was so proud of The Sophster for getting through the whole thing and especially for actually going up the the candy stations and saying "trick-or-treat!".  I thought for sure she would pull the shy card out on us, but she proved us wrong yet again!  We've also decided to go ahead and take her out this Thursday for some trick-or-treating.  We will go early and visit the houses of neighbors we know and we won't go too far from home.  This has been the best Halloween yet for us, so far, and so we are all very excited about what's to come. :)

Have you done any pre-Halloween partying or trick-or-treating?  What have you/your littles decided to dress up as this year?  Will you be taking your children around on Halloween night for some tricks, treats, and boos?

Happy Halloween!

Independence Day 2013

This year for Independence Day, we didn't do anything crazy exciting.  Just spent the day crafting, playing, and spending time with some good friends of ours, but I'm going to write about it anyway....because for the life of me, I can't remember what we did last year and I don't want to forget again. :)  Last year, Mitch was deployed and The Sophster was barely 17 months old, so I don't think we did much....anyway....

This year, we decided that we would have some fun!  We started out by doing a little craft idea {that I may have hi-jacked from one of my super creative mommy friends} and made a flag!  This was a super easy craft.  All things I had on hand, only a couple of minutes to prep, and Sophi had a blast!  There's also that part about learning through play and such. ;)

All I did was cut a medium sized rectangle out of a piece of blue construction paper, and a bunch of small squares from red. Then, I wrangled the toddler {all it takes is telling her she gets to glue something and she is THERE}, gave her a white sheet of paper, put some glue down, told her where everything went, and put her little fingers to work! Meanwhile, we talked about the meaning of Independence Day, the flag, what it is to be free, etc. I'm pretty sure she had no idea what I was talking about, but whatevs. We had fun, anyway. She was very proud of her flag!

Once it warmed up a bit outside, we decided to go outside and help Daddy wash the vehicles. I put The Sophster in her bathing suit, we set up the baby pool and the wacky waving sprinkler thingy, and we headed outside. She pretty much ignored the sprinkler, but she had a great time helping Daddy wash the cars and transferring sponges from the wash bucket to her pool and back again.

After The Sophster woke up from her nap, we headed over to a friend's house for some swimming and fireworks! Being the bad mommy blogger that I am, I didn't take pictures of either of these things. Oops! We did have a nice time, though. Sophi got to spend some time with her friend Anslee, and Mitch and I got some good QT in with our friends {and a bottle of wine}. My girlfriend, Jessica, gave Soph a fishing lesson. She loved it and I'm sure it won't be the last time we sit on a dock and yell "Here fishy fishy! Come out Mister Fishies!" over the side. ;)

We hung out and waited for fireworks, but they didn't start until 9:45 and by then, Sophi was beat. She wanted nothing to do with those fireworks and was demanding to go home! Alas, maybe next year she will be ready for the fireworks. We did set some small ones off, but again, she was too tired to care much at all.

Anyway, that was our Independence Day! It's never too late to write a post about a holiday when it's loaded with cute toddler pictures, right??? Hope you had a great holiday, too!

What Father's Day Means To Me

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I have never really had much of a relationship with my father. If you are a newer reader, I'll recap shortly.

My parents were married until I was eight years old. I was the biggest Daddy's girl ever in the universe.

That is, until my dad became a drug addict who cheated on my mom and eventually abandoned his family. I didn't see him again until I tracked him down when I was eighteen. He was still on drugs and had no real interest in being in the lives of his children then, either.

And finally, when my nephew was born in 2010, my brother reached out to him again. Thankfully, this time he is at least off drugs {as far as we know}. He seemed to be doing better, was engaged, has a nice home, a steady job...etc. I tried my best to make it work for close to a year.

I had a hard time trusting him, after all of the years of pain, and just before I gave birth to Sophi, I cut ties. I caught him in lie after lie. That isn't something that I want in my daughter's life {lies and him coming in and out of her life}, so I called it quits.

Needless to say, for pretty much my entire life, Father's Day was either a bitter day for me, or a distant memory....

Until The Sophster was born.

Even though Mitch was deployed when Sophi was born, and has been deployed for nearly a year of her life, he has always been there. The night she was born, he made it a point to stay up all night with me, on Skype, supporting me through my labor and celebrating the birth of our beautiful girl!

Sophi and I went through a very difficult first four months without him home, but he was always there. Then came homecoming. I was nervous about how things would go with them meeting for the first time, but she knew who her Daddy was, and he stepped right into that role like he had never missed a minute.

He has never complained about changing a dirty diaper, he always makes time to play with her, even with his crazy work schedule, he ALWAYS tells her how much he loves her, he doesn't anger when she refuses to talk to him and comes screeching to me. And she loves him for it.

And I love him even more for it.

Where most girls have wanted to find a man like her Dad, I have always wanted to find a man who is the exact opposite of my dad, and I did. I thank God every day for my husband. He is my knight in shining armor, the peace to my chaos, my voice of reason, and the best Daddy I could have ever asked for, for our child.

So babe, THANK YOU for always loving your girls, for always being passionate about your family, for being the BEST DADDY I've ever known, and for teaching me that Father's Day is a day to celebrate, and not a day to scorn.

We love you more than anything on this Earth! :)


Happy Father's Day, to all of you amazing Daddies out there, who choose to be there and love your babies unconditionally! You deserve all of the good things in the world! Thank you for stepping up and being REAL MEN!

Easter

It's only a week past Easter so it's not too late to blog about it, right? Even though I had full intention on writing this a week ago. Oops! What can I say? The weather has been SO awesome lately that I just haven't felt like sitting at the computer. SO! We had a really fun Easter! Mitch and I were really excited because, even though this was actually the Sophster's third Easter, it was the first one where we have felt that she could get involved with the fun of the holiday...and we went all out! We did several tot school activities throughout the week and FOUR egg hunts! I'll show you the tot school activities that we did this week, first.

Easter School Activities

My iPhoto program kind of crapped out on me last weekend and I, sadly, lost a lot of pics. Mitch was able to get most of them back {that man is a God sent!}, but needless to say, I was an emotional wreck the night that it happened. I am still finding more and more that have been lost. I'm saying this here because, a lot of the missing pics are pics that I took of the Sophster with her school activities. {sad face}

This week was either a complete hit or a complete miss for Soph, and that's ok. We're both still trying to feel different things out. This is only the beginning. :)

The first thing I did was {get really super excited about my new laminator, and} printed out this egg themed, shape matching game. I found the idea on Pinterest but for the life of me, I can't find it now! Anyway, the big sheet has one big shape on each egg, and the individual eggs have multiple small shapes on them. Sophi figured this out pretty quickly. I kind of knew that she would BUT what I especially love about this activity is that it got her saying names of two shapes that she hadn't named before, rectangle and oval. Cool! Oh, I ended up gluing some of that no skid shelf liner to the backs of the eggs because they weren't staying in place well and she was getting frustrated. That worked out perfect. Fun for days!




Another thing that I did was just gave her two bowls, put several of her Easter eggs in one bowl, and gave her a spoon. Then, I encouraged her to scoop the eggs up onto the spoon and transfer them to the other bowl. Yeah...she couldn't have cared less about this. She wanted to break all of the eggs open and then put them in the other bowl. After a few minutes, though, she DID start scooping the egg halves and moving them from bowl to bowl. Success! Her interest was not held for long on this activity, though.



The third thing I did was printed out a large b/w Easter egg, laminated it and let her color it with her dry-erase markers. She loved this! We are big fans of coloring around here! She also loved that mommy could just wash it off and she could start all over again. I presented this to her, along with the next thing, after her nap one day.


The other thing that got rolled out was a picture of the Easter Bunny that was printed 5 times, in progressive sizes. The goal here was to get her to sort them from largest - smallest or visa versa. She didn't get it at first. She was VERY excited when she saw it. She ran over and started pointing and yelling "Easter Bunny Easter Bunny Easter Bunny!!!", which eventually turned into, "One, two, three, four, five! Five Easter Bunnies, mommy!", which EVENTUALLY turned into her stacking them with largest bunny on the bottom up to the smallest bunny on top. So, even though it didn't work out as I had planned, she definitely got a few lessons from this and it wasn't an idea wasted. :)




The Fun Stuff!

As I mentioned before, this is the first year that we have involved Sophi in any kind of Easter egg hunt or Easter activities. The first thing we did was a glow in the dark egg hunt! I found the idea on Pinterest, originally posted by Play at Home Mom, and could not WAIT to do this!! So, I got on Amazon and ordered a bunch of these finger lights {wow, they're like $4 cheaper now!}, threw those babies in some eggs, waited for it to get semi-dark out so that the light wouldn't come in the blinds too bad, and hid them while Mitch distracted the nosy toddler with food. ;) I was nervous about how this would turn out, since she had never hunted eggs. As usual, I was nervous for no reason. Not only did she "get it", she LOVED IT! It was SUCH a huge hit! Then, the lights went to hang out with my little brother, who did a night time outside egg hunt for my nephew, who also begged to do it over and over again!




We colored eggs

Well, Sophi "painted" eggs. I got the cups all out and set up all nice and pretty, laid a towel down underneath, came prepared with dippers....c'mon lady, you're working with a two year old, here! LOL!! We showed her the "right way" and then she did it her way. She grabbed an egg, plopped it onto the towel in front of her, dunked her tiny little hands into the colored water, and painted those eggs! She was so proud of herself and asked to do it again for days after. We were pretty proud of her, too. :)



Yeah, we may have slammed one or two into the glasses and busted some shells. Oops!

Egg Hunt #2

Our first outdoor egg hunt was the Friday before Easter. There was an egg hunt over at Sophi's Oma's condo. So I got our little pretty all dolled up in one of her Easter dresses and we headed over. The weather could not have been more perfect. It was the first perfect day of the season, I think. Absolutely gorgeous! Sophi had a blast. She didn't get a whole lot of eggs because instead of grabbing the egg, throwing it in the basket, and moving on, she has to open every egg that she finds....right then. Oh well, she didn't care how many eggs she got so neither did we! Here are a few of my favorites from that day.



Easter Festival

Saturday, the day before Easter, my little brother and nephew drove out to join us for the Easter festival near our place. The kids had an egg hunt but it was kind of a joke. So many grown people were snatching up eggs and throwing them in their little's {3 and under} basket and Jaiden and Sophi only got a couple of eggs a piece. No biggie, though. Why? Because they had a train! And free popsicles! We stayed for a few hours and had a great time. Sophi is completely obsessed with her cousin. She is always wanting to hold his hand or hug and kiss him. She asks about him every day. I hope that when they grow up, that he will be like the protective big brother that she doesn't have. :)



Easter Morning :)

The Easter Bunny came Saturday night and left Sophi a trail of jelly beans leading from her room to her very first Easter basket on the coffee table! This was a HUGE hit! She woke up and we went in to get her, told her that the Easter bunny had come and had left some surprises for her. Once she woke up and got all of her snuggles out {oh how we love that part!}, she was off to explore! She stopped as soon as she saw the jelly beans and proclaimed "JELLY BEANS!!", then stooped down to eat one. We actually had to encourage her to follow the trail, and not sit and eat every one along the way. LOL! She had a blast going through her basket and discovering the goodies inside. After that excitement had calmed some, we gave her breakfast and I hid the eggs in our front yard while she ate. Then we headed out and let her hunt! She had a great time. We all did. It was an awesome Easter. She still asks to see the Easter Bunny {whom she refused to see while he was around} every night before bed. Silly girl, maybe you'll be ready for him next year. :)




Aaaand last but not least, our attempt at a family selfie on Easter morning. I looooove Sophi's bed head and how I look like I just rolled out of bed but I have that "I am one seriously proud mama!" look on my face. Because, well, I am.




How did you spend your Easter? Do anything special with the people you love? Whatever you did, I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!