Ethan is a Rainbow!

Ethan started his new schoolyear and is a Rainbow now having graduated from the Sunshines.  He seems to really enjoy it with the additional structure and activities.  They are learning a letter a week (not that he doesn't already know) and he enjoys the related storybooks and popsicle-stick puppets he gets to color.  The schedule is working out great with him going M/W/F and Liz teaching Stroller Strides Tu/Th.  We are looking forward to the first big musical production for Thanksgiving since he'll be singing three times the number of songs he did the previous year!

Football, Falafel and Flooring

So fall is here, technically. Ethan and Anneliese are taking an interest in football and Ethan wants to know "Who's on your team Daddy?" referring to fantasy football. We went to a local Greek festival and had fun but weren't able to convince Ethan to go on the ferris wheel. We discovered a backyard spider that looks like a crab with a body the size of a dime! Creepy. We finally took the first steps pulling up carpet to see how much original flooring is missing from when the house was added on to before we bought. On an impulse (that stretched into a few days) we successively pulled up 370 sq-ft of carpet to check it out. Ethan started crying saying he was going to miss the carpet "because we've had it for a long time". He got a grip after a while and both he and Anneliese helped out pulling carpet padding staples and washing down the floor which is a wavy dirty mess but it's still about as good as our carpet was.

Click here or the album for photos!

We are Insulated

So we finally got tired of baking inside the house during the summer, feeling the hot ceilings everywhere where the house hadn't been added onto during the remodel. So, we decided to take advantage of some fleeting tax incentives and got insulation blown into the attic. Some poor guy actually squeezed himself deep into the ~18" peak of our attic with the hose and the whole thing was done in a little over a half hour.

Family Listens to Space Shuttle Landing

Coming home in the carpool I heard on NPR that the Space Shuttle mission STS-128 was being diverted to Vandenberg Air Force Base, 150 miles west of Long Beach.  Upon getting home, I was able to time the sonic boom by finding live video (click for replay) online and waiting for the narrator to say that its speed was approaching 600 mph.  We all sat on the porch with the laptop running, not knowing what to expect, and heard two rapid and suprisingly loud sonic booms.  All supersonic airplanes create two booms but because the shuttle is 122-feet long, they are spread out by half a second to make them distinguishable. Ethan and I thought it was pretty cool...not so sure about the girls.

Someone also recently sent me this video of a guy getting a ride on a U2 spy plane at 70,000 feet.  I always get choked up at videos like these related to orbiting Earth, though I'm sure the background music helps.  If I happen to stumble upon $200k of disposable income, I'll consider calling Virgin Galactic.

More Summer Fun

Click here to see other August photos!

Ethan Goes to Hawaii (for real this time)

So for over a year Ethan has been claiming to have been to Hawaii...in a past life!  Many a story started off as "This one time, in Hawaii, I _______".  My favorite was when he described being a fighter pilot and part-time race car driver.  Well, thanks to Pépère lining up the accommodations, the whole family was able to go to Oahu for a week! We stayed in Ko Olina at the Marriott Ko Olina Beach Club which surrounded one of the four man-made lagoons which quelled the already mellow waves. 

We had a great time at the lagoon building castles and at the resort's lagoon pool.  Ethan even met a girl friend on the last day.  It took some coaxing but we got Ethan through a waterfall and cave in one of the pools.  Before Mémère and Pépère went home, Liz and I checked out the USS Arizona Memorial and the Battleship Missouri at Pearl Harbor and the whole group visited the Dole Pineapple Plantation where I was bummed to discover that Google Maps on my Blackberry did not have the maze expansion.  We also climbed up Diamond Head where I got to carry Anneliese in my arms the entire time which was a good workout.

Click here or the album for photos!