ryanandbernadette.com

I sorted a bunch of photos from earlier this year and just now got them posted, enjoy! They are in the spring 2010 folder.

Check out our San Diego photos here:
San Diego Photos

So it’s taken me a while to get back here to let you know how the rest of our vacation went.  After the Wild Animal Park, we went to Legoland, a somewhat silly name for a very fun amusement park.  I actually enjoyed it more than Disneyland, and I think Ethan did too.   Poor Isaac didn’t enjoy a lot of the trip since he was stuck in his stroller most of the time, but it’s a little bit his own fault since he’s too stubborn to let go and just walk.    Anyway, Legoland is perfect for kids from about Ethan’s age up to about 13 or so, especially for boys.  There are millions of legos all over the park made into people, characters, boats, buildings, and all sorts of fun things.  I loved that they have lego tables next to the waiting areas for a lot of the rides with longer lines so that the kids can play and then just hop back into line with their parents once they get closer to the front.  We rode in helicopters, cars, boats, a fire truck, pedal car, trains, and on another roller coaster.  It was much less crowded than Disney, had much more space, and offered a lot more for Ethan to do.  He’s just barely 36″ tall now, but that is the cutoff height for a lot of their rides so he was measured a lot, but passed every time and got to do a lot of fun things.  He really enjoyed riding in the planes and steering a boat.  I think my favorite was riding the fire truck.  We had to pump the truck down to the other end while in competition with 3 other families, pump to get water through our hoses, aim at a “window” to put out a fire, and then jump back in the truck, and pump our way back to the end.  We got 2nd place, pretty good considering Lora had to run off to chase down Ethan when we got off to put out the fire and John and I had to pump and aim at the same time, which is considerably harder than it sounds.  It was really fun, and harder work than we expected!  I had a great time getting to hang out with Ethan and spend time just playing.  Ryan didn’t get to experience all of the park because he left early to take Isaac home for a nap, which was very considerate of him, but we did miss him.  If you ever do go, you HAVE to go to the Granny Apple stand up at the top of the park for their apple fries, they are fabulous!  They taste kind of  like apple pie and I’m going to have to figure out how to make them myself. 

On Friday we went back down to San Diego to the USS Midway.  It is an aircraft carrier that was decommissioned in the early 90’s after seeing almost 50 years of service.  It was really interesting walking around.  It seemed smaller in some ways than I imagined, and bigger in others.  I think it was mostly that the planes that were on it were smaller than the planes I’m used to flying on, but the ship held a huge number of them.  I can’t imagine how long it took people to get used to finding anything on there, all the hallways looked the same and it was just one door after another.  It seemed like we were walking in circles, yet we didn’t see the same thing twice.  At least, I don’t think we did!    Ethan loved looking at all the planes.  We spent part of the evening walking on the dock near the house we were staying in and got a fabulous dinner.  It was a great way to end a really fun week.

We had a good flight back, all three of my guys slept most of the way home and I actually got to read on the plane, which is almost unheard of!  We got home to much colder weather than what we’d been used to, but we’re readjusting to the alternating snowy and warm days.  We had a great trip and have definitely put San Diego on our list of places we want to go back to!  A big thanks to Gramma and Papa for a wonderful vacation!  I have gone through some pictures, now we just need to get them posted, soon I promise!

We’re just over halfway through our vacation in beautiful, sunny, even warmer than we thought it would be glad we didn’t pack long sleeves Southern California.   We have been busy!  We went to Sea World on the first day, which was so much fun.  We got there just in time to see the killer whale show, which Ethan absolutely loved.  We saw so many different fish, sea mammals, whales, dolphins, all sorts of animals.  I think it’s one of my new favorite zoos.

We spent the next day around the house, going to the beach which is only 3 blocks from here, and walking on the pier.  Isaac got to stick his feet in the ocean for the first time and seemed to enjoy it.    He loves watching the waves come in, he just kept giggling while he watched.  He also liked playing in the sand, though he did not appreciate it when I wouldn’t let him eat said sand.  Ryan and John saw a whale just off the dock, and actually have a picture to prove it!  Ethan got to run around in the sand, play with some buckets, look for shells and run from the water.  We kind of messed up the first time we went to the water by trying to make sure he stayed out of it with the end result being that he’s now afraid of the water.  Oops.  So, we’ll have to work on that.

We went to Disneyland yesterday.    I’ve only been to Disney World once, and it was about 20 years ago so my memory isn’t exactly the best.  It seemed smaller than I thought it would be, but I think it is quite a bit smaller than the Florida one.  We did have fun!  Ethan got to ride on his very first roller coaster, I was surprised that he took it so well, though he did pronounce it “scary” after it was all over.    There are quite a few rides that he can’t go on yet because he’s just too little, but he was able to drive the cars with a little help from daddy.  He had a great time with that!  We also went through It’s a Small World (one of few rides I actually remembered), the Storybook Canal, watched some Jedis in training, met Mickey Mouse, and got stuck in the Pirates of the Caribbean between two gunfighting pirates while the ride had to be rebooted.  Ahh, the memories.    Ethan and Isaac finally took a little nap for a while and hung out with Gramma and Papa while Ryan, Lora, and I got to go on a few rides by ourselves.  We rode on Big Thunder Railroad, which was a lot of fun, and went through the Haunted Mansion, still one of my very favorites and one of the only other things I remembered.  We considered Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones, until we saw the lines and then reconsidered.  The boys had a good time, it was just a really long day for two little guys.

Today we went to the Wild Animal Park just north of San Diego, it was awesome!  That’s my kind of park.  It was set much more naturally than most zoos, largely due to the sheer immensity of the land they have.  We walked through a lot and took a tram through more, where we saw a very new antelope (I don’t remember the species) that had literally just been born between the tram before us and ours so we were the very first people to see it.    That was really awesome!  If you’ve never been to this park and you are in the area, you have to go.  It is a little expensive, but well worth it to see the park and help support their conservation effort.

We are staying in a house in Oceanside that is really nice.  It’s so nice to be in a full house with 3 bedrooms, a full kitchen, laundry room, and just a lot of space.  Way more than we’d have in a hotel.  The boys are staying in with us, sort of.  We’re in the master room and Ethan’s in a study just off the side while Isaac’s in the huge walk-in closet that’s more than big enough for his pack n’ play three times over.  Like I said, we’re only 3 blocks from the beach so we’ve been down there almost every day.  It’s such a nice location, we’re really enjoying it.  Isaac loves having room to crawl around and get into trouble, and Ethan loves that we are only 2 blocks from the commuter train tracks.  He loves hearing the trains go by, which are close enough to hear but not enough to be annoying.  He talks to Puppy quite frequently about the trains, and absolutely loves it when we get to see them go by.

So that’s our week so far, tune in later for more updates!

It never really occurred to me before kids, and truly not until they were around for a while, that there are things that kids aren’t born with.  Like knowing how to blow your nose, jump, or even having an imagination.  Ethan has had two stuffed animals close to his side for a long time now, ever since I stopped worrying about SIDS enough to allow him to have them in his crib.  We started with just a small leopard, inexplicably named Boo, but I made the mistake of throwing him through the washer one day and not getting him dry in time for nap time, necessitating the introduction of a stuffed husky dog, more obviously named Puppy.  Ethan still carries both of them around all the time, but Puppy has the more favored status and can be found with Ethan almost all day.  I have managed to convince him that Puppy needs to stay home when we go out (except for Bible study, which was the original reason for giving him a comfort object in the first place) so that he doesn’t get lost.  One of my great fears is that we will somehow somewhere lose Puppy and cause a major breakdown.  Anyway, back to my original point.  Ethan has started developing his imagination more lately, causing me to realize that he hadn’t had one prior to this.  He’s started using things in ways that weren’t their original purpose and using various animals to act out scenarios around him.  It gives you new eyes for yourself when your child calls a dinosaur momma, but I digress again.  Since he so often has Puppy with him, Puppy gets a lot of his imagination and a lot of his conversations.  This morning when Ryan got him out of bed, he said something about Puppy being a dog, to which Ethan promptly replied, “Puppy is not a dog, he’s a person.”  Well, duh.  It was really sweet and explains a lot about how he acts around Puppy.  He was giving Puppy rides around the family room just a little while ago, I have a feeling Puppy will be a part of our lives for a long while to come.  It will be a sad day indeed when he’s no longer required.

Ethan can be very profound sometimes.  At dinner tonight he told us, “dessert not all the time, it’s dessert”.  I would do well to remember his words more often!  Dessert is just for some of the time, not all of the time.  That’s what makes it special, well, that and the chocolate. 

But not really.  Isaac finally drank out of a sippy cup on his own today, hooray!  He wouldn’t take them for a long time, probably because he hasn’t been using bottles.  So we’ve been giving him bottles of juice during snack time hoping he’d get used to them enough to be able switch over to the cups.  He still doesn’t like using a cup as much as a bottle, but he will take it.  Chalk one up for small victories!

We filled out the paperwork for Ethan’s preschool next year today, yikes!  I still can’t believe he’ll be ready to start school this fall.  His first day is the 23rd, just a week after his birthday.  That promises to be a tough one for mommy!  It will be good for him, but it will be an adjustment for all of us.  It does promise to make life a little crazier though as we have to get up and out the door earlier than we do now, something I don’t think any of us will enjoy.

I’ve listened to a presentation on Family Time a few times at Mops and bought a couple of the books the last time I heard it.  We finally used one tonight.    I finally decided that Ethan’s old enough to start understanding some of the lessons in there based on his increased understanding of what’s going on around him and ability to remember conversations and events for longer periods of time.  Basically, the lessons give you ideas for presenting Bible stories in a way that kids can understand and remember.  So tonight we read the story of Noah and built an ark out of a cardboard box, which sounds kind of obvious, but wasn’t necessarily something I’d think of!  Ethan loved it.  We stuffed the box full of animals, and it took some doing to get him out of there.    We rocked the boat with waves and both of them just loved it.  I have a feeling the ark will be a fun toy for a long time to come.  It’s our goal to keep having family time each week and use the stories in the book to help us teach the boys Bible stories and about the character of God.