What crazy weather!

I have to say, Dallas has the strangest weather I have ever seen. One day it can be 14 degrees, with ice covering everything, and then just 4 days later it is 72 degrees with perfectly blue skies. So far this school year the kids have had school canceled 7 times. Yep you read that correctly 7 times. To make things more difficult there is no salt for the roads, so when the roads freeze basically everything shuts down. In the slide show below you will see a picture of the mall parking lot, totally covered in about 2 inches of ice.
The girls have been taking gymnastics lessons since January and absolutely love it. They are working hard and learning a lot, but I have to say by the far the cutest thing ever is Rory trying to do a cartwheel. I will try to get a video of it for the next blog update. Alex and Rory are both interested in learning how to play golf, which makes Daddy very happy. Pat bought them a new set of clubs but they where a little too short, so we will be looking for some longer ones so they can continue to practice.
Alex is practicing riding her bike and can go about 15 feet before falling. The cold weather got in the way of our practice time, but now that it is nice again we hope get back outside and work on it again. Alex is also learning to read. It is amazing listening to her sound out words and we are so proud of her for trying so hard. She tells me she is the best reader in her reading group at school and I believe it.
Rory has learned how to write her name this month and is now working on her other letters. She is very proud of herself for making this huge accomplishment. Rory continues to be our "little princess" and is found dressed up in a princess dress for most of the day.
For a week or so in February we had an unexpected guest visiting our apartment. A very nice kitty that seemed to be lost decided to live on our balcony. The girls had a lot of fun playing with it and taking care of it until we needed to take it to the humane society. We hope it quickly finds a new home.

In between the freezing cold, stuck inside days, we really enjoyed our few very nice days. This month we purchased Heard Museum passes and zoo passes and we have already made good use of both!
The Heard Museum is only a few minutes away from our apartment and in January featured a life size dinosaur exhibit. It was really neat, although Rory found it a little scary when the dinos moved and made noises. The museum also has a very large bug exhibit with more types of creepy crawly things than I ever needed to see.

The zoo is a bit of a drive, but really a very fun zoo with a great children's zoo. The kids especially loved all of the really cool boulders to climb. Alex also had a great time feeding birds, but Mom and Rory have decided that next time Alex and Dad will have to go in alone. There were way too many birds way too close for comfort. One even tried to get in my shoe!

The girls and I joined our local MOMS club and have had fun participating in some of the activities they have planned. We visited the Science and Tech Museum which was featuring an exhibit on animation. Alex and Rory were a little young some of it, but they did get to watch their first episode of the Flintstone's and the Jetson's.

We also went to the Children's aquarium and had a great time. It was a very small museum, but pretty fun anyway. On our way back to the car we passed a Butterfly museum and had to go in. It was a very beautiful butterfly exhibit with tons of pretty flowers and plants as many varieties of butterflies. Rory had one land on her head (picture missed) and Alex had one on her foot.
We are very excited to be on our way to Scottsdale next week for Spring Break and then when we return to Dallas we will be directly to our new house! Lots of fun ahead for the Angelo Family!!