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.

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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

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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.

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Legoland!

Before Oma and Opa went back home, they took the family to Legoland for the first time (Daddy and Ethan went when he was 14 months old).  We had a great time and everyone stayed awake through the fireworks at closing.  We didn't get on a few rides like the new Lost Kingdom Adventure and Splash Battle because lines were long, but our tickets came with a free return visit anytime in the following 90 days so maybe we can hit them next time.

There were only two rides in the whole park that Ethan couldn't go on because he was a half inch short of the 42" requirement.  Ethan survived what was arguably his first 'legitimate' roller coaster...The Dragon...where the minute we flew down the first drop he spent most of the ride with his head in my armpit.  Ethan was cutthroat at the Volvo Junior Driving School where he deftly weaved in and out among all the other less competent drivers.  Too bad he has to wait until he's six (or can pass as six and be able to tell the attendant he's six) to graduate to the non-junior one.  Other fun things included some revamped sections of Miniland USA including the Las Vegas strip and a revised Capitol scene with President Obama being inaugurated. 

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Belated Party at Chuck E Cheese

Ethan had been requesting a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese since going to one for a friend's.  Even though they have security checking ultraviolet hand stamps to make sure nobody steals a kid, I was stressed and tired just being around the pandemonium.  Check out the video!

Ethan Turns Four!

We celebrated Ethan's birthday on Sunday (our anniversary) since everyone had to work Monday.  The highlights included him receiving his first action figure (Bumblebee from Transformers) and a new bicycle!  I followed him around the neighborhood clocking him at 9 mph (much faster than his tricycle!) quickly followed by the first crash and scrape on the knee.

In other news, Ethan has become very meticulous with his art, staying in the lines and usually using every color to make everything like a rainbow.  While Liz' folks were here, Ethan and Opa built some very impressive structures out of Lego Duplo bricks.  Their parting gift to Ethan was another set enabling us to reach the ceiling now!


Anneliese still doesn't say much but she's got a lot of personality.  She has to walk to and from the car by herself these days.  She obeys complex orders like "go in your room and get your pajamas" or "go give that to your brother" and she does it.  "Ma" and "Da" are clearly audible...especially at 6am after she's woken up.

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Parents' Weekend Away

The arrival of Liz' parents for the annual summer visit associated with Richard's two-week class at Fuller Theological Seminary allowed just Liz and I to get away for a weekend. We elected to check out the various wineries of the Temecula Valley about 80 miles away.

We checked out Old Town Temecula where we sampled and bought an exotic jerky sampler pack at the Temecula House of Jerky. We also beat the heat and took advantage of the absence of kids to catch a few movies in a theater!

We stayed a night at the Pechanga Resort and Casino where we had one of our best meals ever at The Great Oak...$80 unlisted dinner special for two where we each had Caesar salad with dressing made from scratch right at the table, 7-oz. filet mignon, and chocolate soufflé!  Basically were only paying for the steaks.  Picking from nearly a thousand wines was overwhelming but we ended up with a great red.  After dinner we promptly lost all the savings at a Pai Gow Poker table.

We drove around a variety of wineries the next day (still reeling from finishing the bottle from the night before) but spent most of our time at Leonesse Cellars and at Thornton Winery where we had a nice lunch and bought 4 for 2 of the 2007 Gewurztraminer.  Scenery was nice though not as good as Napa.  It was also quite a challenge sampling wines everywhere in the extreme heat.

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Rocks, Cliffs and Dinosaurs!

The family took a trip to Denver, Colorado to stay with Liz' friend Allison and her husband Josh.  We drove the first of many drives towards Colorado Springs to visit the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center and then did a driving tour of the Garden of the Gods where Daddy hopped out repeatedly to snap quick pictures which turned out to be a good idea because days later when we returned to picnic it started raining.

We checked out the Denver Botanic Gardens where they had dinosaurs hidden around the grounds to make it palatable to kids.  Keeping with the garden theme we went to the Butterfly Pavilion where Ethan got to hold a tarantula!  At the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, we all got a bit of vertigo next to the world's highest suspension bridge, 1053 feet above the river bed. Daddy was 3 for 3 in tomahawk throwing there!  Next door we hit Buckskin Joe's Frontier Town and Railway where we had a stormy but pretty train ride over towards the gorge.

Somehow we had stumbled upon a brochure for the Focus on the Family Visitors Center which was free and really cool. Ethan was not happy however when we told him he wasn't tall enough for the three-story tall curly slide. We met up with Avery (Ethan's best friend from Stroller Strides who moved over a year ago) at a cool restaurant The White Fence Farm where they serve their famous hot corn fritters which essentially tasted like funnel cake as a side dish!

We also took a nice ride on the Georgetown Loop Railroad where the boys got to get off halfway and take a tour inside the Lebanon Tunnel silver mine!  Finally we had a night of watching 4th of July fireworks from the comfort of the rental minivan topped things off.

Click here or the album for photos!  (You'll see that Ethan like sticking his tongue out lately.)