A Magical Evening

We've had a couple of fun outings this weekend! It seems like it's been a little more relaxing since all the Christmas hustle and bustle is past and we've had fun on both of our outings!

The first one I'll share with you today was our trip to the Zoo Lights. Before Christmas, we were given five free tickets. Colt and his girlfriend, Amber, weren't able to go along with us, so Joy invited her friend, Kasey, to go along (and we gave the other one away to a lady in line at the zoo). We all had a wonderful time, but you can see by these girls' faces that they had a ball!

The first pictures were taken before the entrance gate. We were greeted by this big beautiful lit Christmas tree!



Here are the girls in front of the tree posing of course!



Here they are posing in front of the alligator. All of the statues out front like this had wreaths on them. They were so pretty!





And then you know how much I've wanted snow this year....well the zoo had a couple of different spots where it was "snowing" and it was great! The girls (and me) had lots of fun there! (I think I really enjoyed myself this evening, because Jason had camera duty and I was free to "play")! Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!















And Jason held up the camera and took a picture of us together in the snow. (A little distorted picture, but still a fun one!)



From there we went on to the holiday farm! This was a hands-on petting zoo!



And here are the "cow"girls!



Look what hatched!



Walking through the zoo, the lights were so pretty!









Next we took a train ride on the North Pole Express. The girls were lucky enough to get a seat on the very back of the train!



After the train ride, they decided the take a virtual ride on the "Glacier Run". We could hear them screaming from outside!



Then it was off to Santa's Workshop. Santa wasn't there, so they decided to take a seat in his chair.



This was the tree in Santa's workshop.





Then we walked through my LEAST favorite part....the herpetarium.....but we did meet Bob the Turtle.



There were many photo ops throughout...

With the moose...



With the panda (the zoo has real pandas LeLe and YaYa from China)..



Then everybody was hungry...so we headed over to the cookie decorating shoppe....



Joy decorating her cookie....



Kasey decorating hers...



And this one is funny to me....notice how intent Jason is decorating his cookie...



I decorated a cookie too, but I had the camera during this particular part (I ate it all too and it was yummy)!

And here they are enjoying the fruits of their labor!





Carriage rides were also offered through the zoo, but we opted to walk since we had taken a carriage ride just a day ago (the other outing I will share with you on my next post), but the girls did stop to pose in front of this carriage all decorated with wreaths.





And Santa's sleigh was just outside the gift shop.



After our walk through the zoo lights, we stopped by our newly remodeled McDonalds that has the coolest tables with video games for the kids to play, so the girls played a game of checkers and mini golf.

I asked Joy and Kasey what their favorite part was and they loved the virtual ride, the train ride, and the SNOW! Snow really does have a way of making it fun....for us it just made it a magical evening!