Roll Tide!

We are super excited that Alabama won the national championship game last night!! I believe we watched almost every single one of Alabama's plays this season (I think maybe one or two games weren't on tv?). I've become an Alabama fan anyway since marrying Dean, but by the end of this year I knew most of the players' names and even could recognize them by their numbers. They seemed like a high quality group of guys.....Dean keeps up with all of the Alabama message boards and articles, and he's told me some impressive stuff about the players (of course I know Texas also had a lot of great guys on their team). So it was great to see them win! I know it would have been a completely different game if Colt McCoy hadn't been injured.....that was a shame. And it turned into a much closer game than it should have been, with McCoy being out! The only sad thing now is that there's no more college football for another 7 months. :(

These pictures are from an earlier game this season; Grant was in big time fit-throwing mode last night, so he went to bed before the game even started!

We had a fun week. The boys and I went into town on Tuesday and ended up going to the zoo in the afternoon. We went to the Childrens' Zoo for the first time.....it's hidden in the back and we've never known about it. Our favorite animals by far were the sea otters......those two little guys were so funny! The instant we walked up, they both jumped in the water and started doing flips right in front of us. The boys got such a kick out of them. And there were two giant porcupines! And a playground too, which of course makes the trip almost worth it in itself (at least for Grant). Maybe next time we'll do the petting zoo.....I was never a fan of those and Grant hasn't been either. I think Drew would love it, but I kind of avoided it this time (he didn't know any better)!

Then yesterday, it was 10:30am and we had already completed my one errand of the day (Half Price Books). I was driving around trying to think of something (anything!) we could do that would keep us away from the house for a little longer.....and something other than just going into a random store, where the boys have very little patience and I usually end up leaving frustrated at them! (And of course, for the last month, we've had basically the same problem as we had in the summer.....it has been SO cold, making it difficult to do outdoorsy things. We played in our backyard maybe two times in all of December....crazy.)

So we were driving down past NASA, and I thought we'd check out the Space Center. I went ahead and got a 1-year pass for $23, and we had a fun time! There's very little that's actually appropriate for kids as young as ours (I guess that's why they don't charge for kids under 4). There was a mock-up rocket that we were sitting in when the screen said something about a countdown to blastoff. Grant said, "I want to get out of here. It's about to blast off." There was also a mock-up space shuttle that you can walk inside, but he wouldn't go in there. He thought it was going to blast off too! Overall, it seems like a lot of the hands-on exhibits are outdated. Grant doesn't know any different now; he just likes to press all of the buttons randomly. But I think an 8-year-old might get frustrated because some of the exhibits don't really seem to work! But for $23, hopefully it will at least give us a place for them to run around every once in a while!

It was a bummer today.....I was supposed to go to dinner tonight with a few girls for Sierra's birthday. But Dean is working late......some of their product froze today with the cold weather, so they've been trying to get it back to normal. I was going to mention this earlier this week: this is his first week in a completely new position. He was transferred to a different plant (basically the same commute), and his first day was Monday. This plant is known to have a lot of breakdowns like this. Oh no!! It becomes really hard to find things to do by myself with the boys in the evenings when I've been with them all day already. I hope this doesn't happen a lot!

I went to wash my face a few minutes ago, and didn't realize until I splashed water into my face that I still had my glasses on! I need some sleep!!