Visit to Ft. Worth and Dallas!

So the grant that is paying for Joseph's assistantship here at Sul Ross also pays for him to attend one conference every school year. Last year, in lieu of buying him a plane ticket to attend a wildlife conference in Nebraska City, we decided to turn it into a family vacation and rented a car so that we could all go with him. It was an awesome trip and we have been looking forward to our next "free" vacation ever since. This year we decided to head east to the Ft. Worth and Dallas areas. We left Wednesday afternoon  after I got off work and headed to our cousin Natalie's house in Dallas. It was so great seeing the Pelfrey's! Natalie and I took all of our kiddo's to a little park near her house and fed the ducks. Jadyn could not get enough of throwing out the bread and watching the duckies respond to her calling "here duckies! Come eat your food duckies!"

Note: Since we have been back, Jadyn has taken to "feeding" the cars as we walk along in our stroller. She leans way out and sprinkles bits of her granola bar calling "here cars! Come eat your food cars!"

Back to our vacation story: Joe commuted back and forth from his conference Thursday and Friday...a commute that we thought would be 30 minutes and which actually turned out to be an hour...poor Joe. He was pretty wiped out after trying to negotiate Dallas traffic all weekend. Thursday night the Pelfrey's took us out to a fun little icecream place that made fabulous icecream cookie sandwhiches. yum! Friday morning the kids and I moved up to Garland to stay with our friends the Hofferts for the rest of the weekend. Carolyn and Mike have been our friends since our first year at BYU. Carolyn and I were freshman roommates and She and Mike worked with Joe for a semester. We got married the same summer and Carolyn and I were pregnant at the same time with both of our babies. It was so fun to see them again! Our kids got along as well as four toddlers can while learning to share.

While we were their we celebrated McKay's first birthday, and the next morning packed up and headed to the zoo to meet up with some friends of mine who moved to the Dallas area from Alpine.We haven't seen them since before last summer so it was so good to get together and catch up on all of the changes from this last year! Saturday evening we went out to eat at the Golden Correll and Sunday after church we went over to Carolyn's parents house and celebrated her little brother's birthday.

Monday morning Joe and I did some last minute shopping and went to check out the Bass Pro shop. It was so fun! the store is HUGE and the staff were all really friendly. We spent half an hour chatting with an associate at the gun counter about the pros and cons of the different gun brands and hearing him hint about how many women are "packing" now a days. ahaha, I told Joe that I am not ready for that yet....who knows if I ever will be!

We made it home late Monday night after a loooooong drive that included a stellar trip to the Walmart in Albaline (everything was on sale!) and an extended visit to the Burger King in Odessa (The kids had a blast chasing each other around the tables).