Everything is Bigger in Texas

When Brian was in elementary school his class had the assignment to fill in the blanks on a sheet of questions. One of the questions was "If I could go anywhere in the world, I would go to..." and Brian said "Texas".

I'd tell you how I would've answered that question, but you can probably already guess.

Anyway, when Brian's oldest sister and her family moved from Oregon (where we also visited) to Texas it only seemed logical that we would fulfill Brian's childhood dream of seeing Texas. To add to the fun our trip was in celebration of our nephew, Eli, finishing his cancer treatment!

I was pretty pleased with myself for catching an awesome deal on airline tickets from Southwest. Sure, there was a connection, but it's not such a big deal for us. They also do the 'free' luggage check. Let me explain to you why it is 'free': because you will spend half your life waiting for someone to bring it from the plane to the terminal when you arrive. Not a process we'll be repeating. But we survived and eventually got our clothes back so that we could spend a weekend with the stinky boys.

The first stop was the aquarium in Dallas. For an aquarium there were sure a lot of things that didn't live in the water though!

We fed baby birds blueberries, saw lots of monkeys and birds, even watched a bunny doing laps on his racetrack (below). The boys thought he was a pretty funny bunny.

Gideon made friends with a manatee, who hung out right in front of his face for a good five minutes. I think the manatee may have actually fallen asleep.

All the stinky boys took a photo with the performers (yes, in the 'aquarium') who were dancing. We especially liked the guy on the left who was wearing a backpack with real birds hanging out on the top. Sounds messy to me, how about you?

Gideon enjoyed using the map to navigate for us. He did an excellent job. After he successfully guided us out of the massive aquarium we headed back to the house for another nautical adventure: Battleship!

We also spent a good part of the weekend working on some very impressive Lego structures, getting Texas BBQ, visiting Yucatan Taco Stand (actually a restaurant) to eat killer nachos and then going for frozen yogurt. We visited the Kimbell Art Museum, which was a very cool building despite being seriously under construction. My favorite part was probably warming up the hot tub and enjoying an evening of watching Brian coerce (read: pushing) our nephews into the frigid swimming pool. To be fair, Brian did jump in too.

We had a great time visiting the Walkers and celebrating the end of Eli's treatment. Thanks for having us, guys!

Huffmans in Arizona, you're next on our list of houses to invade for a long weekend. :)