Weekend Wrapup

Sunday morning Mommy got a wonderful surprise at church - two of the members from Faith stopped by to say Hi! That was Miss Sue and Miss Irene (who babysat Parker then Wesley in the nursery). , It was great to be able to see them again and to get a chance to visit with them a bit before and after worship.

Then when Parker's children's choir practice was over, we headed down to Tampa for a family birthday party. Time to celebrate those September birthdays - Aunt Barbara, Uncle Kelly and Grandmommy. Unfortunately we were seriously delayed in getting there because of a bad accident on I75 near State Road 54. It took us 40 minutes to go 4 miles! Needless to say that everyone had already eaten lunch before we arrived, but they did save us some food.

Uncle Kelly, Granddaddy and Daddy

Uncle David resting

Aunt Barbara cleaning up - and mad that we took her picture! :)

So after a quick lunch for us, we opened presents and then took the kids outside to play at the pond and the putting green again. This time we came prepared with bread to feed the turtles, fish and ducks. In addition to the animals from last time we also saw a big red snapper turtle who came up briefly for food. However, Wesley put a crimp in our plans by throwing one of the plastic bags full of food right into the pond!


We took a brief break between the dock on the pond and feeding the ducks on the shore - it started to pour down rain and we took shelter in one of the carports. Here's Parker trying to catch some rain on his tongue.

But of course since it's Florida, the shower only lasted a couple of minutes and then we found this mama duck with her seven babies on shore and fed them.

The non-duck feeding crowd.

Picture with the Pelican on the shore - this was the best of several pictures taken of the cousins. They were too wet and wound up to stand very still!

Finally to the putting green!

We really didn't hang around long before heading back to Ocala. We had big plans as a family of 4 today and wanted the boys to be well rested. Today was Mommy and Daddy's day off and Parker also had the day off from school. So we kept Wesley home from daycare and we all went tubing on the Rainbow River in Dunnellon. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while - Mommy and Daddy first went tubing here as teenagers with the youth from Seffner. Later we took the youth from Tice here and the last time we went was a few years back with Uncle Clark, Uncle Daniel and Aunt Dawn.

We left the Malibu at the end of the river run and took the Windstar up to KP Hole County Park where you put in for tubing. Since we live close by and hope to do this often, we had purchased our own tubes - that had drink holders and little built in cooler flaps. We put in about 12:30pm and finished up the run at 4:45pm. The water is super cold, but we had bought the boys some special insulated suits with flotation stuff inside to help out. And they seemed to do really well and liked it alot. We had plenty of snacks and drinks to help keep them occupied too. Wesley alternated between riding in his float and riding with Mommy or Daddy. He would get cold and then sit with one of us to warm up and then want to get back in his own float again. Since it was during the week, everything was super quiet. We only saw one other tubing group and five or six boats on the whole trip. Very peaceful and relaxing. So relaxing in fact, that Mr. Wesley ended up taking a nap for the last 20 minutes of the run! Afterwards, we dried off, packed everything up and headed home to get cleaned up. Then we treated the boys to Cici's for dinner. And boy did they scarf it down tonight!