More Albuquerque

The kids and I spent Monday relaxing and visiting with Jill and cousins.  My brother-in-law Scott was just promoted to be the new general manager at the Cinemark…24 screens, first run, and one of the busiest Cinemarks in the nation!  Way to go Scott.  He’ll do an awesome job and really deserves the promotion.  Anyway, Jared got the full tour of the theatre and then they went to a movie.  And brought me back a HUGE bucket of kettle corn.  Yeah, they serve kettle corn at his theater…I think I need to move to Albuquerque :)

Monday evening we attended Braden’s (12) soccer game while Alissa (16) watched and fed the rest of the kids at home.  It was quite enjoyable to learn that Jill is that parent.  Ya know, the vocal one, the “don’t you dare mess with my kid” one.  Ok, she’s not really bad, but still entertaining at times :) After the game we picked up some McDonald’s for Braden, dropped him off at home and then headed out to Pei Wei for dinner, while Alissa put all the kids to bed.  Seriously, I NEED an Alissa.  The girl is absolutely AMAZING!!!  It was really nice to eat yummy food and visit with Jill and Scott.

Tuesday morning Jared and Scott were up and out the door by 5 am and headed to the balloon field.  Scott knows somebody, who knows somebody, who knew the Brazilian pilot of one of the balloons and they were invited to help be part of their chase crew.  They would go and help them inflate and launch, and then they literally chase the balloon around town to help it land, wherever that might be.  It sounded like so much fun.  Unfortunately, it was too windy that morning and the regular balloons were able to launch, but the “shapes” balloons (and theirs was a pig) were not able to :(  This picture is of all the other balloons launching.  So cool!

Jill and I headed to a pumpkin patch that morning.  It was supposed to rain in the afternoon, so we tried to get out as soon as we could.  It turned out perfect.  We drove about 35 minutes to get there and it was a little overcast at times, but we also got some sun.  It did finally rain and get windy, but we were able to do all the kids wanted to before the rain came.

The first thing they do is take you on a hay/tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch.  Then they drop you off and  you choose a pumpkin. Gavin got right off and picked the first pumpkin he saw.

Mia first helped us find a pumpkin for Tessa

And then searched forever to find the perfect one for her.  She totally had to pee the entire time though (not anything we could do about that in the middle of the pumpkin patch…we just had to wait for all 3 trailors to be loaded back up and the farmer to take us back to the main area…) so she was having a hard time focusing.

And Tessa mostly was just tripping over all the vines and getting upset about it!

While Mia searched, Gavin was in charge of keeping an eye on his and Tessa’s pumpkins at the front of the patch.

I told the kids they were responsible for holding their own pumpkins, and they got as big as they could.  It was so hilarious to watch them when we got back to the parking lot, rolling their pumpkins along to the car :)  And they weren’t really even that big. 

Then it was off the play in all the activities they had around the patch…

The big slide was a hit with all the kids.

And since Jill only had Trey with her (the rest of her kids were in school) she “got” to go down the slide with him over and over!

Big “spider wed” to climb around on

After seeing some animals (bunnies, goats, ducks, cows…) we ended at the corn pit.  I think there was just as much dust as there was corn in there!  The kids all LOVED it, but were covered with dust by the time we left.

Trey got dust in his eyes, and was trying to wipe off the dust…with his dust covered hands! 

Tessa could have stayed there all afternoon!

We stopped at McDonalds for lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon at the Foderaros.

Wednesday we had to head home.  Our plan was to get up and head to the balloon field to see one of the “mass ascensions”, where hundreds of the balloons all launch at once.  Then we would head home straight from there.  Unfortunately, it was raining Wednesday morning, so the balloons would not be launching.  Boo.  So we packed up the chair and headed home instead.

This is how we got the massage chair home…

Ha, ha…too funny.  And since you are all wondering…the chair IS awesome, and Jared DOES sit in it every night.  Come on over and try it for yourself :)

(I’m 100% serious…we’ve already had a few friends come over and try it out!)