Celebrating Natalie

This year, Natalie's birthday fell on a Wednesday and with Samuel's school in the morning and AWANA's in the evening, we decided to take her Heaven day, Friday, off to spend time together as a family and do something fun to remember our sweet sissy.  After a lesurely morning, we headed to a children's museum about one hour away.  Get ready...I'm about to bombard you with pictures! :)

 Malachi the Builder!

Sapphira loved the grocery store!

She wasn't giving up her checker spot for anything...thankfully these kids were happy to load up her conveyor belt. :)

Malachi really loved the veterinary clinic.  He took very good care of this sweet dog.

Checking it's ears...

...and giving him a nice warm bath.

He also scheduled a follow up appointment! ;)

Sapphira even took a shift on the phones.  We spent quite a bit of time in the section of the museum.

This rice table was also a hit with Sapphira.

I'm thinking I might have to have Samuel build a rice table for her this summer!

The last thing we did before we left was play in the water area.  There were several small fountains and pools to play in and experiment with water flow.  So fun!  I was so thankful there were waterproof smocks to wear...I wasn't too keen on changing the kids' clothes in the bathroom.

.  Sapphira played for a bit before completely melting down and going out to the car with Daddy.  All that fun did a number on her!

This was Malachi's favorite area.  He spent quite a while playing on this water table and fitting the colored walls into the pegs in the table to make different paths for the ducks and boats to travel down, and experimenting with how quickly or slowly the water ran. 

After a couple minutes all the other kids went to different water activities, leaving Malachi alone to create his own "river" for the boats.  He was able to play all by himself for at least 10 minutes.

Other highlights of the day were a life-sized lite brite with huge pegs just the right size for Sapphira's hands; an "ambulance" complete with steering wheel, emergency lights and bed for the sick patient (Sapphira will tell you she wants to be an ambulance driver when she grows up, so she was soooo excited!); a wooden train table; a puppet stage with a video camera that projected your show on the wall; and a big digging pit filled with chunks of rubber and lots of shovels and tractors to go around.  There was also a room where you could use real clay to make a project and have it fired to take home.  We didn't do that since there was an extra fee and it was too far to drive to come back to pick up once it was fired.  Maybe a different day.

We had tons of fun together and will make it a point to come back to this museum again.  I'm so thankful we were able to find something interesting to do together that kept us all entertained.  Too bad big sister couldn't join us...we love you, Natalie!!!