birthday pics

more pictures from Gabe's Birthday parties... click on the link:
Bday pics

Ok, so some random pictures from the last few weeks....

Gabe playing in his pool 

The result of a plane crash just south of our town

Lots of smoke

They finally got this fire contained, and then a couple days later we had lighting storms, which started 50+ wild fires in our county. Quite a few were fairly close to us - it was kind of a stressful weekend, especially being new here and not knowing how they handle this kind of stuff.

Gabe's Great Grandparents got him a sandbox for his birthday. It stayed inside the first couple weeks and was fun to climb in and out of. One day, we decided to practice drinking from a regular cup while he was sitting in. That was a great idea for Gabe - he dumped it out all over himself right away, and then played for a half hour in the puddles it made in the sandbox. He had a great time

Make some homemade ice cream

Yes, that is bacon about to be added. Homemade bacon ice cream. Yum.

The bacon is cooked with brown sugar, so it gets all caramelized and is a nice salty sweet flavor.

Another birthday present for Gabe - Adam's parents got him a big swingset! Rick & Dee came to visit over Gabe's birthday weekend, and Rick & Adam got it all set up!

Loves his swing!

Mickey Mouse Birthday Party!

Some friends over for Gabe's party! (The sandbox has made it outside and now has sand in it)

Gabe was pretty unsure of the sand at first - it took him a good 10 minutes or so to get comfortable with it. 

One of the nights Rick & Dee were here, we made a Chinese food feast! Here we have some Chicken WonTons,  Pork egg rolls, and cream cheese wontons. We also made pork fried rice. It was delicious! 

I knew that patio door in the bathroom would be no good...

So remember that awkward patio door in our bathroom? Well it has always made me a bit uncomfortable. If Gabe is ever in there with me, he likes to play with the vertical blinds. The bathroom is also kind of narrow, so getting out of the shower and drying off, it is very easy to bump in to the blinds.So I always hope that our next door neighbor is not in her room that has a window looking straight in to our bathroom door. I fixed this by hanging some thing curtains behind the vertical blinds. So if Gabe does swing the blinds open or I bump in to them, at least there are curtains behind.
But also, in the bottom corner of the door, I noticed about a 1 square centimeter open space. We had been having lots of bugs getting in the house, and I think this was a major contributor. So I stuffed it with some cotton balls, and it definitely seemed to help.
Well apparently there was another open space on the corner of the door....
This morning I was in the bathroom and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something in the blinds. But when I looked, nothing was there. So I figured maybe some birds or something was outside and I was just seeing their shadow once in a while. Totally dismissed it.
But then this afternoon I was going to the bathroom. Gabe was playing on the floor in the bathroom. Laying down, rolling over, all over the floor. Inches from the blinds. And all the sudden I look up and there is this little snake head poking out of the blinds. I totally freaked out, grabbed Gabe and we got out of there. I called Adam at work in a panic and told him I hoped he was coming home really soon, because we have a snake in our bathroom. I didn't know what kind. It was pretty small - didn't think it was a rattle snake, probably a garter snake, but I'm no expert and who cares what kind or how small it is, there's a snake in our bathroom. So he asked me what I was going to do, how I was going to contain it if I wasn't going to get it out. So I said I'd close the doors and tuck towels in tight at the bases of the doors. So he got on his way home and I went and grabbed some towels. I got one door taken care of, then was going through our bedroom to go get the other door and then I saw another snake coming out of our closet. And I saw the 1st snake in the bathroom. So now there's 2 snakes. So I freaked out some more. Closed the bedroom door and tucked a towel in the base. And then I decided I couldn't stay in the house while I waited, so we took a walk to get the mail and then over to the park. Didn't come back until I knew Adam was back. He got those 2 out. But as Gabe and I were coming in the front door, I noticed a third one in the frame of the door. ACK! More freaking out. So Adam took that one out too.
He filled the other gap in the patio door with cotton balls - to be replaced with steel wool as soon as we have a chance to get some. And he so kindly searched the rest of our closet and bedroom to make sure there were no others. So hopefully it was just those three. And hoepfully they are long gone.....
Our landlord is going to come over to add some better weather stripping to our front door where the last one was.  And he's going to see if he can do anything else about the patio door.

So yeah, not really the greatest day for me. The morning already started out not so great - trying to deal with the county and figuring out how to get appropriate services/therapies for Gabe. And then we get snakes in the house. Gross! I think I may have nightmares...
Adam is going to add some pictures. I don't really want to look at them, so I'm going to let him take care of that...

The terrifying garter snakes (or "racers" as everyone out here calls them). - Adam

Labor Day Weekend

So, Gabe and I are back to California after a fun 5.5 weeks in Indiana and Minnesota. It was definitely hard to come back, so I made sure we had something different and fun planned over Labor Day weekend. We debated between going to Sequoia National Park or to one of the beaches. But one of the beaches we were considering was only supposed get up to the mid 60s, so that would have been a bit cool. And the others we figured would be pretty busy, since it was kind of the last weekend of summer. Plus Gabe can only handle about an hour or so of being out in the sun and water, so it would have been a hard day for him.

So we ended up at Sequoia on Saturday. It took us about 3 hours to get up there. Once there, we decided to splurge and get the national parks annual pass (we figured there are quite a few national parks around that would be doable in a day or weekend, so may as well - only have to get to 3 more in the next year to make it pay off). We hit up the information building once inside the park and then from there drove up the mountains to the Sequoia groves. The drive was only 17 miles, but took over an hour due to the steep, twisty roads and one section of one lane road that we had to wait about 20  minutes before we could go through. We found a place to park (parking was crazy, we lucked out and found an empty spot right away though) and then had a little picnic lunch. After lunch, we loaded Gabe up in the jogging stroller and then walked the path that led to "General Sherman", which is the largest tree by volume in the world. It was only a half mile walk, but it was all downhill and had lots of steps, which was a little tricky witht the stroller, but we made it work. It was a little more difficult going back up with the stroller, but we managed. The trees were massive. They are so tall that the didnt' really seem like there were as wide as they were, but they were huge. I believe General Sherman is 36.5 feet across at it's base. Crazy. It was kind of interesting - there were a TON of German tourists there. Not sure why, but it seemed every other group of people we passed was speaking German.

After we finished up there, we drove up a little further to a visitor center and gift shop. Got a few things there - including a bottle of beer for Adam from the Mammoth Brewery in Mammoth Lakes, CA. (Which after drinking, Adam has decided that we will be visiting that brewery (&town) sometime.) We also got a little "passport" book that we can get stamped at all the national parks we visit. So hopefully we will get a few more filled out in the next year. After the visitor center and gift shop, we stopped at the museum and then we decided to head back towards home. We would have liked to have seen more of the park, but it would have been a few more hours of driving to see much more, and it was already like 4:00 in the afternoon. So maybe we'll plan a weekend trip up there sometime so we can see more. We stopped for dinner at a little pizza restaurant in one of the towns outside the park - it was awesome pizza. Then we headed back home. We took a different way home, not quite as direct as the way we went, but it was more freeway driving, so ended up being quicker.

The rest of the weekend was pretty mellow. Set up Gabe's pool in the backyard so he got to 'swim' some. Did lots of laundry and picking up around the house.  

Today Gabe and I went to our first day of MOPS (mothers of preschoolers). I was in a MOPS group in Duluth and loved it, so I got signed up right away for this year out here. I think it should be a good time. I'm kind of bummed that they only have one meeting a month (Duluth had 2), but they seem to do some  other activities throughout the month, so that should be fun. They are going apple picking in a couple weeks, so hopefully it works for us to go too.

Tomorrow Gabe has a follow up appointment to check on the tubes in his ears. Unfortunately the closest pediatric ENT we could find is in L.A.  (not sure why we need to go to a pediatric ENT, and not just any ENT, but that's the name our insurance gave us, so for now I guess that's what we'll do), so we will have a lot of driving tomorrow. But we'll break it up on the way home and stop and run some errands, since we'll be near a Sam's Club, Target, and much cheaper groceries. Well I guess that's about it for now.

Below are some pictures from our day trip to Sequoia...

"Tunnel Rock" the road used to go through here, but now it swerves around it



Where's Gabe? This wasn't even one of the biggest trees



Me & Gabe. "General Sherman" is the tree on the left. It doesn't look that big in this picture, but it was a ways off. If you look close,  you can see a bunch of people around the base of the tree.



A giant pinecone. Don't remember what kind of tree it's from - not a sequoia though - there's are egg sized



Museum




Adam & Gabe. General Sherman on left



Ready to go!



Some of the views on our drive in Sequoia





This was a resevoir just outside the park - it was huge. If you look close, you can see a line going around it, just about the green grassy areas - that is how high the water can get. It was a huge difference!



Waiting to go through the one lane road