Happy New Year!

I'm behind, I know...here's to a new year!

Halloween

The Trick-or-Treating Gang

Aidan is Optimus Prime (a Transformer), Brennan is Thomas the Tank Engine, Evan is a puppy dog, minus the ears, and Marian is Draculaura, (from "Monster High", a vegan vampire)

On Friday, our neighbors held their annual pumpkin carving/movie night.

Evan checking out the screen from the other side

"Down in front!"

Some of the results:

Ours are the cat on the left, the face in the middle and the spider on the right.

Aidan's last minute addition

Evan getting up close and personal with the pumpkins.

Evan apparently loved when they carved a pumpkin at school last week. His teachers said he kept sniffing it like a flower.

Cute Faces

Watching "Hoodwinked" on the DVD player

Sharing with Cousin Michael

Day Trip to Atlanta

The World of Coca-Cola had a few interesting areas, but for the most part was not worth the price of admission.

We found far too many disgusting flavors in the international tasting area--why mess with a good thing?

We washed out the bad tastes with the good ol' American flavors.

Then we headed across the block to the Georgia Aquarium--definitely worth the price of admission!

Waiting for the live dolphin show to start

It was a bit intense with a whole fictional sailors vs sea monster story with actors breaking into song at various times. The dolphin tricks were intertwined in the story.

Brennan freaked out and spent the whole show in tears.

Aidan liked it.

Marian moved up closer with Thomas in the hopes of getting splashed by the dolphins.

This exhibit ("Ocean Voyager") was immense to say the least!

Many LARGE fish in here including big manta rays and whale sharks

It's hard to describe the scale of the whale sharks, but this employee was a tall man himself.

Marian and Aidan waited in line for the chance to pop up in the penguin exhibit for a closer look.

Brennan was still jittery from the dolphin show, so he didn't want to go in any dark tunnel.

At the coral reef exhibit which had waves crashing at the top.

It was a very peaceful room.

More Outings

When Thomas came back into town, we went back to the Botanical Gardens at Clemson with Evan and Brennan, this time taking the the much prettier, shorter route!

Cabin from the mid-1800s.

Brennan enjoyed peeking in the windows

That afternoon, we took Marian, Aidan, and Brennan to Duke Power for the self-guided tour in their visitors center to learn all about nuclear energy! Aidan really liked it, so we went through a second time, and he asked to go back every day afterwards.

When you drive past it to get to the lake house, all you see through the trees is the white ball (I'm going to assume it's a water tower, since that's what it looks like to me), so the kids were surprised to find out this whole facility was hiding back there.

The butterfly chair in their Butterfly Garden

The kids making places light up on the map

Greenville Zoo

We made another day trip to Greenville to check out their zoo! It's small (took us about an hour and a half to see the whole thing) but very nice.

The reptile house had this ledge running along the whole wall for the littler ones to stand on so they could see in--very cute! Evan loved it!

More ledges for Evan

The bamboo forest

The boys were enthralled with the alligators and alligator turtle, while Marian was less than thrilled to be in the room with them.

They sold us some prepackaged crackers at the gate and said we could feed lots of the animals (elephants, giraffes,...) but we couldn't figure out how in the world you were supposed to get the food to those animals. Even throwing it to them, it would have landed too short for them to reach. So the goats got to eat 3 packages of crackers. They didn't mind!

Evan thought he should show them how it's done. He wasn't scared of them at all!

Tubing

Uncle Joe and Aunt Jackie gave the kids a thrill by taking us out tubing.

You couldn't go fast enough for Aidan

Marian would have liked to have been on the tube and just let the current take her wherever with no help from the boat. She kept wanting to slow down.