The Herrera Family: January 2009

The kids got to experience something really cool this week. The local shopping center, The Shops at Wiregrass, has a Kids Club where they have interesting activities for the kids each Wednesday. This week, it was the reptile guy. He had a lot of really interesting creatures including a 10-foot boa constrictor, a small alligator, lizards, a huge tarantula, and lots of other creepy, crawly things. The best part was that it was a "hands-on" exhibit. For those of you who know Miguel will know that he wasn't thrilled about this particular activity but the kids and I thought it was lots of fun. I have to say, though, that it was hard for me to get over my own fears in order to let the kids participate. The surprising part for me was that Sophia was a much more willing participant than Lucas.

Sophia with an Australian Tree Frog

Petting the baby alligator

10-foot Red Tailed Boa

The children's dept. at Macy's will never be the same

Sophia, the spider whisperer...

Well, it seems that I am only capable of updating this blog about once a month or so. I think about it always but then the time gets away from me then I realize that another week and another month has past. That's pretty symbolic of a lot of things in our lives, I guess.

We had a rather uneventful Christmas as we just stayed close to home and did our family celebration right here. The kids had a great time and Santa was very good to them - probably too good. We did spend some time with Uncle Owen (my brother) and his family in Gainesville a couple of days after Christmas. A good time was had by all. The kids played is his big yard that had lots of leaves for them to throw and roll around in.

We brought in the new year at our neighbor's house with a handful of families from our neighborhood. We put the kids in the bedroom with a movie and some popcorn while the adults shared in New Year cheer. The kids are all friends and play together regularly so they had a great time. They both stayed up to bring in the new year with us but Sophia got really grumpy at about 11:45. I figured she'd made it that far, I certainly wasn't going to put her to bed then! No matter how tired she was the night before, it didn't stop her from getting up at her usual time of 6:30 a.m. You'd think that if you keep a kid up for 4 hours past her bedtime that she would sleep in a little in the morning. We had no such luck.

Lucas is loving soccer and is really great at it. And I'm not just saying that because I'm the Mom. Some of the parents from the competing team stopped me after the game last week and were falling all over themselves at how fast he is and how well he handles the ball for such a little boy. I promise that one of these days I'll get some video posted.

Miguel and I celebrated our 7-year wedding anniversary earlier this week. I'm still having a hard time believing it's been that long! We got a sitter for the day but ended up not really doing too much because we ran some errands and did some shopping then before we new it, our time was almost up. We had planned to go to a movie or something along those lines but because the time went so fast, we just went out for an early dinner and called it a day. I had quite a bad cold anyway so I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. I was happy to come home and sleep!

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the past month: