Don't you just love the movie UP? Well, we do, and if you have never seen it or if it has been awhile, you should definitely watch it. Every year during spring break, we try to have as much adventure as we can. This year we may have set a new personal Cluff record for having an extreme amount of fun. On Monday, we woke up early and headed to the Bishop's Storehouse to work from 7-9 a.m. They call it work, but it is really fun and we go every Monday in the summer and every Monday that is a holiday or day off from school during the school year.
When we finished helping at the storehouse, some of us hopped on the light rail and headed to the Science Center in Phoenix. It was fun going into the city and some of us had never ridden on the light rail before.
It was so fun that some of us decided to stand instead of sitting and see if we could keep our balance while the train was moving.
Once we got into Phoenix, we stopped to take pictures on these cool statues of bugs.
At the Science Center we rode a bike that told us how fast we would need to pedal and how long we would need to ride to burn the calories in a hamburger. If you had seen this exhibit you would think twice before you ate another hamburger.
We participated in wheelchair races.
We went inside a giant model of a stomach to see how food is processed once we eat it and slid out a plastic rectum while the sounds of gas and gurgling noises played in the background. Hey, it was educational! We apologize in advance if Uncle Robert's family is reading this post because we used the actual names of body parts. :)
We each took turns laying down on a real bed of nails.
We used a computer to distort our images.
We went inside of a room that taught all about the Roosevelt Dam. I'm not sure where, but somewhere there is a rule that if you go to an actual dam or if you go to an exhibit about a dam you are allowed to say the word dam because it is not a bad word.
We spent plenty of time in that room building dams and having a _ _ _ (not the bad word, we only left 3 spaces) good time.
We had lots of fun playing in the water at this exhibit. I'm not sure what it was supposed to teach us but we had a good time.
We walked up and down a lot of stairs because it was fun.
We crossed from one side of a Phoenix street to the other side using this cool bridge, not because we needed to, but because it was fun.
We got back on the light rail and this time we sat down the whole trip because we were tired.
We stopped at Wendy's on the way home and bought some good food, but I noticed that no one ordered a hamburger. See, we did learn something!
On Tuesday, the only picture I took was of these beautiful daffodils that we had in our house to help us celebrate Spring. On Tuesday, we sang the song Because I Have Been Given Much, I Too Must Give, and we cleaned our rooms. That activity was surprisingly not voted as one of the favorites of the week. I found $1.78 while vacuuming and doing laundry and if I had a dollar for every bobby pin I found in the house I would be filthy, stinking rich! We celebrated our clean rooms by eating lunch at Costco and later in the afternoon we went to the temple to do baptisms.
On Wednesday, I needed to spend the day with my parents, and so I left the children with 250 water balloons and 5 cans of silly string to create their own fun. Kaylee looks like she is posing for a mug shot, but it turned out to be a very fun activity.
Who wouldn't love throwing water balloons at siblings and neighbor friends?
When I got home all I found were the plastic bowls in the sink and the pictures of the fun they had on the camera.
Richard got home early on Wednesday and took Paige and Kaylee out into the desert to shoot with his family. Thanks for the invite Uncle Robert, sorry we had to throw you under the bus a little earlier in this post.
Those guns sure were loud!
Paige looks like she was taking this activity very seriously.
Thursday was voted as the most fun we had all week. We woke up early and were in the car headed to the Tucson Zoo by 7:20 a.m. Why? Because they feed the giraffes at 10:00 a.m. and we had to make it there on time. This picture shows the kids humoring me while we wait for the giraffe feeding to begin.
What can I say? It was amazing and totally worth the drive and the effort to get out of the house early. AND, did I mention that admission is only $3 for 14 yrs and younger and $7 for 15 and above?
We all enjoyed the zoo, even me, who will never be considered an animal lover and will never own a license plate that says pets enrich our lives.
After we left the zoo we found some ducks to feed. If you know anything about the Cluffs, then you know that we always go to parades and we always find ducks to feed. On our way home from Tucson we decided to stop off at Picacho and visit the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Farm. We had never been before and we were curious, so we thought we would check it out. It was so much fun! I am serious, we really do recommend it. The place was full of animals and even I liked it. :)
There were donkeys to feed.
There were deer to feed.
There were goats to feed and ducks and ...
even I liked it.
Of course, there were ostriches to feed, but they were not our favorite animal there.
Our favorite thing to feed at the farm were these adorable lorikeets. They are from Australia and they drink 250,000 calories of liquid nectar a day. Yup, you read that right, 250,000 calories per day. That is the equivalent of a 150 pound person eating more than 470 hamburgers. They were very friendly and would climb all over you while you fed them. On Friday, I didn't take my camera with us, but we went to the Kiwanis Wave Pool in Tempe and then we went to the Arizona Mills Mall and looked around.
On Saturday, we all wore green shirts (even Dixie wore a green dress for the occasion), since it was St. Patrick's Day and we drove to Payson to find adventure.
We took our cousin, Katie, along. Don't worry, she was wearing green socks.
We ate green, chewy sprees and green sweet tarts and green mints and we chewed green gum.
The weather in Payson was much cooler than Mesa and we found these beautiful trees that were blossoming. We went on some walks, checked out the local Wal Mart and ate at Wendy's. (Again, no one ordered a hamburger.)
Then, we found a cool store where we could take these great pictures.
