Hands On

I'll spare you the pain of seeing us on the beach for the millionth time and cut straight to the most exciting part of our Tampa trip, at least for the boys. Actually, I couldn't show you the rest of the pictures even if I wanted to because it seems that our camera ate them! Okay, well, it's probably not the camera's fault. Operator error is the more likely culprit, but since there's no actual proof to the contrary, I'm blaming the camera.

So, I won't dwell on the fact that we lost pictures of our afternoon on beautiful Clearwater Beach with it's powdery, white sand and blue sparkling water. Oh, and I won't cry over the fact that no one will ever see the incredible family photos we captured on Pier 60 at sunset, and I'll pretend that it doesn't bother me that we only have half of the pictures from the awesome children's museum in St. Petersburg. Nope, not dwelling a bit!

Anyway, here's what I did manage to save. I'm glad I have something to share. The boys absolutely loved all of the activities at the museum. I dare say that Anh and I enjoyed ourselves too, except for that 30 minutes when the day camp crowd was unleashed. That wasn't particularly enjoyable, but eventually, they were locked back up in their classrooms. Talk about insanity! I was teetering on the line, but luckily didn't cross over into LaLa Land.
Do you see that firetruck in the top corner of the picture above? I had some adorable pictures of the boys all decked out in their firefighting gear driving the truck. Not dwelling...moving on! Jax and Baylor liked this contraption way more, anyway. Up and down! Up and down!
This monstrous playset was also a big hit, pretty much every kid's dream playhouse.Both Jax and Baylor enjoyed the grocery store. I had about a million other pictures of them baking bread and running the checkout lanes, but we'll just be thankful that we were left with these two for the memory books. Oh, and it turns out that Baylor is a cereal junkie. We must have shopped for a good 30 minutes, and the boy just kept going back to the cereal section.

Here the boys are learning a little bit about where dairy products come from. They were fascinated!

Jax even got a little business experience, running his own pizza joint.And, of course, Jax tried his hand at medicine. Looks like he's considering Pediatrics and Radiology.At some point, Anh got roped into helping Jax build an electric car. This activity was clearly for an older group of kids, the dads.After exercising our brains, we made our way to the cafeteria to refuel and learn about nutrition. I thought it was funny that Jax loaded up on vegetables considering that at home he's repulsed by anything green that I put on his plate, except "trees," a.k.a. broccoli.

Baylor just seemed confused about why his tray was empty. He didn't seem to understand that it was play food!

To work off all those imaginary calories, we turned our focus to music, both composing...

and practicing our dance moves! There's room for improvement on both fronts. Oh, and we shared our pipes with the unfortunate bystanders as we sang "Row, row, row your boat..." while playing with the green screen.

There really was so much more to the experience, but well...you know. I'll just keep reminding myself that there will be more days at the beach and there's always another sunset.