Giggles

MJ is a girly girl. She just is.

Tonight, I made a tutu for her. It's for an upcoming photo shoot, but I had to try it on to make sure it fit and looked the way I wanted it to. 

The moment I put it on her, she started laughing. Like, really laughing. 

Just being in a tutu made her absolutely, positively tickled pink.

Doctor

today i went to the doctor's office. twice. once with each kiddo.

tennyson had a clean bill of health. we were only there to make sure his ears were doing okay. they are. and he did so much better this time around. there were actually intermittent periods of non-screaming.

mj had the eventful visit today. even though she is almost three months, today was the big two month shot visit. she was a trooper. but she has been much crankier about the whole thing than tennyson ever was.

we also found out that mj is probably in need of some physical therapy. due to her torticollis. basically, her neck muscles on one side of her neck are stronger than the other side, which means she is almost always looking off to the right, and she is developing a bit of a flat spot. the whole thing is very fixable and is most likely the result of the way she was positioned in the womb.

it wasn't the funnest of days, but we rewarded ourselves with mcdonald's for dinner, so life is good again. and we don't have to see another doctor for another month now.

Zoo

the other day it was finally not a million degrees.

and mike was home, and i was home, and i was actually showered before ten.

so i decided last minute we'd go to the zoo.

we hadn't been to potter park zoo in a long time.

last time we went, tennyson was not even a year old yet.

i was a little underwhelmed with the place, but i think that has a lot to do with the fact that it was about a million degrees outside and my kid wasn't really even old enough to care about the animals.

because this time around, we had a lot of fun.

we spent quite a while laughing at the otters going by. it's pretty funny the way they flip around and speed by. then they disappear and come back again.

and we spent quite a bit of time at the farm animal area. tennyson learned how to say the word "turtle". and we had to eventually pry him away from the pig pen.  

but the highlight of our trip was the lion. the thing was seriously up close. at one point, the lion came and put its face right up against the glass next to tennyson. i wish i would have had my camera then. instead, we just got pictures of lion butt.

and for old times sake, we got a couple shots in the cut outs.

i'm now a big fan of the potter park zoo. it's close. we can spend as much or as little time there as we want. and it's cheap. plus, there isn't much cooler than sitting and eating lunch while listening to a lion roar.

Drive

a lot of people told us we were crazy when they found out we were driving to utah.

honestly, i was pretty sure they were right.

until i got in the car, that is, and had been there for a few hours.

that's when i realized our kids are amazing.

and that a little bit of planning goes a long way.

my parents were great and got tennyson a ton of new dollar store toys that we could pull out along the way. 

and the ipad. i am now convinced more than ever that the ipad is the most wonderful creation ever.

tennyson could play on it when he wanted. and then when he got tired, he could watch hours and hours (and hours!) of mickey mouse clubhouse.

we didn't stop often, but when we did, we took our time. 

like the time we visited the dollar store to get tennyson a new toy.

or the time we stopped at little america to have a picnic and play at the park.

or the time we stopped and wendys, lost a shoe, had to change diapers in the booth because the restrooms had no changing table, and threw a tantrum or two.

we took the drive in three days.

on the way out, we drove one night to chicago. 3.5 hours.

then we drove to cheyenne. 14 hours.

then we drove to utah. 7 hours.

and then on the way back we drove to iowa. 14 hours.

then we drove to chicago. 7 hours.

then we drove to lansing. 3.5 hours.

you find when you spend that much time in a car, that there are few things nicer than getting to a hotel room at the end of a long day, or finally seeing that sign that says "welcome to utah" or "welcome to pure michigan."

and truthfully, we saw a lot more of this than i expected:

it was a long drive, yes.

but it went so much better than i ever thought it would.

and it was well worth it to see friends and family.

and not have to spend a million dollars on plane tickets (give or take).

Fun

i'm slower than i want to be with posting about our trip to utah. considering we've been home for almost two weeks now, and all I've done is post a few pictures of the family we saw with hardly any commentary. i blame my slowness on the fact that i have two kids (really, it has more to do with the hours upon hours of bones and dawson's creek i've been watching, pretending it's because i have to nurse).

but despite what you may think, we did more than just sit around and visit family while we were out there. we took two weeks so that we could do all the visiting we wanted, and still be tourists in our own state. 

honestly, a lot of the stuff we did revolved around the restaurants we needed to visit. jdawgs, cafe rio, crown burger, the list goes on. but we didn't take a lot of pictures at those locations because, well, we didn't want to look like fatties on our blog (even though we totally are).

so here are some of the other fun things we did. 

we danced around during a parade. the parade was probably one of tennyson's favorite parts of the visit. memo to self: find out when more parades are in michigan.

we also got to play with a cool glow sword. it's so easy to spoil when you are only buying for one. he better live it up now, because once he has another sibling who also needs a glow sword, the answer will probably be closer to what i remember my parents always telling me: no.

we took tennyson on his first ever visit to chuck e cheese. have i ever mentioned that tennyson has this special knack for hitting the jackpot? i'm taking him to vegas when he gets older. we're gonna be rich. but seriously, he won like three hundred tickets on just one machine. and as opposed to back in january when he only wanted to hit the buttons, this time he also wanted to put in the coins, and take his own tickets at the end. my little boy is growing up.

we went to the world's largest trampoline gym (although i'm pretty sure that i don't put much credit in that claim). tennyson was a little nervous for most of it. for the most part, he enjoyed watching people jump, and he would jump on the solid ground outside the trampoline areas. he'd also boss people around to get him the basketballs. mike and his brother, paul, played a couple games of trampoline dodge ball and by the end of the hour, mike and paul came to the sad realization that they are no longer sixteen.

we also took a tour around campus. it's crazy how time can pass, but not feel like it is passing at all. the last time i had walked on campus, i was nine months pregnant. in fact, i was due the same day mike graduated. now we can share peach rings with our kid and watch him run in circles around the stairs of the jfsb. so i know time has passed. but my brain just wouldn't admit that it had been over two years. because i honestly felt like i was just studying for finals yesterday.

we spent one afternoon with my cousin and her twin boys at the dinosaur museum. tennyson went around roaring. and he got to dig for dino bones and run around to his hearts content (which wasn't much because the visit coincided with nap time). 

we also went to see brave with my grandparents. funny story, we actually went twice. the first time we tried, we sat there for a long time after the movie was supposed to start and finally were informed that they couldn't get it to work. so we had to go back later in the day. we didn't mind really. tennyson loves the movie theater. the extra time spent didn't bother him one bit.

and that is all we have pictures of. well, not true. we have lots of other miscellaneous pictures that are all really pretty self explanatory. so i'm just going to tack them on to the end of this post and let you know that each and every picture is also a fun time we had. because the whole trip was a fun time. a really fun time.