A Little Get-Away

Due to the nature of the type of work Chris does, he has to travel sometimes for work. Up until a few months ago, he would take around a dozen or so trips a year to places all across the US, generally being gone for 3 to 5 days at a time. While there are some perks to his travelling, for the most part it stinks. I miss him, the children miss him, and he misses being home. 

A few months ago, an opportunity arose for him to make a lateral move within his current company. At first, I really didn't understand why he would even consider going through a transition and basically learning a ton of new stuff for a lateral move. THEN he told me that with his new position most of his travel would be within driving distance of home and that means waaaay fewer nights away from home. It also means that the children and I can tag along with him on his trips every now and then. Yay!

Last weekend, we did just that. Chris had to work in Oklahoma City (about 2 1/2 hours from where we live), so we made a little weekend get-away out of it. We drove down late Wednesday night after Bible study (with hopes that the children would sleep in the car), and ended up running into a terrible thunderstorm. It was absolutely nerve-wracking, BUT we made it safe to our hotel just before midnight. 

On Thursday, Chris worked while the kiddos and I hung out in the hotel room. Once he got off, we went out on the town for dinner and a little shopping. It was so nice just to be away from home and relax!

Friday we planned to visit the Science Museum of Oklahoma and spend most of the day there. I'm so glad we did! It was fun for all of us.

There was an entire part of the Museum geared toward toddlers and babies. Brianna loved painting her own face!

Here she is using one of the computers to draw:

Brenson enjoyed getting in this tractor with Daddy:

Within the children's area, there was a large water exploration exhibit. Brianna had a blast!

Brenson is the type of baby that doesn't want to be held all the time (or really much for that matter). He was so content to play on the floor and explore the various toys on his own.

Brianna and I were counting in this photo. I love the sign behind us that says, "Babies at Work".

This crazy mirror caught Brianna's fancy. She said, "Wow! So many B-annas!" Haha.

We went to a planetarium show that Brianna and I really enjoyed. Brenson got fussy during the show, so Chris took him out and missed most of it :-(.

There was also an exhibit all about weather. In the photo below, Bri and I are in a wind machine and the wind is blowing 42.9 MPH. We stayed in until it reached over 75 MPH!

Here are Chris and Bren taking a turn. Bren did not love this!

Another exhibit was all about the mouth. Isn't this cute of Brianna standing in a giant mouth?

Brenson wanted to sit up on one of the molars :-).

There were seriously so many neat exhibits that we didn't even have time see/do them all. I think we'll have to start making an annual trip to this Museum!

One section of the Museum was all about geometric shapes.

Brianna loved crawling through these tunnels.

Next to the geometric shapes was an exhibit about optical illusions. Isn't this great?

My favorite part was the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame. The wall was covered in photos of famous gymnasts, and there was a television streaming video of great moments in gymnastics (perfect 10 olympic performances and such). Even more fun than that though, there was a huge area where children could play on gymnastics equipment. Brianna had a BLAST (Brenson was napping in the stroller at this point).

I LOVE these photos!

Can you tell she was loving this?

Haha!

She didn't like the balance beam too much, but the parallel bars provided lots of entertainment.

The thing that Brianna loved the most (I think anyway... she actually gave us a different answer each time we asked her) was this treehouse play area. The treehouse was 3 stories high, and you could climb to the top and look out of the skylight of the building! Then, you could slide down this HUGE slide back to the ground floor. Look at how high it is!

Of course, my fearless child wanted to slide down, but I just wasn't ready to let her do it. She's only 2 years old. However, her Daddy said to let her go down if she wanted to, so I did. This is how she was when she reached the bottom:

She was a little scared right after getting off the slide, but as soon as she hugged Daddy she said, "Let's do that again!" And she did :-).

Meanwhile, Momma and Brenson observed from the sidelines. He had just woken up from his nap here and was less than thrilled that he wasn't in his bed.

We had such a fun (and educational) day at the Science Museum! Like I said before, we will probably take an annual trip there for many years to come.

We were planning on going to the zoo in OKC on Saturday, but ended up cutting our trip short due to a funeral at home. One of our teenagers at church passed away from Leukemia and we really wanted to be there for his service. We are a very small congregation, and this was our 2nd child death this year. So, so hard. We really felt like home with our church family is where we needed to be and that the zoo will be there later. Leukemia is such an awful disease, so we rejoice knowing that he is no longer suffering. There is great comfort in that.

I didn't really mean to end this on a down note, but that was definitely the feel of the weekend. We had a blast on Friday and a really, really hard Saturday.