Great Wolf Weekend

We headed out to Concord to meet up with my college roommate and her family (including 2 boys close in age to Grant & Hayes) at Great Wolf Lodge (or "Wolverine Lodge" if you ask Grant).  Halloween activities at the lodge included trick or treating, so we brought the boys' costumes, and they trick or treated like pros.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed in the "Wolf Den" room, complete with bunk beds:
 

Story time:

 

Lots and lots of swimming in the waterpark:
 

Pumpkin painting:
 

Phillips Farm

For our next farm, we stepped it up a notch with the Boys' Club and went to Phillips Farm, where we had the place all to ourselves for the morning.

Conquering the giant slide:
 

Our first cow train ride:
 

Hay-less hay ride (how I wish all hay rides were hay-less):
 

 

 

Rookie Corn Maze (they told us we couldn't get lost):
 

 

Our first duck races:

Corn crib:
 

If only we'd brought our Spiderman costumes:
 

Go Boys, Go Duke!

The Duke vs. UVA football game was a big one for us.  It was the first time both of the boys made it through an entire football game, from the skydivers  jumping in at the beginning...
 

 

 

...all the way through to the very end!

 

Green Level Gourd (Animatronic) Farm

Fall is here, which means it is pumpkin patch time.  For our first farm of the season, (while Grant was in school) Hayes and I met up with Dylan, Sarah, and our friend's mommy group at the awesomely local and country Green Level Gourd Farm.  Highlights included...

A vast collection of dancing Halloween animatronics:
 

A homemade bowling alley:
 

Clappers on the hay ride to help trigger the many Halloween animatronics (Google is telling me this isn't a word, but I think it is and I don't know what else to call those creepy electronic robot doll things) into doing their spooky things:
 

A wicked witch, one of the many, MANY animatronics we saw on the hay ride:
 

Check out the background to see a Halloween animatronic wedding tableau (this hay ride was 20 awesome minutes of non-stop Halloween animatronic action):
 

Fun around the farm:
 

And an awesome homemade pirate ship, complete with bungee-corded in fishing rod that Hayes used to "catch" Sarah:

If that doesn't inspire you to get on Pinterest, I don't know what would.

Chihuly Nights

After our train ride, Grant took a huge nap, which was a good thing, because we had a big night ahead of us.  We headed to the Dallas Arboretum to have a picnic and explore the amazing Chihuly Nights exhibit.  Chihuly is a glass artist who has done exhibits of his giant glass pieces all over the country. The Arboretum has a huge installation of Chihuly art, and all of the pieces are lit up beautifully for night viewing.  My pocket camera wasn't up to photographing those, so all credit goes to Steve for the amazing pictures of the glass.

 

First we had our Taco Cabana Picnic:

 

Then we explored the pumpkin patch while we waited for the sun to go down.  This shot was in Cinderella's carriage:

 

Grant decided his job was to make sure all of the little pumpkins that looked like they'd rolled away were tucked back into the piles:

 

Dark!  Now let's see some glass.  I tried to pick just a few of my favorites:
 

 

 

 

 

 
This was probably the latest Grant has ever stayed up, but we had a great time wandering around and looking at it all, and it was definitely worth it!

Lunch Downtown

On Monday, we took the DART train to downtown Dallas to have lunch with Steve in Deep Ellum and then go up in his building.

Grant liked climbing on these metal "robot birds."

 

Attempted group shot:
 

 That building with the hole in it is where Steve works:

 

Inside of Steve's building:
 

Riding the DART train back to Migi's house: