Cats, Spinning, Escalators, oh my!

So, for Russ's birthday (yes, I'm well aware it was over a month and a half ago...) we decided it was time to add another family member.  So off to PetCo to look at their sweet, adoptable kitties.

We found this little girl:

Of course she was insane for the first day or two, mostly hiding under the couch.  But by the end of the first day, she found her preferred snuggle spot.  Even still, every night she goes in and sleeps on Russ's feet in bed...until he gets up.  Then she wanders the house, meowing like crazy.  When Russ was out of town for a week, she would NOT shut up!

It was a full 3 weeks before we could decide what to name her.  We settled on Tesla, but the kids still enjoy trying out other names on her.

Sam testing out Russ's birthday streamer doorway.

Corinne got Russ this awesome fish AND the shark.  Unfortunately, there wasn't enough helium in the shark for it to work, and we couldn't get the fish to work all that great, but it was fun to play with!

Russ and Corinne hiked up the mountain on his birthday weekend.
The kids and I took the tram and met them at the top.
Sam and Russ kept hiking a bit at the top while the girls checked out the restaurant--hello nachos and onion rings!! :)
Here's part of the AMAZING view from the top.

This is at our homeschool park day.  The kids love spinning on this thing.
Note:  You know it MUST be cold here because both kids are in long-sleeved shirts, Brook is wearing pants and a hat!!!  VERY abnormal for these two.  A very cool thing about Albuquerque though is that 45* in the sun is actually really quite pleasant.  So it must've been windy or something.

I Love when these two act out stories.  We made them a tent and they were playing fishermen.  They are just so sweet with each other.

Here's a 2 minute video of them acting out their story.

One cranky weekend day where everyone was low on sleep and the gymnastics gym was unexpectedly closed, we drove around looking for something to do and ended up at the Bosque.
Brook had fun balancing.

This is the entrance to the museum/gift store!  Kinda crazy.

This is inside the museum.

An area where you can look out over the pond and see all of the fowl.  Sandhill cranes were making the way through the area then.

Aaaaaand this is where Sam sat the entire time we were checking out the Bosque.

I even tried taking his seat belt off and he woke up, flipped out, and buckled it back in.
Russ hopped back in the car and took a snooze while Brook and I checked out the gift shop and got some goodies for the boys.

Brook & Sam's giant leaf nest at the park down the street.

This is my mattress.  And my kids flying off of it.  Into the wall.
They loved it, of course.
Sigh.

We found this keyboard at a thrift store for a few bucks.  Sam was so proud of himself that he figured out how to record and play back his own songs.

You can't see it super well here, but this is the first random yarn-bombing I've seen done.  It's down the street at our park.

Russ has to get his exercise somehow!

Russ was in charge of Thanksgiving this year and decided he wanted to do a bacon-covered turkey.
After we ate it, he decided next year he's just getting fried chicken.  Ha!

One of the families in our homeschool group had a Christmas party.  They lived waaaaaay out in the boonies, up by the mountain.  It was a really neat and beautiful area, and the kids had a blast running around the house. 
Homeschoolers have some of the coolest spaces and toys.  This is one of the movie-watching places--wall-to-wall seating, hammock and a big screen setup.  Another favorite area was the bar hanging from the ceiling--lots of pullups, swinging, hanging upside down going on.  There was also a large kids table where we set up our laptops and had Minecraft running for whoever wanted to play.

Brooklyn, Russ and I had an art day where there was a lot of painting, snowflake making, and painting those snowflakes going on.  It was a lot of fun!

We had tickets to the River of Lights here in Albuquerque and decided to use them on the first night.  Once we got close to the parking area, we turned around, unable to deal with the sheer amount of people we saw trying to park...and we high-tailed it to the mall to catch Rise of the Guardians.
We all enjoyed the movie (mostly--Sam has a tough time with movies because they are too long), and decided to check the mall out per Sam's request.

We found the ride area and used the few quarters I happened to have.

The ride area was right at the edge of the food court, which was Very cool.

Theeeeeen we spent the next 30 minutes riding the escalators!

The mall was about to close, but we couldn't pass up on the Hurricane Wind machine!!!
Russ actually made me get in and try it after this--the kids loved it!!

And of course we've been Minecrafting!
While I'm pretty sick of it, I'm constantly amazed at how much we learn from it.  Not only have I learned way more than I ever thought I would about installing mods, maps, making skins, Java and coding and making our own mods...but the kids love it and will randomly pull out things they've learned for me.
Like when I was doing something on there for Sam the other day and he said, "Dat says 'weakness'."  Yup, he was right!  Or another day, "Dat says 'episode'."  Right again. 
And Brooklyn almost has the process of making her own skins and uploading them herself down (which involves typing the right website in, finding the skin she wants to modify, doing so, downloading it, opening the right folders, copying, pasting, re-naming, going to another website, finding the right page to upload, and finding the right file to upload).

Off to finish the next post, the one where when I finish I will officially be Caught Up!
WOOT!