Joy School Fieldtrip to Hogle Zoo

Since we were at the end of the alphabet we thought it would be fun to take the kids to the zoo. It was a nice day and we all had a good time :)
First picture of the day ( we had one girl we hadn't met up with yet, and one that couldn't come)

Picture by the elephants, can you see them?

For some reason they were fascinated with the water hole, even though there were no animals in it.

It was fun seeing Easton's reaction to the animals. Mostly he would stare and point and say something that sounded like "ohhhh".



Looking at the giraffes

Lion head drinking fountain

Here are the kids are looking at a peacock. The fence wasn't very high, so they were able to get really close. But I guess the peacock didn't like that because all sudden it let out the very loud, long, and shrill scream! The kids actually froze, you should have seen the look on their faces! Once they were able to the ran away as fast as they could. I guess they probably won't get that close again :)

Saralyn seeing what size of gorilla she would be. I think she is at the adolescent stage. oh my, I can only imagine what that will be like! I'm glad I have a few years o prepare :)

There was a pretty fun playground for the kids to play on. Saralyn and Easton certainly enjoyed it!

Yard Makeover

We have been wanting to fix up our front yard for a while, and what better time than now right? Some of the things we wanted to do were: remove ugly tree, level the yard so it wasn't a sinkhole, make a nice flower bed, and possibly a sprinkler system in the front.
This is the before picture

We were going to try to do it ourselves, but after we thought about it we figured we'd probably save money by having someone come and do it for us right the first time :) Plus I think it would have taken us at least a month and it took the awesome company we hired a day and a half! So we were happy, very happy.
This is what it looked like in the process...


And these are the beautiful after photos! Yay!



Josh and I decided what we thought would look best (mostly Josh, he's really good at that kind of thing)and then we planted them after they were done with the landscaping. We are so excited! It adds so much to the house :) We love to just go out there and look at it. The neighbors probably think we're a little weird, but oh well! Actually all of the neighbors have been telling us how nice our yard looks, and we definately agree :)