The Zoo

Last week we went to the Zoo! I love the National Zoo for so many reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason I love it is because it's free. There are so many exhibits and animals, it takes several trips to see most of it. We love the elephant shower. Everyday at 10:30 they bathe
one of the elephants. They have lions and tigers, an ape house, giant pandas (and a baby panda), hippos, sea lions, and so much more. They also have an area called Kid's Farm. It's at the bottom of the zoo. (The zoo is on a huge hill, so it's quite the workout.) The Kid's Farm has areas to pet cows, llamas, donkeys, and maybe a few other animals. It wasn't there when I was a kid. Thomas and Emily enjoyed it.
The zoo was pretty crowded with camps and other large groups. We managed to see everything that we really wanted to see. We watched the Sea Lion Show. Annette took Thomas and Emily to see the "Elephant Training" while I fed CJ. He was a good sport. It was the perfect weather for a zoo day. So anytime anyone wants to go the zoo, give me a call and we'll come too. Reminds me of the song "I'm going to the zoo, zoo, zoo..." We took a picnic lunch and ate on the grass in some shade. All three kids fell asleep on the way home, an added bonus for me.


See here, you can just walk right up the stairs to the tigers and pet them. Just kidding! It looks that way in the photo.

Here are some videos of the animals.

Dairy Day

Last week we went to Dairy Day. It was held at Frying Pan Park and we all had a good time. Emily got to pet some goats and cows.

They had games for the kids, free samples of milk and ice cream, an animal parade and lots of other fun things. Emily enjoyed making a cow puppet. I learned that a farmer uses about 175 gallons of water, per day, per cow!

This is how they used to get the corn off the cob. They had some pretty old machinery which I'm sure my dad would have liked to see. They had an old old washing machine, a saw which was an attachment to a tractor, and a few other machines.

So here is Emily petting the goat.


And here she is trying to milk a (fake) cow. I was helping her.

My boy

I love this guy so much. He is cooing and laughing. He gives the biggest grins after he finishes eating. He weighed 17 pounds at the doctors on Monday. He has almost outgrown his Bumbo Seat. (See above photo) Everyday it gets harder and harder to put his legs in it.
He is consistently sleeping eight hours at night. And often he sleeps for 9 hours or more. On Saturday night he ate at 8 pm and not again until 7:15 the next morning. It was great.





I highly recommend On Becoming Babywise by Gary Ezzo. I read it and used it for Emily and am using it for CJ. It really helped me establish good sleeping habits for my kids. And if they are sleeping well, then I am sleeping well.

Look Who's Behind the Wheel

You let who drive the boat?






Poor Sophie, all tuckered out.


My battery was running out and so each time I went to record, the camera would shut off. Sorry for the short clips, but at least I combined them all.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The Boat

Anytime Emily talks about the boat, I'm reminded of Dory on "Finding Nemo". "A boat, I saw a boat, it passed by..." Anyways...here are some pictures of our time on "the boat".
Uncle Von and Isabelle, Emily and Thomas, Sophie, Isabelle, Uncle Tommy, Thomas, and Emily, and Thomas and Jill. The dogs went swimming for a little while.



Here is Emily contemplating whether or not to jump. First she "slid" off the boat while holding my hands. Then she jumped to me. Then she told me she didn't need my help, and she jumped off the boat all by herself. She was so excited and when I asked her if she wanted to do it again, she said no. She loves her Dora swimsuit, thank you Grandma. It has the little ruffle and she loves it.



Here we are Emily, myself, Sophie, and Isabelle on the float. The girls liked it. We pretended it was our spaceship.

Emily and Isabelle just had a blast swimming in the lake. On the second day they realized that they didn't need to wear their floaties and a lifejacket. They swam all over pretending they were Ariel.

Huckleberry Acres

So last week I took the kids to Huckleberry Acres (www.huckleberryacres.com) with my brother Von and his family. My other brother, Thomas, came up on Thursday with his son. We all had a blast. Emily loved playing with her cousins. The kids played outside for hours and hours. We also watched Enchanted (several times) and Evan Almighty. Emily and I got to drive the go-kart. It was so beautiful. We got to go out on their boat (more on that to come), roast marshmallows, and we really had a great time.

Our New Car

So as most of you have heard, the white Infiniti committed car suicide. So here's the story.
Chris and I had talked about using our Stimulus Check to get air conditioning in the white car. It's been broken for almost two years. The summer is just too hot for a baby to be in the car without a/c. But then we got to thinking the car is 12 years old, and do we really want to put anymore money into? We had been talking about getting a new car for a few days. I was on the fence, Chris was definitely for buying a new car. Back to the fateful day...


I started the car up, opened CJ's door and went inside to get the kids (I often did this). The car is a stick shift. When I started it, I took it out of gear and just left the parking brake on. Emily was standing on the patio. CJ was inside in his carrier in the house. Emily yells, "Mommy, the car is going by itself". I run outside, thinking if I can get to it in time I can get in and use the brakes. I did not make it in time. The trees stopped the car for me. Remember CJ's door was open. Two tress caught it and the door did a "Tommy Boy". It won't close but I did manage to bend it back "close" to normal. So my mind was made up for me about a new car. I was glad that no one was in the car and that the crash didn't involve anything other than trees that belong to my folks. Don't worry, the trees are fine.



So the vehicle we decided to purchase...

A Saturn Outlook. In my mind it was between the Outlook and a Chrysler Town and Country. The two selling points for me with the Outlook were: 1. It seats eight. It is nice to have that extra seat. 2. It has all-wheel drive. I don't forsee us needing it very often, but when we will need it, it will be nice to have. Plus we love the On-Star feature. Currently we get turn-by-turn navigation which we've used several times.

Our Garden

Our garden and when I say "our" I mean Chris does 99.5% of the work and I enjoy the harvest. He is such a great worker. I love him for it. My idea of a garden is plant a few seeds (which you already own) in the area you have and see what comes up. This is his idea of a garden.
Precision is what I call it.



The first two photos are of the square foot gardens that my brother researched, bought the materials, and with Chris's help, made. They then filled them up with dirt and viola, Gardens. We ran out of twine to complete ours, but that's okay because Chris and Emily just planted more vegetables in those larger areas.
The bottom two photos are of the garden that Chris reclaimed. He and Emily pulled out a lot of onions. He shoveled, raked, weeded, built a fence using logs (trees) from the property and netting from Lowe's, and measured. Chris chose to get Heirloom seeds from rareseeds.com and I must say I was surprised at how cheap they were. He got corn, okra, beans, snow peas, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beets, and spinach. They also gave us a free packet of eggplant. We'll see how everything grows. I did help plant the corn. The corn has been planted in the huge garden. The vegetables that we want to go to seed will also be planted there soon. Everything else got planted in the square foot garden. Emily loves helping her daddy in the garden. She loves to water and she helped me for part of the corn planting.