Labor Day weekend/ Family STAY-cation!!!

Get ready for picture overload!!!! But first off let me explain our weekend. My family of 4 had been planning on spending the long labor day weekend at my parent's lakehouse but a few circumstances changed and we decided at the very LAST second that it would be best for our party of 4 to stay in town and have some quality family time. It was much much needed for us. Ben has been working just crazy hours at his new position, I have been overly exhausted trying to juggle the kiddos almost completely by myself plus there's been some external added emotional stress in our lives...not due to anything relating to the 4 of us but long story short....Ben & I desperately needed some down time. Some time to have fun as a family.

So since ben was going to be off work for 2.5 days we decided to make the most of our time and have a family STAY-cation! 60 hours of non stop family fun!!!

It started on Saturday afternoon/ evening when we had an amazing BBQ dinner prepared for us by ben's dad and we got all dressed up in our longhorn gear to cheer on our team for the season opener...

AND....we don't get the channel the game was on :( BOOOOOO so we watched other college football but continued to sport our burnt orange!

Sunday

We took the kids to this amazing new aquarium that just opened in grapevine.

It was really amazing. Lots of 360 tunnels to go through where fish swim all around you

A bunch of interactive things for the kids to look at, see, touch.

Baby Hallie sure did enjoy it :)

But not as much our biggest boy!

Watching the fish swim under his feet

Looking through the glass

Touching starfish, sea horses, crab

One of the pop up 360 things for kids to go under. So fun!

And they have a big play area for the kids

Obviously we had a ton of family fun. We were shocked and aww'ed simultaneously! hehe :)

And of course aiden wanted to ride the carousel on the way out...

After the aquarium we decided our next family fun activity would take us to gigi & poppy's house! They weren't home so we pretty much invaded their house for our mini getaway

Where we swam that night

Aiden did SO awesome with ben there to swim with. Better than he's done for me all summer. HMMMM

Then after dinner we decided to "pretend" go camping!

YUMMM smores in the firepit

Followed by the building of a tent...inside of course!

Hallie & I got in a lot of snuggle time while the boys were busy at work.

Such a good helper he was!

Inside the tent...where he did not actually get to sleep because there was no settling him down to sleep there. Just playing and then off to a real bed for sleeping. That's my kind of camping!!! :)

But right back to playing in the GINORMOUS tent as soon as we woke up.

**I'm thinking this picture may make my parents cringe with the HUGE tent in their living room while they were gone, haha**

Play & coffee in the tent

She likes "camping"!!!

My hubby is oh so talented when it comes to building things with magnets! Good job babe! After enough tent time we went back out for more swimming on LABOR DAY!

So sweet hallie.

Did I mention that the weather was amazingly awesome for our stay-cation? Barely got into the mid 80's on labor day. It was even a bit cold out of the water at times. LOVE IT!

Mamaw came over in the afternoon to have lunch with us and see the kids swim a little bit.

Our yummy cooked out lunch courtesy of Ben!

I love how put together I look in this picture. I mean not everybody can look that good, ya gotta really work at it!

Such a fun FUN weekend. We missed being with all my family at the lake but had such a wonderful, relaxing, fun family of 4 time! I feel refreshed and ready to take on the week! And what a BIG week....Aiden starts back to school!!!!

Hope everyone out there had a safe and wonderful labor day weekend!