Soaking up the sunshine

Now that Michael is only flying for American family time is typically very infrequent and usually at odd hours BUT this weekend we both got off of work around the same time on Saturday and we decided to go for a drive. Since we are building a house we love to go and find new neighborhoods and go into model homes to get ideas. The particular new neighborhood we found this week abutted a HUGE ranch with green pastures as far as the eye can see. As I was driving by I saw all these adorable new baby long horn calves and I really wanted to kids to be able to see them so we stopped and tried our most enticing cow noises to try and lure them over.

Sadly we weren't fluent in cow so we didn't get to pet any babies but the kids still loved seeing the cattle and I loved being able to knock the "city" off of them a little bit.

Speaking of cities... today after church we wanted to do something outdoors since we were between thunderstorms so I suggested taking the kids to the outdoor dancing water fountains/splash pad in Sundance Square in downtown Fort Worth.  

There's lots of seating with some umbrellas for shade and the pad is so large that it did't feel too crowded.

The water levels constantly change which keeps it unpredictable and fun for the little ones and I was oh so tempted to just run in there myself!

None of the other kids had swim clothes on but since we were going down there intentionally to play in the water we were very prepared with towels, etc. and think if I had some extras with me I could have made a pretty penny.  So my advice is that if you are going downtown just to walk around bring some towels and maybe some swim clothes with you just in case because it's really hard to resist letting your kids go and run through the water jets.  There is also a bathroom right near by that you can change them in on site.  

Libby kept trying to catch the water in her mouth:

Ezra just wanted to try to jump over the jets.

Luckily we left just in time as the bad weather started to roll in.  Ezra was the first to spot this amazing cloud formation.

So we decided to call it a day and head on back home.  I love where we live because there's so much to do here for free.