The Getaway.....and more. :)

Vacation is long over, and I still haven't blogged about half of it. The thing that is holding me back the most is the time it takes to download the pictures. There are so many good ones, and I'm trying to pick the best ones without taking an hour a day just to get them from computer to blogger. :) Ah, well. You may be reading about my vacation for months to come. :)

So here we are in November. There is so much going on in life right now. Some may say that my plate is a little full. Maybe my eyes were too big for my brain stomach when I agreed to be a part of all these projects.....but how to choose when they are all worth while? Here is what I've been doing lately.....as if you care....:D

The thing that is taking up the biggest chunk of my life is the charter school. I have limited myself to spending 3 hours per day on it, because if I didn't, it would consume every waking second. It's coming along like a miracle. :) Cory and I attended a state charter school training meeting this week, and it felt a little overwhelming to see and hear what tasks lie ahead...but comforting to know how much we already have done and the great group of people we have standing behind it now. :) Hard to believe that the process so far has been 5 years in the making. Amazing to me how much we all know about starting a school that we didn't know 5 years ago. :) The process has taught me so much, not just about opening a school....but that big things can be done by ordinary people, everything awesome starts as a someone's small dream, and things happen according to God's master plan (not my master plan). :) If you don't know....our group is opening a charter school for the arts here in our city. Everything possible has been falling right into place for it this year and we are all excited to see it become reality! Maybe in the next post, I'll tell about an experience we had a Bass Pro shop that had to do with the charter school that was super inspiring to us. :)

I'm also teaching/coordinating an EMT class at work. Thank goodness there are only 2 weeks left until it's over. I think I can safely say that everyone involved in it will be happy to have 3 days a week of their lives back. :)

It's also fall and time to winterize the yard. The weather has still been super nice here...but I don't want to wait until it turns cold to get things trimmed and covered and ready to last until spring. We need to re-plastic the greenhouse, trim down and mulch all the flower beds, and somehow figure out how to protect all the cactus we gathered this year from frost.....any ideas???

Add to it just normal things like running, laundry, vaccuming the house, eating, showering, etc, etc.....and I am going like the energizer bunny all day long. I really enjoy being busy, so I'm not complaining in the least.

Here are some pictures from when we went to the wild animal park. You pay to drive your car through a big fenced area with tame animals that come up to your car expecting treats. Of course, you also pay for the food they want to be fed. At first, I thought we were getting taken when they wanted us to buy this HUGE bag of food. I don't even remember how much it cost. I also thought we would never in a million years use all that food. After we paid for the food, the lady told us to watch out for the camels that would try to stick their heads in and take the whole bag of food. So, we started out a little scared....but all the camels were sleeping. We even tried throwing food out to them. They didn't want to play. :) The ones that followed us through the whole park and really did scare us were the Emu. They stuck their little heads in the car and pecked at us. We threw food in piles on the ground so we could make a getaway. They are agressive! :) This first picture is Emma's first response to a large animal sticking it's head into the car. :)
I think this was Cory's favorite. The first animals we got to feed were Elk. They ate a lot and we had fun feeding them. :) The front desk sold us a souvenier "Slobber Towel". We used it. :) After the Elk, we thought we were about done. Most of the food was gone.

We ended up seeing all kinds of animals, mostly Deer and Emu. :) It must be around 100 acres of property where these animals are allowed to roam and reproduce. It looked like these people also like to make cross-breed animals. There were several "Liger" babies. (Lion father and Tiger mother). Also lots of "Zedonks" or "Zonkeys". (Shown below)

These big horned cows were lying in the road when we drove up. They scared me a little....I don't know if you can appreciate just how big the horns are. Maybe as big as the car. Seriously. :)
Cory claims one of these donkeys nibbled on his leg. :)
By the end, Emma was really enjoying the animals. We even ran into a psychopath monkey. When we looked at him, he would bite his foot and scream at us. That entertained us for about half an hour. :) It ended up being a lot longer then we expected...lots of fun. :) I wish we could have a park like that in our area.