4th of July

We had great fun on the 4th celebrating with our best friends. We enjoyed bbq ribs that Ken spent all day long smoking and we played Wii Beatles Rock Band before we hit the fireworks display. Fireworks were a little on the sparse side at the McKinney show this year. We still had a lot of fun. Ken bought the kids glow sticks and that was money well spent!

Rockiology

The girls have been classifying our fossils that we found yesterday. Caroline announced that they are "Rockiologists".
I realized that I didn't post many of our actual fossils, so here they are:

Pete Patterson Fossil Park

Today, Ken, the kids and I all went to Ladonia, TX to visit the Pete Patterson Fossil Park. Don't even TRY to google it. There is very little in the way of information out there on this place. You can hardly find Ladonia, TX on Google.
Ladonia is a small town in northeast Texas, about 15 miles north of Commerce. It's claim to fame is the North Sulphur River which runs east/west just north of town.
When you drive through the town, you go a few miles until you cross over the river. Then you see this sign on the left:


You park in the parking lot and walk down the steps....


This is what the riverbed looked like for us

It was very odd. You could lift off pieces of this and it was about 3/4 inch thick and sort of floating on top of the next layer below it with water in between. It had really cool patterns though!
This was under water, but there were a TON like this.








Did I mention it was a RIVER?!








We weren't the only ones down there today. Notice the child size footprints in the bottom center of the picture. We couldn't decide if this was a pterodactyl or Big Bird.


And there was mud...






Did I mention that the riverbed looked cool?


and a few more of the kids...