Conklin Creatures: Thankful in Phoenix

My parents have a vacation house in a suburb of Phoenix, so on Monday we headed out to celebrate Thanksgiving with them down there. Brian and I have both been to Phoenix a couple of times, one of the times together for an ASU basketball tournament he played in during College, but the kids had never been there before. This was also Levi's very first time on an airplane and he did wonderfully. It is a bit more of a challenge traveling with three kiddos, but Jonah is getting older and more able to sit still, so that makes plane rides MUCH more pleasant. We crammed all kinds of fun stuff into our five days in Phoenix. All that is pictured below, as well as blue-lipped swimming (the kids insisted and had a blast, but 65 degrees and cloudy isn't exactly ideal for swimming), the movie Tangled on Thanksgiving day (Abby's voice reached a new level of high pitched while watching. "The PRINCESS!!!" "The princess and the prince are together at last!!"), many delicious meals, golf cart rides, visiting Great Grandpa Rumbaugh, and Brian and I even managed to squeeze in a run as well. We had our Thanksgiving meal at the country club in my parent's resort complex that was fun and delicious as well. Now, for the pictures....

On our first full day there we made an attempt to strike it rich. There is an old gold mine in the Superstition mountains area and Jonah and Abby have seen a Backyardigans episode that made them very excited at the idea of digging for gold. It was beautiful!

This is our "before we become unimaginably wealthy" family picture.

After a quick train ride to survey the hills, Jonah had to get some training in how to effectively pan for gold.

I thought he would need quite a bit of help, but he did a really great job swirling and swishing on his own.

Next, we use tweezers and collect out our treasure.

Once again, Jonah did great! Abby even saved a few garnets for us, too. There was quite a bit of fool's gold mixed in, so the only way to find the real gold is by it's slightly more yellowish color.

In the words of Jonah (and Pablo from Backyardigans, actually) "We're rich, dag nabit!"

Grandma entertained prospector Levi while we were mining. I venture to say that if we make it back down to Phoenix in the future, Abby and Jonah will be wanting to go on the hunt for gold once again. They had a blast.

The next day, we went to the Phoenix Children's Museum. I wish they would move it to Omaha. It was wonderful and extremely interactive and entertaining for the kids. This was probably Abby's favorite activity. You put a scarf into this tube and you could adjust it's path as it was sucked through these tubes.

Eventually it would shoot out through one of the holes and then you would try and catch it. Abby could have played this all day if we had let her.

This time Grandpa was on Levi duty. Tough job.

While Abby was doing that, Jonah was busy getting lost in this enormous climber. I may or may not have gotten lost in there as well. It was super fun and if they decide to box it up and sell it for $59.99, I'm buying one for our backyard. Jonah is three stories high (I think) in this picture.

Upstairs they had a bike car wash.

Complete with rickshaw bikes. Abby got the complete princess treatment.

And this is what Abby claims was her favorite activity of the day: painting the castle. It lasted about five minutes, but it must have made an impact.