New Surroundings

Wednesday night the kids did really well sleeping in a completely foreign place.  Theo and Woodrow’s rooms are across from one another so they both kept their doors open with their heads halfway out into the hallway. Max woke up once during the night, but stayed in his room otherwise.  

Thursday morning Mason was off bright and early to get his visitor pass for his new office,  checked-in,  and attend some briefing.  Some of the other coworkers were out of town so his real work will begin this upcoming week.  The kids and I had a real slow morning and were thankful that my dear friend Christyn had dropped off muffins the day before so we already had breakfast in the house. Since we wanted to get out a little bit and Mason was heading towards the gym after his meetings we decided to hit our favorite first stop at any new place… the library! Even before getting groceries we had play time at the library, checked out new books, had library cards in hand, and signed up for the summer reading program.  Living in Illinois I got some at accustomed to using the Walmart grocery pick up and I use that again here for our first shopping trip which had random items that I wasn’t driving tired kids throughout the store we rendezvoused back at the house about the same time Mason had gone home.  Checking and receiving their first Nebraska mail was also lots of fun.  Let us know if you'd like our new address.    

In the afternoon and the kids were getting a little squirrley and Mason had some things he wanted to get done, so I decided to take the boys to the park I had seen previews for that wasn’t too far away in Council Bluffs, Iowa at Lake Manawa State Park.  There were several people at the lake fishing but the temperatures are really heated up for the day and there were not as many walking trails as I had originally anticipated. There were mountain bike trails but they were closed off to vehicles I’m thinking because of recent flooding.  The park was super awesome. It was a gated area with a park for 0 to 2-year-olds,  2 to 5-year-olds, and then five and up.  Of course all three boys explored all three parks.  The only downfall was that it was really hot and there is no shade. Fortunately I brought water bottles, but we didn’t last as long as we probably would have if it was cloudy and we hadn’t been tired from the previous day’s drive.  I imagine that the Park gets very crowded with the visitors because there’s a little beach right nextdoor so several kids were playing in their swimsuits.

We ended off the evening taking the kids out to a restaurant. They were excited and even Woodrow, or trickiest eater decided to try wings and decided they’re his favorite now.  We also took a walk around the neighborhood where the boys ended up losing their baseball to the street drains, and Maximus found "Santa Trees" (evergreens).  I'm a personal fan of all the bunnies we seen in the hood.