Once upon a time in January, the kiddos and I found ourselves with an open Saturday and drivable roads and made plans to hang out with Grandpa Braden. The opening day of the "Sue the dinosaur" exhibit sounded slightly busy and stressful, but I'm SO SO glad we went!
There's Sue! I've never been a real stalwart science student, but even I remember learning about Sue in elementary school. The boys - especially Will - loved all of the dinosaur displays.
I hadn't been to the Discovery Center for a few years but it seems some exhibits never change - these are all ones I remember from field trip visits a reallll long time ago!
Everyone loved the weather reporting screen, of course. 99% sure this was my favorite one in my younger days.
There were also plenty of new-to-us exhibits. The boys loved roaming around and checking them all out:
Ohhh man the green slime was a hit! Jack probably spent most of his time there.
And the best innovation of all was an area for kids under 5 (a couple older brothers may have slipped in ;) ). Carma was in heaven with all the cool activities and features of this place! Grandpa hung out in there for a quite and while and then I switched him out so he could wander around with the boys.
Jack in particular loved pulling Grandpa around. They're pretty cute buddies! It was a really fun afternoon and sooo nice to get out of the house. So if that had been it, it would have totally been a worthwhile, awesome adventure! But that wasn't it. There was more....
At one point, Carma was playing with some other kids at this table and their mom was building too. Her profile kept catching my eye because she looked SO much like an author I love. An author that I knew lived in the Treasure Valley somewhere. I pulled up her fb author page and creepily held up my phone to compare and contrast the picture with this woman - repeatedly coming to the conclusion that it was her and I should say something....
So I did! I creepily followed her to the next room, summoned all my courage and asked, "Excuse me, is your name Annette?" And she kind of side-eyed me and confirmed, so I followed up with, "As in Annette Larsen who writes books that I love?" And it was her! I'm pretty sure I was shaking and my kids were trying to get my attention anther kids were trying to get her attention so we didn't talk long, but after she walked away I totally kicked myself for not getting a picture. So I interrupted her again hahahaha and we took a quick selfie! Aren't we all glad I looked so cute and put together that day, grrrr.
Imagine my extreme delight when this popped up on her Facebook the next day!! I commented that I was 99% sure the fan was more excited!
And then the next month she shared this as part of a daily challenge!
Here are all of Annette's books (so far!). She self-publishes and is really involved with the whole process which is way cool. The first four each feature a different sister in a royal family, and the fifth is connected to - although the books can definitely be read independently of the others and still make sense. They're romantic but clean (yay!) and cover some pretty intense storylines in such an interesting and well-written way. Sometimes it takes me a chapter or two to re-adjust to her writing style, but it totally sucks me in every time! I think they're technically categorized as young adult, but that's okay because my maturity is sometimes debatable ;). 
Here's her website: annetteklarsen.com and her amazon page: Annette K Larsen So far I just have all of the kindle versions of her books, but the paperbacks on are my list someday! And every so often she runs sales on the kindle versions and you can pick them up for an even better price than they are regularly.
And that's my story of stalking someone and being brave enough to say hi and it working out awesomely haha!
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