After all the fun in North Texas, we headed south to Houston! I may or may not have planned the route to Houston to go through West just to get kolaches. It seemed like a nice detour around the madness of downtown Houston and I got my favorite Texas pastry. Win-win!
We were doing so much running around visiting all of our friends that the camera once again got forgotten until almost the end of our time there. (Like always...)
But I did manage to get a few photos of pool time at the Thurmond's house! We had pool time at one of my former mentor's house and he suggested these pool "wings" that worked great for his grandkids. They did a much better job of keeping the kids from going face first in the water. These two still weren't convinced and mostly preferred to stand on the side of the hot tub. (It was definitely not being heated!)
As usual, Allie went a little crazy buying all kinds of toys for them for both indoor and outdoor use. We managed to convince her to keep the pool floats since we don't have a pool, but she insisted on sending the water squirters along with us. The kids (mine and hers!) had such a blast attacking each other with them, that I couldn't resist taking a few along with us.
Also, as usual, John had a fun project going that the kids were super interested in watching. Last time was 3D printing and this time was a new CNC router he was tinkering with building. The boys kept trying to peek into the garage through the cat door. We finally let them out there to watch with the proper hearing protection.
After saying goodbye to the Thurmond's, we decided to hit one more museum before hitting the road south again. We hadn't made it to the Children's Museum of Houston yet (we did get the one in the Woodlands again on this trip), so we decided to go check it out. Our museum membership in Alaska covers so many museums around the country and this was one of them - it even included immediate entry into Kidtropolis. I think you usually have to reserve a time, so it was nice to just walk in.
The boys had a blast in Kidtropolis! They got little bank cards at the beginning, then got to try out various jobs - collecting paychecks along the way.
Of course, they wanted to hang out in the grocery store and this one was even a HEB. I wanted to hang out there too (maybe more at the real one, but it was close!)
Henry was more interested in shopping than checking out. I spent most of my time restocking behind them. They had the cutest little aisles! And there were even kids manning a meat & seafood counter. So adorable!
I finally got them to wave goodbye to Kidtropolis and check out all of the fun water activities outside. Henry must have been watching his brother the other day, he was using two water guns from the get-go!
Thomas was much more excited about making the biggest waves he could in this wave tank. I was mostly trying to avoid the sun and stressing over not having their hats! Only one of them got soaked enough in the water play to need an outfit change once we got back to the car, but for such an exciting morning, it was a small price to pay!
On the road again and off to the next Texas adventure!