Pre 4th of July trip to PH

I finally got around to posting my pictures of our latest trip to Pleasant Hill over on Flickr.

Colorado

A couple of weeks ago (I lagged quite a bit on getting pictures posted, sorry) we headed to Colorado Springs to visit Lisa's cousins. Some highlights of the trip:



Quinn does a pretty good job on the plane, especially when you have a row to yourself and she can just go crazy in an empty seat. She didn't really complain until we were descending and then she fell asleep.



There can be a lot of thunder storms in Colorado during the summer. Every day we were there we got a deluge in the afternoon.



Emily's kids are really good at wearing Xander out.



When you drive a large SUV with one man, two women and a bunch of kids around town in Colorado you will have to constantly explain that you are not polygamists.



The Colorado Springs zoo is nice, but you will be walking uphill most of the way.



The Falcon trail around the air force academy is fun, but it is strange to have your DI checked and the car searched on the way to a trail. But then the guy at the shop where I rented a bike asked if I had anything strange in my trunk before sending me to that trail. Also I rented a 29'er and didn't really see what the big deal is about. (Julie and Dugan will probably be the only ones to understand that last bit.



Beware rental car upgrades. We upgraded to a dodge charger because the person at the counter though we would have trouble fitting the car seats into a ford focus. Lisa then proceeded to get a speeding ticket 10 miles from the airport on the way home. Oops. At least speeding tickets in Colorado are much cheaper than in California.

As usual I've post pictures over at Flickr. Though I have changed a few things, I've ponied up for the "Pro" account so full size images are now available to grab to make prints form or you can order prints through Flickr. Also I've set the photos so that they can only be viewed by "friends and family". This means that you will have to create an account on Flickr (free) and add me as a contact, at which point I will mark you as family and you can get to the pictures. The Colorado pictures are here. If you view the slide-show be sure to turn on the captions using the "Show info" link at the upper right of the slide-show page.

Camping PIcs

I finally got around to posting my pictures from the El Capitan camping trip. They're at the usual place.

The Evil Doctor Pork-chop

Xander went to his first movie yesterday. If you've been around him in the past few months then you can probably already guess which one he went to see -- Toy Story 3. He made it through OK, there were only a couple of spots where Lisa had to convince him that they should stay through the whole movie. Me and Quinn were hanging out at home I was half expecting to get a call at any moment from Lisa saying that he had gotten scared and they were on they're way home. But he held his ground -- from Lisa's lap -- and got through the whole movie.

As you can probably guess, he liked it a lot. So much so that when they were walking home Xander told Lisa that we wanted to go see it the next day with me. He then declared it again this morning and, since he agreed to be good all day, I took him. Kent also wanted to see it so he tagged along. He was brave -- talking about Xander now. not Kent -- and though he watched all but the first ten minutes of the movie from my lap he didn't once say that he wanted to leave. I'm just wondering how many more times he's going to try to get people to take him while the movie is in the theaters. And in case you're wondering, the movie is great; even without a four year old sitting in your lap.

SLO Kids Museum

On Saturday we took the kids to the SLO children's museum. Note SLO here means San Luis Obispo, not that we took them to a museum for slow children.



Xander dug for saber tooth tiger bones, among other things. But his favorite part was taking all the packages from the postal truck and loading them on the back of the fire truck. Then he jumped in the cab of the fire truck and drove around delivering them to the kids who were playing in the other exhibits. This went on for about 45 minutes. At one point a texted Lisa, who was with Quinn in another part of the museum, that Xander was going postal.



Quinn really liked the museum too. She was a bit below the museum's target age group but, as we all know, that wasn't going to stop her. Above she is making a mad dash for the museum's farmer's market. Mad dashes are her new thing, she does a baby sprint until she can't remain upright (which is surprisingly far. So far she's only crash landed on carpet.

My favorite part was the human sized bubble exhibit. Below is a video of Xander almost getting the bubble above his head. In my classic fashion I forgot that I can't rotate the camera when shotting videos so you'll have to rotate your head instead. When I tried it I couldn't get bubble much past my waist.



There are some more pictures from the trip posted at Flickr.

His Own Room

I'm about a week posting this but Xander moved into his own room last Saturday. We got his bed moved along with the art museum. So far he sleeps in there until early in the morning when he goes to the potty, then he jumps in the big bed. He keeps asking for these wake up calls for when breakfast is ready though, so I think he might be thinking that he's moved to some sort of resort or something. Plus, at least on the weekends, he never sleeps later than the rest of us so no one will ever be up early enough to give him his wake-up call.

Bike

I'm really late posting this one, but a few weeks ago we got Xander his first bike. It's a Toy Story bike of course. Right now everything we buy for Xander elicits an I want a Toy Story version request. He's been having a blast riding the bike with only a couple of spills so far.