More Hawk Hunt Photos

These didn’t make the initial post, but the hawk hunt was so much fun this year, I just had to include some more! 

 

 

  

 

 

The Hawk Hunt 2012

With the Williams family in town for the second half of spring break, the girls got to have their annual Hawk Hunt yesterday.  It’s a special day that my mom prepares for the girls to enjoy the outdoors, crafts, snacks, etc., and the girls look SO forward to it each year.  This year, we went to the Manassas Battlefield for the hawk hunt.   The setting was beautiful (see the previous post for nature pictures), and the girls had so much fun exploring, painting bluebells along side the river, sketching cool things they saw, and hiking around.

 

Each girl is unique in their own way, but they all love being together, and they’re all active girls with a good sense of adventure, so days like yesterday are perfect ways to spend the day for them.

 

 

It was another wonderful hawk hunt, and Mousey finds a way to make each year even more creative and fun than the previous one.  The girls are lucky to have such a great day to make memories with each other!

Some Nature Pictures of the Hawk Hunt Location

 

 

Spring Break–Fun at the Zoo

Yesterday, Jill and I took the kids downtown for a visit to the Zoo.  We had the perfect day for a zoo visit.  The weather was sunny and warm, and I don’t know if I remember a visit when we saw as many animals out and active as we saw yesterday. 

The first big highlight we saw was the tiger exhibit.  The tigers were actively prowling around, roaring, and putting on a show for the kids.  In all the years I’ve been to the zoo, I’ve never heard the tigers roar, and it was not at all the sound I expected. 

After being impressed with the tiger show, we walked around and saw the beautiful lions sitting out and enjoying the sunny day.  What magnificent animals they are!

We were next treated to a show by the orangutans.  There were three of them climbing and swinging on the cables above the zoo visitors.  There were two younger looking orangutans that were smaller with shorter hair, then coming behind them was a most bizarre looking one.  He was big with long, hanging hair that almost looked like it was dreadlocked.  He wasn’t particularly cute, but he was cool in a weird kind of way.  We all loved watching them climb and swing across the cables then climb down their tower to the monkey house.

 

    We ate our picnic lunch at the panda overlook, saw a bunch of more cool animals, got funnel cakes and cotton candy, and then finished off the day by spotting the elusive Giant Anteater.  It was a great day at the zoo, but a big highlight of the day for Jill and I, who both have a long history of being seriously directionally challenged (Mom, remember the soccer tournament trip with the three of us?), came when we disregarded her car GPS and my phone GPS and made our own shorter way out of the city back home.  It was an awesome day and a great zoo trip!

            

      

Spring Break Day 1

Nina is on spring break this week, and we’re not going anywhere but trying to do some fun things each day.  Yesterday was a sunny but windy day, so we decided it was a good day to fly Lyla’s new kite. 

After some time flying the kite, the girls wanted to play on the playground.  In these three pictures that follow, I was actually intending to take pictures of Nina going all the way across a different type of monkey bar when I saw through the camera that Lyla was right beside her swinging across the monkey bars herself (a first time for her to do that).  Nina and I got such a laugh out of going back and looking at the pictures of Lyla in the background just swinging her way across the monkey bars like it was no big thing.  She got a lot of confidence after that and kept doing it over and over and was very proud of herself.

  

Weekend Wrap Up

This past weekend was a busy one for the Simpson family.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t a weekend of things we were all doing together but one of those weekends when Mark would have a commitment, then he’d get home from his and I’d leave for mine, and we managed to do that most of the entire weekend.  One of my shifts of being at home was Sunday afternoon when the girls were playing in the back yard garden.  We haven’t planted anything yet, so right now it’s just fun for digging.  They took a break from digging to sit down on the front step and consume a bowl of a most ridiculously good tasting popcorn creation that I brought home from a baby shower on Saturday.

Judging from the fact that Lyla was licking the bowl, I think they enjoyed the popcorn.

We also did manage to get in date nights this weekend.  I didn’t get a picture of Mark and Nina as they were out the door before I thought about it, but Nina did report that the driving range they went to had the automatic tee and ball set-up, and she thought it was very cool that she didn’t have to set her ball on the tee but that it did it for her. 

Singing Hosanna Round Three

Today was our third experience with Palm Sunday and the Hosanna processional.  The first year, some of you may remember that Nina didn't react totally as we expected.  The second year was much better.  However, this year we were back again for round three, but it was Lyla's first time being old enough to participate.  She had a great time.  Lyla surprises us a lot because sometimes she plays the shy girl role and other times she loves to be the center of attention, so we were glad she enjoyed herself today.