Travel Town

We are in LA for this week for some pre-move preparations. I realize I'm going to see a whole new LA when we get back because we will now be discovering all the things to do for kids. Yesterday we went with Daniel and Amanda to Travel Town in Griffith Park.  Micah as usual slept most of the time and just woke up long enough to eat and ride the little train. Julia was really excited to see all the trains and especially to ride on the little train.

The Dimple

Can you tell I'm completely obsessed and in love with this boy? I love that he is cooing and smiling now and that he thinks everything I say to him is hilarious first thing in the morning (when he is happiest). It gives me a chance to see my favorite feature of his, the dimple. He has one little dimple that comes out on his left cheek when he smiles. Just his left, not his right (although he does kind of have a dimpled chin as well.) It's adorable and a trait that runs in my mom's family. Two of my brothers have the one sided dimple as well. Love this smiley boy!

Micah's 2 Mo. Stats

Micah had his two month appointment yesterday, along with his two month shots which left him whimpering all afternoon. Luckily he woke up this morning as his normal smiley self.

Weight: 13 lbs 4 oz (80%)
Height: 22.5 in (32 %)
Head Cir: 15.5 (66 %)

Truck Day

On Saturday the library had their annual "Truck Day" where they bring in a bunch of different trucks for the kids to sit in and learn about how things get done. We just got Julia a book about construction trucks and she loves to see the fire trucks and police cars zooming by behind her house, so I thought she would enjoy this. 

In the Humvee

In the SWAT car

Just a random construction truck

The digger

She said her favorite truck to ride on was the digger, but she was talking today about how she got to go in a police car so that one must have made an impression too.

Niagara Falls

After we left Toronto we went to Niagara Falls, which was the main reason I wanted to make this trip before we left for the west coast. You can stand right next to the edge of Horseshoe Falls and it is pretty amazing to see that much powerful water gushing over the cliff.

We realized the reason you don't see a lot of pictures of Horseshoe Falls is that there is always so much mist in the middle.

So while American Falls (below) is beautiful and the most photogenic, it pales in comparison to the power of Horseshoe Falls.

 

The moon, just because I liked the picture.

At night they light up the falls all different colors. They start out with white lights, then circle through a lot of other colors, and then do multiple colors at once. Robert went down to the falls and took pictures, while I stayed in our falls view hotel room with the sleeping kids and watched from there. Of course I liked the purple lights the best.

And here is the sunrise over the falls as seen from our hotel room..

Toronto Blue Jays Baseball Game

This was such a fun baseball game! Toronto was pretty cold, even at the end of April so since we had a one month old we didn't really go anywhere for the day and a half we were there except the baseball game. Which was okay since we just got to relax at our hotel and the reason we were there was baseball. When it was time for the game we got all bundled up, took the elevator down to the lobby and walked next door to the stadium. Then we took off all our coats because the stadium is indoors! Very nice, and as we saw, Toronto needs it so their fans don't freeze at the beginning and end of the season.

During the game someone hit a grand slam!

We realized while we were there that not only was our hotel right next door to the stadium, it was actually connected to the stadium. They have 70 rooms that have a field view from the hotel room. That would have been pretty awesome to sit in your hotel and still be at the game!

The day we were there was kids day at the Rogers Center, so they had face painting (Julia got a blue jay on her hand), balloon animals (Julia chose a pink dog balloon), and the highlight was running the bases. All the kids in attendance got to go down onto the field and run around the bases! I think we appreciated it more than Julia, but she still had fun and she was excited to go around with all the other kids.

While we were in line to go Robert realized he didn't have his phone, so he ran back to our seats and to lost and found looking for it. So I was left with Julia and Micah and and the diaper bag for the running of the bases. While we were in line Julia made friends with the girls in line behind us. After a while Julia decided she didn't want to stand anymore and sat on the floor refusing to move while the line moved ahead. I had to pick her up  and carry both the kids, so the Mom behind us convinced Julia to walk by suggesting she hold hands with the other little girls. They were still holding hands when they ran around the bases.

Here is the video I took of the girls running together. Julia is wearing blue pants and a purple shirt, and they mostly walked so they go pretty slow. Excuse the bad camera job and Micah crying in the background.

I like how they started going the wrong way between 2nd and 3rd bases and someone had to show them where to go.

As soon as she finished we found Robert. He missed seeing her run, but he still got to be down on the field with us. He didn't find his phone, so we decided to look in the diaper bag. Yup, it had been in there the whole time. 

Julia decided she was beat after her run and plopped down on the floor to relax right in the middle of everything.

Micah "hanging in there" after a long day .

Checking out the dugout and family picture on the field.

Pittsburgh Children's Museum

While we were in Pittsburgh we spent a day at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Or an afternoon I guess. The motto of this trip was take it easy, so we didn't get out the door from our hotel until after 11:00 a.m. Julia had a lot of fun here. She is at an age now where she can really get into the things meant for kids (Disneyland this year is going to be fun!). 

The museum was separated into different rooms with themes (we don't have pictures from every room), and this was essential the art room. Here she is doing silk screening. They had a table where they could cut out different shapes out of scratch paper, then they would silk screen it. I had Julia draw the shapes and I cut them out.

Concentrating on the silk screening.

I got paint on me!

The finished product. The shapes she drew were a blob, a tear shape, and a tracing of her hand.

She was also a big fan of the paint and easels. We ended up with half a dozen Julia masterpieces for us to take home.

This room had a big track and lots of wheeled contraptions the kids could take around the track. Julia liked the little trike they had the best, but I got a laugh seeing Robert pulling Princess Julia along on whatever this rolly thing is called.

The water room had a bunch of large tubs where they could float boats, splash in the water, or play with water toys. They had these cute little ponchos to put over their clothes, but every kid that came out of there was soaked in some way or another. You could tell the people who came prepared because they brought a change of clothes for this room.

Julia was no exception. We didn't bring a change of clothes, but this was the last area we had left to visit, so afterwards we repeated a couple rooms again (like the art room) and walked five minutes back to our hotel. Total non-stressful day for me since Robert spent the entire time playing with Julia while I took care of Micah.

Faces of Micah

It is so amazing how fast babies grow and change. Here are the faces of Micah at one week and another at two months. Although he is getting chubby Micah doesn't always look like a sumo wrestler like he does in these pictures, he just has big cheeks and gravity seems to be working against him in this position.

And are pictures from different ages all together. Newborn, one week, one month, and two months.

Pediatric Opthamologist

At Julia's three year check up the doctor thought she might have some vision problems, so he referred us to a pediatric ophthalmologist. Since then I've been thinking, "well, she does squint a lot and she's pretty clumsy.." But Julia had her appointment this Monday and the doctor said everything looked perfectly normal for her age. Yay! They said Julia was the patient of the day because she cooperated perfectly with everything they asked her to do, except when they dilated her eyes. She was fine with the first eye drop, but then she realized they were putting water in her eyes, which she hates, and refused to open her eye for the second eye drop. They still got it in in no time though. I guess they have a lot of practice since they are a pediatric practice. For the record, I didn't think they did anything different to her than my optometrist would do to me at a normal eye exam so I don't know why we had to see an ophthalmologist...

Wheats meet Nowlands

 While we were in Pittsburgh we spent a couple evenings over at Jeremy and Sarah's. We tried to get some pictures of Julia and Eli together since they are just a couple weeks apart (see Sarah's post here  for past pictures of them together each year since they were babies). It was the end of a long day for both of them so   most of our pictures looked like these:

But I think these ones were pretty cute.

And here are some pictures of the other two kids. Now that I think about it we should have taken pictures of them together too since they share a birthday!

Micah

Conner

Pittsburgh Pirates Baseball Game

A couple weeks ago we took a trip to Pittsburgh to see Robert's cousin Jeremy and his family, and to check off another baseball stadium as part of Robert's goal to visit every MLB baseball stadium and collect a souvenir ice cream baseball cap from each of them. Ironically though, after we had gotten home a few days later we could not find our Pirates cap. I think we left it in the hotel in Toronto.

This was also Micah's first baseball game ever. Julia and Eli enjoyed running around the benches, Micah mostly slept. Eli was actually very into the game for most of game watching the players hit the ball etc., while Julia was pretty oblivious to what was going on. She spent the first half of the game playing with her toy frog and getting ice cream with Dad. 

And Robert got to see Conner for the first time, and I hadn't seen him since he was a little baby. Conner and Micah share birthdays, they are exactly one year apart.

 Our seats were out in left field so Julia, Robert, and Eli stood by the fence and asked the players for baseballs (they didn't get anything).

                                               

 

Afterwards we rode the escalators up to the top deck and took pictures with the city behind us. I like the first picture of Julia and I best, but the bottom picture actually shows Micah and I figure we need to have a picture where we can actually see him at his first baseball game.

Pittsburgh was cool with all it's bridges and hills and very picturesque. It has crazy streets though. After the baseball game we were going to Jeremy and Sarah's house when we took a wrong turn (even with our GPS guiding us) and ended up crossing back over the river we had just crossed and right into traffic. We went from an estimated arrival time in four minutes to twenty-five minutes with that one wrong turn. And then we had put in the wrong address in the GPS anyway so it took us another 20 minutes to get from the wrong address over to Jeremy and Sarah's. We really did get to see a lot of Pittsburgh even though we were only there a short time.