Zoo trip and publication news for me.

Today we went to the zoo with our friends the Holts. They have boys ages 4 and and somewhere around 19 months, so they make good buddies for our boys.

You may know that Stpehen loves birds, so first stop was the bird area. He especially likes flamingoes so I took this photo:

Next is this bird and turtle. Doesn't it look like they are kissing?

Unfortunately they are not, they are fighting. The bird apparently wanted the turtle off the rock, the turtle didn't want to give up. The bird bit him and everything! Eventually the turtle did slide off the rock and back into the water. Mean bird.

Watching all this good Bird vs. Turtle action was this guy.

Then we tried to leave, but we had to deal with this guy first! *he looked mean in real life*

Here are some pics of the boys walking around the zoo. *Stephen in green, his friend in yellow*Here is Stephen on an aligator. and you thought I was an overprotective mommy!

Here is Ethan and his little friend. How cute is that "Thing 2" romper? It was sunny so they have squinty eyes.

Here is Ethan with an aligator. The consenus of all the boys is that they "think" it's not real.

I'm pretty sure this one is real, so we just looked, didn't touch!

The kids almost fit though these bars, either aligators only eat fat kids, or the zoo only cares about fat kids. *kidding, there was another fence*Arn't these pretty? Our zoo is a "Zoo and Gardens" and they take the garden part seriously. The sign says African Daisy. Now I'm not a gardner and rarely get to see flowers from young and all, do these petals uncurl and just turn normal? See how they look really interesting? Especially in this second pic. well in the first you can see that on the same plant some are all weird like this and some are flattened out and look like normal flowers. So do all daisies do that? Anyhow I really like them curled. :)We also went on the carousel. Our zoo has the best one, all types of animals on it. Ethan rode elephant, Stephen rode some spotted cat, I think a leopard. *leapard, leapord, Katie, what is it??* I know I've posted photos of it before.

Then we had a snowcone. It was the fluffy kind, you know what I mean? I consider myself somewhat of a snowcone expert. This was a top of the line one.

They have stingrays now at the zoo but you have to pay $3 a person to SEE them. I'm not paying $9 so Stephen can tell me how scarry they are and Ethan can stare off into space. I think you should have to pay to feed or touch them, but you should be able to go near it and look with your eyes for free. Whatever!

In other news I was published in a magazine! It's the Just Cards! magazine, Volume IX. Here are some photos, the cover (which I'm not on) will be first.

There are more, (9 total) but I feel sketchy taking more than a few photos from a magazine. Anyhow this time I took the time to email all the vendors of the stamps I used and let them know I got their stamps published. I really did it with a few at first because I was excited for them, I use a lot of smaller companies' stamps and I love to see them get their names out there. Anyhow they responded with "Great, pick some free stuff!" and so I emailed the rest and almost everyone said that! From this one magazine I'm getting a TON of free stuff. It's perfect because it's all stamps I LOVE, that's why I used them on the cards of course! One funny thing about publications like this, is that I sent this stuff a LONG time ago. Its always funny to see how my style changes and all. :)

So my computer is giving me fits! FITS I tells ya. We are getting a blue screen of death, randomly it shuts itself down and my CD drive isn't reading anything. I'm not thrilled. I wanted to use the CD drive to back up all my photos and writings and stuff, because I'm afraid the computer is going to just explode or something, but I can't! It has caused high tension here. This computer is less than a year old. I just noticed there is a phone number for tech support right here on the side. I wonder if it would help to call it ever? Probably not, they will be like, "Do you have it plugged in?" and I will scream at them and they will hang up.