Labor Day Celebration at the Park

This morning we had a family picnic at Floyd Lamb Park. The whole family turned out this morning for some fun... the kids had their bikes, we had lots of food and plenty of bread for the geese and ducks. It was a beautiful morning, albeit a little breezy. Here's some pictures (but as usual, there's more at Flickr).

Here we were feeding the geese... there were so many of them we had to do it from the top of a picnic table. It was astounding how many surrounded us in minutes. There were goslings, too... they were sooooo cute (I did get photos of them).

This is a view of everyone having lunch. I think there were somewhere around 17 of us.

I love it when I catch this Madison look on camera. It's the cutest thing ever! (I'm only a little biased.)

Somewhere around 1:30 we'd been there for hours and hours, and it started to get really hot. So we packed up and came home to cool off. Madison and I played a few games of Go Fish, and now we're watching "A Nightmare Before Christmas", I picked up the Blu-Ray version yesterday. It's actually the first Blu-Ray DVD I've picked up, and the picture is pretty amazing.

What are you up to this weekend, Internet? The cool part is... tomorrow is STILL my weekend. Yay!

Weekend Update

This weekend is now all a big blur! We were so busy and I'm now noticing it's Sunday afternoon and almost over. There's a lot of new pictures over at the Flickr site, I had my camera in hand for much of the weekend's events.

Saturday we went to a swim party at the house of one of Madison's classmates. The kids had an absolute blast and didn't even slow down for like four hours. The backyard had the most fabulous pool I'd ever seen, and it was Madison's first experience with a water slide. It took her quite a bit of coaxing to go down, but once she did it with an inner tube ring by herself, she must have gone down it 50 times. Here's my favorite picture:

We were there the entire afternoon - she was so worn out she went to bed an hour early last night.

I had a surprise visit from one of my oldest and dearest friends last night, Donnie. He texted me Friday to tell me he was in town and he came over Saturday night for a few hours. We had some beer, caught up on what's new with each other and our families, and laughed a lot at the trouble we got ourselves into when we were young. I am not exaggerating when I say we are both very lucky that we're not dead or without jail time behind us for some of our escapades... it was so awesome to see him, as he's been one of my best friends since I was 15 years old; although we have kept in touch we haven't actually seen each other since 2000. I'm so blessed to still have him in my life.

Donnie didn't leave here until after midnight, but Madison still got me up this morning at 5:30... She and I had breakfast and headed over to Floyd Lamb park to feed the ducks and geese. This used to be a State park but the City of Las Vegas has taken it over, and I have to say the city does a much better job at maintaining the park. It was clean and well groomed, the grills and benches were clean, the trash cans empty and the fishing areas didn't smell like stagnant water. I got some really beautiful pictures today! Madison and I were chased by geese, and followed around by a peacock for about half an hour... then Madison chased butterflies (and actually caught one). We walked and ran around for about two hours - and right after lunch she and I both crashed out watching TV in bed. We must have slept for about an hour and a half, and I'm so happy to have taken a nap, cause naps ROCK! Here's a couple of pictures from our adventures this morning:Above she was chasing butterflies all over this huge field. She totally ruined her pants with grass stains diving after them, she would make a great softball base stealer...

She was fascinated with this thing (I do believe it's a seed pod of some kind), but I told her it is nature's version of the disco ball. :)

We just finished some coloring and I'm about to go outside, blow bubbles and grill some dinner. What did you do this weekend, Internet?

Sunday at the Park

Today Maddy and I met the family at Floyd Lamb Park for a picnic... it was a perfect day in Las Vegas and we ended up staying there for about 4.5 hours. The girls rode their bikes all over most of the day, but there was a little fishing and a game or two of tag in there as well. :) There was this really nice guy exercising his horse at one end of the park, and he let the girls ride him (Silky Sullivan, Sully for short) for a few minutes. This was Maddy's first time on a horse, and he was one BIG horse:
There's horse boarding near the park so you see a lot of horses, but today I found out there's actually horseback riding anyone can do. I added that to my to-do list!

It was a pretty eventful day, so now we're kicking back and watching "Pete's Dragon". I don't think we're going to have any problems sleeping tonight. There are more pictures from our day at the Flickr link.

Hope you had a great weekend!!