"Take Cheese"

Since school's started and I've had to get back to actually doing my chores, going to the gym and running errands most of the day, Saturday has now become adventure day. After starting the day off right...Boot Camp of course, Lulu and her girls from church then got to go hang out with some horses, while I... got a manicure! I got back just in time to see them all get to sit on Precious. Kurt took the big kids to explore a cave...Lulu will have to tell you all about that exciting adventure!

So Baby Butter and I had the afternoon to ourselves. Now, I could have been a responsible parent...fed him a nice, well balanced lunch, put him down for a nap and cleaned out a closet or two...OR we could grab a few healthy (of course) snacks and have an adventure of our own! Seeing as how there wasn't a cloud in the sky and it was a perfect 78 degrees out there, I opted for the latter! (yeah, I know, no big surprise there!) So we grabbed some apple slices (Have you tried the bag of them Chiquita* sells...talk about convenient! Love 'em!), cheese sticks, a bag of Goldfish* and we were on our way to Forest Park! This past weekend was the big Balloon Race, and since they had the Balloon Glow the night before...well it only made sense to me that they'd all be up and ready to go, waiting to take off later that afternoon. We followed the crowds, stumbled upon a pretty good parking spot and hiked up the hill. There were people all over the park camped out on their blankets and lawn chairs, with their coolers full of treats and cold drinks...it was almost like we were all waiting for the fireworks on the 4th of July! So we finally got there and wouldn't ya know it...no balloons! Apparently they weren't due back for another 3 hours and were to take off another 45 minutes after that. Well, there are only so many funnel cakes and frozen lemonades a girl can afford to last 4 hours! The place was lined up with food and various other vendors much like a fair, even had a little stage where some kids were singing and dancing to various show tunes (entertaining for a while...) but no balloons! So after showing Baby Butter a few helium balloons on a few booths, we decided to head over to the zoo! I must take a lot of pictures on our outings, because every time I turned around, he was sitting in some cute little spot, posing for me and saying, "Take cheese!" (that's what we call pictures, 'cause, well, that's what ya say!) We stayed a few hours, but it still wasn't quite time for those balloons, and traffic/parking was pretty ridiculous at this point, so we decided a nice cold root beer float sounded pretty good instead! Hoping that we'd see them soaring overhead, we went to Fitz*s, sat on the patio and "shared" (he had about 2 bites and 3 slurps! He knows mom likes her treats!) a float that somehow ended up being too much for the two of us! So, back to the whole point of the adventure, the balloons...I finally saw 2 of them in my rear view mirror, way off in the distance as we drove home! We did, however, get to take more cheeses... (this was his HALF of the float!)