So I just hadda put this one in.
This is a snap from a movie Ang took of Emma laughing at some shenanigans that Abby was up to. Abby can make Emma laugh like no other. Emma has a very satisfying chuckle too. Where Abby is a quiet laugher like The Mommy, Emma seems to have developed a full bellied laugh similar to The Daddy.
So I have been a little behind of late.
Some hikin, some soccer, some bikin, some playin with my girls.
My hot tub is working finally. It sure was a mess to get the thing cleaned up, lots of contamination after 16 months of idleness. It is a good one too!
Emma is walking and starting to talk, augmenting her signs, and getting her little mitts into everything; plants, toilets, and corners you didn’t know you had.
She is starting to say things like: Mamma, Dadday, name, mow, and basically react to just about any stimulus you give her. Unless of course it is the “NO” stimulus and she really feels like grabbing something out of the planter.
Here is a picture some of you may have seen before.
And Abby meanwhile is in Jazz which she loves, swimming lessons in which she is doing excellent, and gymnastics too; which pretty much means Angela is doing those things too.
She is starting to write, as evidenced by something I found on the back porch.
As if we needed any more evidence that she loves Ariel and everything mermaid, here we see her at Snoqualmie falls, posing for her ‘cover shot’ as a mermaid.
Amazing how unreal this shot looks, it almost looks fake but I resisted the urge to do anything but crop it. Maybe someday I will put some fins on her for a ‘what if’.
Well, we did it, after all of those posts with numbers, miles, average speed, and so forth, I am happy to report that we finally did the Seattle To Portland 2007 (and Monya is happy to have that over). This ride was 204 miles from the lower parking lot of UW campus all the way to downtown Portland by an estimated 2,230 one-day riders and 6,770 two-day riders.
We were four of the one day riders.
The day was hot, cresting at about 86°F in southern Washington, and there were more than a few dropouts due to the heat. We had planned to leave between 04:00 & 04:30, ride a good 15-17 mph avg and try to complete the 204 mile course in 12-14 hours.
My final readings were:
* 04:30 departure
* 203.9 miles
* 15.9 mph avg
* 12 hours 47 min riding time
* 34.1 maximum speed
* approx arrival time of 20:00.
* 15 hours and 30 min end-to-end.
Dad and I rode as a team the whole way, with one really good successful slingshot that drug him down the hill in my draft, then at the trough of the hill he overtook me with his momentum and I was able to draft him most of the way up the other side. Both of us were able to do the stretch faster together than either of us could have done it alone.
We trailed Andy and Frank by approximately an hour all day as they started a little bit closer (in Renton) but 1/2 hour later (05:00) than Dad and I.
The real trick was staying hydrated and “fueled” with hammer gel, gatorade and other electrolyte drinks, and the PB&J sandwiches available at the major foodstops. I believe I drank about 3 gallons of fluids over the course of the ride, and probably about another 1/2 gallon before and after the ride.
The only problem I still have (one week later) is some kind of tendinitis behind my right knee for which I am seeing a physical therapist on Tuesday. I think it may have simply exacerbated an old injury (from soccer or some other endeavor) that I have been able to successfully ignore for lo these many years.
The years have caught up with me now. 🙂
Dad, Frank, Lief, Andy
Here it is, you’ve asked for it, pictures. (Be careful what you wish for.)
Without further ado lets start with the princess series.
Angela, after devouring many books on the subject of Disneyland knew just where to go and just what to do for the ideal experience. This does not mean that we hammered every nail into every board to maximize the experience. Rather, we had a short list of MUST SEE’s and dinner at Ariel’s Grotto was at the top of that list.
Ang set up camp on the waiting list early, because 1 month before our arrival the dinner was booked. We couldn’t promise Abby we could get in but the neat thing was we were the last ones to visit with Ariel before starting dinner.
Then throughout dinner other princesses pleased the crowd.
The fairy godmother didn’t have the same general appeal.
This night Belle was in her ball gown, later we would see her in her everyday frock.
And lastly, one of the favorites, Cinderella.
Emma, was a little shell-shocked by the attention and glam in those early hours, but as you will likely see another day, she warmed up to it all.
You know, I can’t say much about this shot, it is a great one that Angela snapped with the film camera.
Maybe I am already tired from the late nights to come, sitting up by the door, at 2AM, in about 12 years.
I thought it was such a great one that I took the time to scan it and post it here.
First a little logic problem for you.
Abby is my daughter.
Madison is a mermaid.
Abby is Madison.
——
Therefore Abby is Madison and also a mermaid.
OK she is going to be a mermaid…when she grows up.
Oh alright she is at least going to be a mermaid for Halloween next year.
And she has the hair to prove it.
We recently screened the movie Splash at our house about 8 times in 8 days. Well that is a slight exaggeration, it was more like 6 times in 5 days.
And despite some of the sophomoric humor, some PG-13 language, and crude mid 80’s kicks Abby…er…Madison saw right through all that to the heart of the matter. The love story and the mermaid and the kinky hair. Oh and Alan, formerly known as Tom Hanks, now known as me.
So back around Valentines Day Emma and Abby each received a piece of mail. Inside the envelopes they each discovered a “greenback” courtesy of their Great Gramma Elynor.
Abby knew what she had and it would seem as though Emma understood too as evidenced by this video I was lucky to capture.
I finally got around to posting this for you Gramma!
Enjoy. 🙂
So I have a lot of catching up to do.
I have been so busy with work and play recently that I haven’t done my civic duty…namely posting pictures and telling funny stories about my girls for relatives that can’t hear them directly. I apologize for that. So, at risk of cheapening any of the aforementioned stories and pictures I will present them at once.
I say cheapening only insofar as describing what happens to a person who looks at a really funny FarSide cartoon and laughs so they get a calendar of FarSide cartoons and they laugh every day. Then frequently they cheapen the experience by looking at all of the FarSide cartoons until July thinking that somehow reading 150 at once will be 150 times funnier than reading just one. Trust me, it is better to spread them out.
But I digress and risk making this post IMMENSE in my digression. Tally ho.
Allow me to recount in reverse order.
Yesterday I went on a bike ride with my Dad, Andy, and Dad’s friend Charles. We planned on 35 miles and we made it 13.1 (very important, that number, in light of the fact that all of our feet and faces were NUMB from the cold). We rode out in Ravensdale and at one point were riding through falling snow and about 1 inch of slushy white snow on the ground. Not good, so we stopped early. But we are all training to do the Seattle To Portland 190 mile ride this summer so I say again Tally Ho!
Last weekend Dad, Tom, Me, Naresh, and Bhanu (who has NEVER been camping even in the summer) decided it was high time to make an igloo…on a mountain…and then sleep in it…for two nights. Long story short, we only did one night but all the rest happened. Bhanu was good enough to actually upload his pictures and he has shared them with us here.
http://www.fastalbum.com/bp/15
Let me just say, it is hard to take pictures when the wind blows hard, the icy rain falls fast, and you are working so hard and fast to simply put together an igloo so you will have shelter from the previously mentioned weather that you hardly have time to think about eating let alone grabbing the camera.
We started at noon and were finally laid down to sleep at 11PM with about 1+ hours of rest in between. We got wet that night and some of us got cold so the second night was out of the question. Nevertheless, the experience was excellent and amazingly enough I would like to do some more igloo building…maybe just not sleeping in it after. We’ll see what time does to my memory.
Those are my recent story/journal-like entries. Now comes the real good stuff. Pictures.
I just liked this picture of Abby reaching for Emma from the bottom of a long thin box laying on the floor. I think it was the fireplace mantle security thing that came in this box. Anyway, Abby and Emma played for quite some time in this box and you know, with the right type of viral marketing I bet someone could make a fortune selling boxes and sticks and string to parents of small children…and cats.
Here we see Abby after two days with braids in. It takes two days to kink her stick-straight hair like this and about two hours for it to straighten out afterwards. She REALLY likes her hair like this lending more evidence to the theory that “The-grass-is-always-greener” syndrome is probably not a learned behavior.
Abby was just posing cute this day with her little skull cap. The shot was blurry but I thought it added to the effect. I also did some blue-photo-filtering on the shot and added a new feature I found in Photoshop called Surface Blur. You can see some real examples of surface blur in my pictures to come from our igloo trip…the humidty in an igloo rivals a suana. But that is for another day.
On to Amelia Mabel.
She really loves looking at pictures (photos, drawings, paintings, labels, logos, anything really) and she also really loves to have things on her head (as you may recall) and look at herself in the mirror.
Here we see a darker side. The one that punishes Polly Pockets for being so…well…pocket sized. She likes the bald ones the best by far and I think I may have just detected a pattern to her cooing and babbling when she is playing with them…something like fee fi fo fum.
And finally we have moved into the rare sightings category.The elusive CockaPeep. First our photographer managed to capture a shot of one sleeping. We never heard from this poor soul again but when we managed to recover his camera and develop his film we knew we could take action.
We set up one of those motion sensing cameras together with a trip-wire hoping to catch the elusive CockaPeep in the wild. We got some tedious shots of Tasmanian Devils, dumb butterflys, some kind of dinosaur, even a boorish Zimparumpazoo. We tossed all those out because we were after something more elusive and finally, our patience paid off.
The Elusive CockaPeep.
Be warned: don’t look directly into her eyes or you will be transfixed.
Who doesn’t like dress up?
[The Cast] Mommy, let’s play something.
[The Bite] Sure, what do you want to play?
[Set the hook] I know, let’s play dress up. [Reel her in] Yeah!!”
So what started out as one of many (recently) hunker-down-days turned into a glam-fest.
They started with
Accessorized with
Even Emma wasn’t immune. She got her own lip gloss. (I might have to sew a soccer ball into her One-sie if I hope to have a snowballs chance in Maui of ANY hope of environmental control) To her credit, she tried to eat the lip gloss.
The coup de grâce was Mommy’s vintage 1940’s, silk nightgown (Abby’s favorite stash is the nightgown drawer).
The Peep?
She just wanted to eat it.
The Mommy?
She got the full treatment too but she escaped the inviolable proof phase of the morning ritual, aka The Picture.
No, this isn’t another shot of Emma in her fancy sweater.
No, this isn’t another funny face of Abby’s.
This is Saturn like you have never seen her before.
By the way, the next post will probably be another one of Abby and her funny faces. 🙂
blief 