KOOZA!!

I LOVE Cirque Du Soleil shows.  Just one of my favorites is the Kooza.  When I heard it was coming to Phoenix, I was excited.  Date night!!  

Joshua and I dropped off the kids with our friends and drove the hour in a half to where the show was.  After dropping off the kids we had to get some oil for the wave runner and by the time we were done with that, we didn't have much time to eat so ended up picking up sandwiches on the way. We got there and forgot that it gets hotter up in Phoenix so we were a tad bit warmer than usual.  LOL  ok...so I was dying and because of the sandwiches I was extremely thirsty!  We ended up paying $6.50 for a cup of water.  You can bet my bottom at that price that we enjoyed every bit of that water.  LOL  Thats more than what we had to pay in Holland for water at a restaurant (3.50 euro)  

Anyways - the show was awesome like always and we noticed they added a part which was awesome.  It was a lady in the audience that was "supposedly" a mother of one of the actors and kept going up on stage to take pictures and take cookies and so forth to her son.  It was pretty funny.  

Arizona Science Center

A couple months ago on Groupon they had a deal for a 1 year membership for 4 to the Arizona science center for 50% off.  We snatched that up RIGHT away considering just going once would make it worth the price!  So this past Wednesday my friend and I took the kids.  We got there right when they opened so it wouldn't be too crowded.  As entering we found this area of Nano technology area.  So I took a couple pictures for Joshua since He deals with that kind of stuff at work. :)

Theodore was having a good time which lasted a whole whopping 5 minutes.  See this skelaton?  yeah...its eyes glow and the bones move which then scared Theodore!  and not only that...we forgot it was summer break so the kids started pouring in!  That place was crowded and Theodore being one of the smallest kids there...was being shoved around and stepped on...and there was a lot of screaming going on.  :(  After about a hour in a half of that and my back hurting from carrying him...I was ready to go home.  

Charlene on the other hand had a BLAST!  She was all over the place.  Loved touching everything.  I like this stage where they are more curious and aren't afraid of everything.  :)

Dirt??  yeah..she found it!   

All in all...the hour drive to Phoenix was a drive...but I think we will wait another month when school starts to go again to help prevent some of the screaming from Theodore.  

A little hiking adventure to The Wave

Ever since we moved to Arizona we have wanted to go hike The Wave.  Its on the border between Utah & Arizona.  Since it is so delicate land, they only allow 20 people in a DAY!  and the only way to get tickets to it is pretty much luck of the draw.  So the full year every month when they come available we kept trying and trying to get them.  Well we finally got lucky and got a hold of some tickets.  It was for June which I was kind of skeptical about with the heat, but since we haven't been lucky the rest of the months, we had to take advantage of the opportunity.  :)  It was a 6 mile hike total.  So 3 there and 3 back.  We KNEW Charlene couldn't hike that far, we the day we left we stopped at Babies R Us and picked up a spare backpack in to put her in.  

We stayed at Lake Powell Resort which was just OK.  Its been so long since we have had to stay in a hotel room, so we felt cramped.  We do get spoiled with our condos.  :) It was right on the lake which was beautiful, but the resort def. needed some updating.  LOL  

Anyways - We headed out around 9am leaving to get breakfast then the hour drive to the turn off then another half hour down a dirt road to finally find the starting point.  We got all loaded up, and it was also Theodore's first time in a backpack He had a little "fit" wanting out and tossing and turning trying to get out for about 2 minutes until He realized there was no way out. Charlene was a trooper.  She wanted to Hike, and hike She did!  She did the whole way there (3 miles) and 1.5 miles back before complaining her leggies hurt.  :)

Now, another tricky part to hiking into the wave was...there was no official trail!  Get this...when we got the tickets, they sent us a piece of paper with pictures on it and you had to find those landmarks!  So the picture to the right below is how it looked pretty much the whole way!  

One of the landmarks was this next picture.  We are to climb up over this little ridge.  From afar it looked steep, but it wasn't too bad.

Charlene even climbed it!  We told her She is our little Rock Climber now.  :)

 

At the top were some flowers which she stopped and smelled.  She was excited since they matched her shirt.  

Once we got to the top, we had to find something called "two mounds" and climb to the right of them.  Sorry about the funny picture, I thought Joshua took a picture of just them!  LOL  

After we got around the mounds, in near distance we saw a man alone.  We hiked down towards him since we figured that is the right way.  Turned out the 66 year old man was lost and had been out since 6am!!!  He is originally from Israel and moved to NYC and this is his second "attempt" to find the wave.  The first time He got lost and eventually at 1am found cell phone service and called for help.  The man said he was so happy to see us he wanted to kiss us.  LOL  He asked if it was alright if he could just follow us.  The nice part is...since we accidently left the tripod in the car, we got a couple family photos.  :)

                             

  

The next land mark we had to find was a big black crack. So we found it and hiked towards it.

At the bottom of that black crack we found THE WAVE!!!  Now prepare for a lot of photos.  :)

 

  

Found a little shady spot for our lunch.  :)

 

The kids had fun exploring around a little...until Theodore realized I was more than 5 ft away.  Silly mommies boy!  

 

 

And see this little man?  Yeah...we had a first.  A couple asked us to get out of the way so they could get a picture of him.  LOL  usually people take with us in them...but asked us to move??  that surprised us.  But what can I say...we produce cute kids.  ;)

 

 

 

 

This next picture of me was kind of funny.  I climbed up this steep area no prob.  But then once I turned around and realized how high I was up I freaked!  I seriously was afraid to fall!  It was about 50ft down and I had less than a ft wide ledge to get down on!  Its been a while since I felt that scared. LOL

 

On the way back Theodore fell a sleep after fighting the backpack again.  :)

Here is the only picture that has our new friend in it.  This was halfway back and Charlene and us were tired so we sad down in the ONLY shade there was.  :)  

After a 6 mile hike...we were so excited to see our cars.  LOL  Seriously need to get back into shape...it was a killer.  But another nice part is..though this was only a weekend getaway, we found about 5 other hikes we want to do, AND want to bring our wave runner up also.  :)  

Talk about beauty right??