Vacation Pictures & Coloring Challenge

Hi There!

Hope you are having a great day. Last weekend we loaded up the family van and headed out for a road trip to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Steve's family lives there. While I had computer access, I didn't keep up with emails and blogs and stuff, so I am a bit behind on commenting. Just in case you were wondering where I was. 

Hope you don't mind a few vacation pictures. 

On July 4th we headed into downtown Sioux Falls to check out their sculpture walk. On the main street in downtown there are many sculptures to take in and buy, if you had the inclination and the money. We did this a couple of years ago and had a great time. They change the sculptures each year. I thought this one was really neat. Those are cat faces made from boat motor cases! Jessica is partial to kitties and she was enamored with this display. If you check out the link above, the picture on the main page is a bunch of books. Jessica really liked that one, too. :) You can scroll through the photos if you like to see sculptures. They were pretty cool. 

On the 5th, we drove to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. For those of you who may wonder why in the world we would do that,Walnut Grove is one of the places where Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House fame) lived. My girls are standing on the bank of Plum Creek! We also saw the indentation where the dugout  they lived in was. The roof has long since caved in. We toured the museum, which had a couple of rooms dedicated to the television series. While fun, any resemblance to her life in the series was purely coincidental. The center area outside the museum is planted with plants that would have grown back when she lived there. So pretty. There were several buildings to tour, although not all of them had items directly related to her. There were a few other locations in town we could have gone to, but we were running out of time and it was really hot and humid.  I can now state that I have visited three of the towns where Laura lived. I've also toured De Smet, South Dakota and Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri. Happy Sigh!

We also visited the Sertoma Butterfly House and Marine Cove. Steve is the only one who got a hitchhiker this time. I just love how active the butterflies are in this place. Much more so than the butterflies in the Butterfly Pavilion here. 

And here I am. They had these "selfie stations" set up. Only, if you did a selfie with one of these signs the saying would show up backwards. Hrm...so one of the girls took this one of me. 

And that concludes the vacation picture portion of this post. Hopefully I didn't bore you. 

 We had a good time, but it's always good to be home. 

There is a 30 Day Coloring Challenge going on thanks to Kathy R of The Daily Marker blog. I love the idea of the challenge, but haven't really participated before. Today I made sure to sit down and do some coloring. 

Here's the first thing I worked on. It's not finished, but this is as far as I got. I just got this stamp set from Simon Says Stamp. I was inspired to make this from Suzy Plantamura. If you've not checked her blog, Living My Dream out, you should. She does a series of using one stamp set at least five ways. She also creates great coloring card fronts and sells them at Simon Says stamps. Anyway, I loved the series she did with this stamp set. I used Artist Loft watercolors. Artist Loft is the house brand Michaels sells. 

The goal of this coloring challenge is to do some coloring every day, it doesn't matter if you finish a project. I like that no pressure approach. 

I also started this page in a coloring book I've had for months. I bought it at Hobby Lobby, but I'm sure you can find it at other craft stores or online. Here's a link to the artist who drew the images. 

That's it from me today. I'm sure that this is quite enough. :)

Thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you have a great start to your week!

Hugs,

Jeanne