Dancing with Our Stars!

Saturday night Chris and I got to go to a wonderful fundraiser for Hospitality House of Tulsa. Hospitality House is an organization that opens their doors to families in need of a place to live while their loved ones are in the hospital. They provide an apartment, food, laundry services and most of all loving support and people to pray for them and with them.

This years fundraiser was called Dancing with Our Stars. They recruited local celebrities(local news reports, pageant winners, meteorologist, etc). Each celebrity worked with a dance instructor and performed their dance live that evening. Votes were based by judges, we could vote as the audience by donating money for a couple, and then off course text voting was part of it as the celebrities videoed their dance a week in advanced and it was posted so others could vote.

They also had other fun ways of raising money. They had both a silent and live auction. I got some nice wall art in the silent auction. They had some of the professional dance teachers going around and if they asked you to dance you could accept for a 25.00 donation or if you declined you had to pay a 50.00 donation.

It was a great night, lots of fun. We got to dress up go out and enjoy a evening with great friends and help a great cause.

I had one of our friends snap a quick photo of Chris and I outside on the patio.

Party Fun!

Saturday morning we headed off to go Sam's birthday party. Sam is turning 3 and he loves fire trucks, so we started the birthday party off by visiting one of our Fire Stations. The fireman talked about all that the fire truck did, they gave us a tour of the fire station, they talked to the kids about what fireman do, asked the kids some questions, they even called dispatch and had them sound the alarms so the kids could hear the different alarms.


Once they finished the tour we went back outside and one of the fireman was dressed up in their gear. He wanted to show the kids what a fireman could look like if they had to come into their home to get them, so they wouldn't be afraid. The kids were fascinated by the mask and him breathing through the mask.



Bree wouldn't go up to the guy all dressed up. I looked over and poor Bree is still holding her ears afraid that the alarms were going to go off again. One of the fireman came up to here to try and reassure her that they weren't coming back on but she wasn't believing him. I told Sam's mom Mary, that I would be sending her the therapy bill. :)

The kids still enthralled with the fireman's gear.

Group photo before we left to head over to a park to let the kids play and have cake.

Behind the Scenes

Last Thursday our zoo had Member Appreciation night. They open the zoo in the evening from 5:30-8pm. They give behind the scenes looks at some of the animals, meet the keepers, check out the vet hospital, etc. We have never gone before so I thought it would be kind of cool to take the girls. One thing I totally underestimated was the number of people that would be there. So we didn't get to do everything we wanted to but we got a few things in.

One of the good things of the evening was they had free wagon and stroller rentals, so we took advantage of that so the girls didn't get lost in the crowd. As usual, I can never get straight smiles anymore...


When we got there we went ate some dinner, listened to music and let the girls make birthday cards for some of the zoo animals. Once they were done with the card they got to give it to one of the zoo keepers to deliver the card to that animal.

We then moved on to check out the behind the scenes for the elephants. The keeper was there talking about all the elephants. One of them was pregnant, Katie asked where the baby was. Ha!

The elephants were really friendly and would come straight up to the rails. They had four females and one male. Bree had a death grip on me as she was not sure what to think seeing such a big animal so close. I thought it was so cool. The elephants would look you straight in the eye and try to reach out to you with their trunks.

Here's Katie as we were leaving, Bree was being a party pooper and didn't want her picture taken.

We also got to ride the train for free, so we decided to ride the train back to the front of the zoo.

Before we left we let the girls ride their favorite thing the carousel....also free that night. :)