Girl's Night Out

Tonight the girls and I were going solo with Daddy out of town, so I planned a little outing for us. We are going to C's cousin's wedding this coming weekend on our way to the conference. The bride asked me if we could buy her some M&M's for the reception from M&M World on the strip and I agreed. So, we had to get it done this week. No time like the present! I knew I did not want to go out in the heat of day, so we waited until after dinner. The full moon was gorgeous (come back later for a post on our middle of the night eclipse event) and I caught this picture of the moon and the MGM lion. A little out of focus, but still pretty cool.

We parked at the MGM and walked through the casino and over to M&M, so we had to stop by the lions to say hello. Luckily they were about to do feeding time when we arrived. Here the girls happened to be right by the glass when the keeper put a blob of ground meat on the glass for the lion to lick off. You can see the blob right above his head. Pretty freaky to have the lion come over and look as if he is going to bite your head off!
This lion was going for the meat as well, but it kinda looks like she is looking right at A and regally sizing her up.

Here are the girls helping me to bag up all the requested colors. Twelve pounds of M&Ms is HEAVY! We pretty much decided to head home once we had those heavy bags to carry. But we had to stop and say hello to the Coca Cola Bear, of course. I love his sweet smile. My kids aren't too shabby in the grin department, either.
As we walked back to the car, we decided to go the longer, but hopefully shorter seeming, outside route to the parking garage. E was getting tired and whiny and I wasn't sure that I would get to avoid carrying her and the hundred pounds of M&M's. Then, we ran across this ramp thingy. E perked up right away and ran up it like she was on a skate board. So, we stopped and played for a while. One of the cars in the stop and go traffic right by us had some young men in it who called out something about finding a fun place to play. I was telling the girls that they should run all the way up and grab on to the bars, like E is doing in the picture. They didn't, so I showed them how it was done. I got a shout from the guys in the car, "GO, Mom!" The girls couldn't be shown up by their mother, so they had to try it! They found that sliding down was even more fun than running up.

After our little play break we made our way back to the car and drove home. The girls settled in on the couches to fall asleep, anticipating my wakeup call when the moon goes into eclipse a little before 3am. Our trip tonight helped to wipe them out so that they could actually fall asleep, even with the excitement over the eclipse. So, here I am blogging away in order to stay awake. I already have my camera with tripod set up for taking pictures. I just wish I had a decent telephoto lens. Oh well, one can always crop in close. See you soon with hopefully some cool photos!