Just back from Las Vegas

We just got back from Las Vegas, visiting my mom and my brother Erik and his wife Christy. We had a great time. Erik has now passed on the "sister teasing" to "niece teasing". Don't get me wrong, I still got my fair share of teasing but Rachel is now involved too. Erik took Ethan, Rachel, Luke and me to the golfing range, luckily the kids brought their clubs that Erik bought them on a previous trip. Ethan was trying to hit the machine that picks up all the balls on the course. Rachel hit some balls, and then decided it was more fun collecting all the tees that were lying around. Luke accidentally got hit by a swinging club. After Luke recovered from the clubkiss, which left a big mark, he hit a couple of balls and then just ran around. We went through 180 balls in 30 minutes.

We also went to The Mirage, ate at the big buffet for lunch and then saw the dolphins and tigers exhibit. The kids were weirdly fascinated with the pooping habits of all these animals. They mentioned it while watching the alpacas, tigers, and dolphins, and did so very loudly so all the other visitors got a great chuckle too.

Late one night, Erik, Christy and I went to see a show by Jay Leno. His head is just a big in person as it looks on TV. Amazingly he was able to tell jokes for 1 1/2 hr straight. The opening act, The Alley Cats, were really funny too.

The weather was beautiful while we were there. Probably one of the funniest things the kids would say they did was to completely rip, tear, hammer, disassemble an old couch that my mom and Aunt Mary had put out in their backyard. Hammers and saws were flying - which of course can also be attributed to eating sugar cereals nonstop. Grandma's perogative is spoiling!

We did go to visit "Valley of Fire", north of Las Vegas. Natural red rock formations with petriglyphs. We saw a couple of lizards. Some other visitors said they saw a snake but we didn't see that. Ethan loved climbing as high as possible. Erik was taking pictures every couple of steps because Luke and Brady would find a new rock to stand on a bug Erik to take another picture of them.

I'll have to get more pics from Erik to post.