Circus!

We went to the circus today!
On Friday we picked up some free spanish-language newspapers to use for our volcanoes.  Joseph was looking at one of them today at lunchtime, and found an ad for a free ticket to the Ben Hur Shriner's Circus.  We saw that today was the very last day, and 3:30 PM was the last showing.   So, on the (very) spur-of-the-moment, we decided to go!
I didn't really have any expectations, but what little I had were blown away.  It was a fantastic show, and with 2 free tickets (one free with each adult ticket, which was the same price as the kid's ticket, go figure), it cost us only $39 for a totally awesome 3 hour circus.
I am NOT an event photographer-- I don't have the lenses or skills, but I did take a few shots.  And then I realized that more than half of the pictures I took were of the elephants.  LOL!  I love elephants, but they were actually only a minor part of the show.  Oh well.  I'm not even showing all the pictures I took of the elephants here.

The first act was a tiger act--6 great big humongous tigers jumping over each other and over hurdles and up and down off giant stools and walking on their hind legs and looking like giant squishy (and very dangerous) house cats.

This one is jumping on his (her?) hind legs to get a piece of meat the trainer has on a stick.

Sitting on a rotating disco-ball platform.  I love cats, and tigers are the most majestic of cats (sorry, lions, but it's true).  Look at that face!

And a giant African elephant, The Mighty Bo, who did all kinds of cool tricks.

More of Mighty Bo

And more of the elephant-- look how cute!

A trick bicycle rider-- he did amazing tricks on the bike, and then rode up and down huge ramps doing flips.  I'm hoping the boys weren't getting too many ideas.


During intermission we went down to the floor to look at... the elephants, of course! 

They were selling tickets for rides, but at $10 a pop, we decided just to look.  Mosey was very grumpy at getting his picture taken.  He only did it because I told him he couldn't have his cotton candy unless he would be in the picture.  So this is what I got.  :-)

But, as soon as we got back to our seats and he broke open the cotton candy, he was happy again.

Lovely, Mosey.  Really lovely.  :-)

This was actually one of the most impressive acts, believe it or not.  There were about 7 or 8 performers in the 3 rings, some doing juggling, others doing hula-hooping.  This girl was amazing.  This is not a good picture-- I was too busy watching to get pictures of her best tricks.  A person just off the ring kept tossing them in one after another, landing them perfectly over her head where it would join all the others spinning around.  At one point she was swinging 20 hula hoops all around her body, from her ankles to her uplifted arms.  She looked like a human slinky.  It was so cool!

And more elephants. 

Yep, more elephants.

I really, really like elephants, ok?!

So, besides elephants there were arialists who did amazing and terrifying acrobatics on ropes 50 feet up in the air, a pair of trapeze artists, a motorcycle daredevil who did flips and whatnot, an amazing, incredible, hilarious clown, a human cannonball, a dog show (dogs trained to do all kinds of cool tricks), and... I'm sure a couple of other things I'm forgetting.  But it was really awesome.  The boys were transfixed, as was I!  Ben brought his laptop, thinking he might do some work during the show, but I don't think he even looked at it except for during intermission.

Afterward we went to pick up a dog house we bought from someone off Craigslist (long story, but Mister now has to sleep outside...  He's getting to be an old dog, and Ben can't take much more of letting him outside 3+ times during the night), and then out to eat at Steak and Shake.  The boys and Ben had a weird face contest.  Who do you think won?

I'm way too dignified to participate in weird-face contests.  :-)  Actually, I think I might have cracked the lens of the camera if I had tried! 
We didn't get home until almost 9:30 PM, with kids completely wired from cotton candy, cookie dough shakes, and enough stimulation to last a month.  I told them to get ready for bed and then GO TO SLEEP!  Yeah, right.  It's 10:50 PM and I'm still hearing the pitter-patter of little feet upstairs.  Tomorrow is going to be fun...
Ah, well, it's worth it for the memories, right?  :-)

Florida trip day 1: Butterfly World

I want to write about our Florida trip before I forget the details.  I already wrote about how we surprised the boys-- they knew nothing about the trip until we actually got on the plane.
The first day there, we drove down the turnpike from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale.  It was drizzly and cloudy, but the rain stopped by the time we got to Coconut Creek and our first destination-- Butterfly World!  This was one of our favorite places to go when we lived in Florida.  The boys and I went a bunch of times, and they all remembered it.  It was so funny remembering the first time we went, and comparing it to now, 6 years later.  I have some "before and after" pictures.
I didn't get exactly the same angle, but it is the same place in the aviary:

 Mosey has a lot more hair now than he did then!  :-)

 Mosey was NOT a fan of the Lorikeets the first time we went to Butterfly World when he was 11 months old.  I was holding him, and a couple of them came and landed on my head (they were obsessed with my long hair), and he totally freaked out. 
6 years later, however, he couldn't get enough of them.  And they couldn't get enough of him!!

Happy face!

Very, very sad face.  :-)

 Here are a couple of before and afters of Brigham and Joseph (and Moses).

Brigham and Joseph still look like those cute little 3 year olds, don't they?  Joseph was a fearless animal lover even then.  Here they are now (plus an added brother, who wasn't walking let alone holding lorikeets before!):

Here are the rest of the Lorikeet pictures.

No, it didn't poop on my head, but I was worried about it.

Here is a "before" of me, 6 years ago.  I am just about too vain to post this picture.  Here I am looking quite postpartum, I think literally 2 days after I started Weight Watchers, with 50 lbs to lose and no makeup on.  Do I look frazzled?  Well, with 3 kids 3 and under, I pretty much was frazzled all the time.  Still, I'd love to go back in time and relive some of it.

Cool looking birds, eh?  They're not at all native to Florida, but, what the heck!

Here are another set of before and after photos-- in the mist tunnel in the butterfly aviary:

Before.  They thought this mist tunnel was the funnest thing EVER.

And after.  They still thought it was cool, but they were a little more subdued about it.  :-)

And here are a couple of before and afters of Brigham.  OK, so I guess he doesn't look *exactly* the same as when he was 3.  :-)

I don't have an "after" picture of Joseph in the butterfly aviary, but here's one outside, looking at the macaws.  I have no idea what that expression means.  :-)

And my final "before and after" pictures.  Not on the same bench, darn it, and only 1 of the boys is actually in both pictures, but you get the idea.  Mostly I just like looking at those old pictures when the twins were itty bitty.  :-)

What else did we do there?

We walked across the swinging bridge (in case you can't tell, this is "before." :-)  Joseph and Brigham had already run across it before I could get them to stop and take an "after" picture).

We walked through the passion flower vine pathway.

We walked through the bug museum and goggled at the emperor scorpions and black widow spiders and brown recluses and giant millipedes and hissing cockroaches and the black and yellow orb-weaver that was still in the corner, uncaged, sitting on the huge web that it spun across a couple of dead branches set up against the wall.

We saw lots of butterflies.  My absolute favorite are brown and kind of drab with their wings closed, but when they open them, they are a bright, iridescent, peacock blue.  I tried to get a picture of one with the wings open, but they mostly only have them open when they're flying.  I did get picture of this one, clinging to the screen of the enclosure.  But the light streaming through its wings made the blue nearly transparent.  Still pretty, though.

This one came and sat on my hand looking at me for quite a while.  Hello, there!

And of course lots of birds.  This macaw area was new since we were here last.  They had a veritable conversation with Joseph who stood there for 5 minutes or so squawking back and forth with them.  :-)

 

And silly boys:

We stayed until closing, and of course had to go through the gift shop (the boys love gift shops), but they restrained themselves and didn't actually buy anything there!  Ben and I did, though.  It's a great place to buy presents.

We drove on down through Ft. Lauderdale, and to Plantation where we stayed in the EXACT same hotel we stayed at for 6 weeks or so when we first moved to Florida, before we closed on our house.  The Staybridge Suites on Pine Island Rd., just north of Broward Blvd.  Talk about deja vu!  We didn't stay in the same room, though.  Actually we got a great deal because hotels.com messed up and booked a room they didn't have, so they upgraded us to a really nice 2 bedroom 2 bathroom suite for no extra charge.  They still have "sun downers" and served a light dinner in the lobby.  It sure was easier to wrangle 2 nine year olds and a 6 year old than it was 2 two year olds and a 6 month old!!