Driven to Distraction

Scatterbrains, that is really the only way to describe myself these days. Formerly, I was this ultra organized, extreme multi-tasker extraodinaire. These days, I can't seem to keep a single thought in my head, I leave one room to do something, and get three steps away and can't for the life of me remember what I was doing, or I'll start one thing, and get side tracked on to another, never to finish the first thing, or I'll forget to take my ATM card out of the machine, and then forget I had even gone to the bank when the nice person from the bank called to tell me I'd forgotten my card. That being said, this post, like so many others may jump from topic to topic randomly. Welcome to what it is like in my brain.

Our second round of February visitors arrived on Wednesday afternoon. Great-Grammie Abby and Nana (Cindy). Grammie hasn't seen the boys since June, and for Cindy it's been since Christmas. We had some fun activities planned for their visit, but most importantly, we planned time when we did nothing but play. We played so hard that the boys had to be rousted out of deep sleep after 3 hour naps.

It has been spectacularly beautiful here, we've had weather in the high 70's all week. It was especially beautiful in La Jolla at the Aquarium. We love this place. I think we go once every 10 days or so, sometimes more often. The boys love to play with the fake lobster, shrimp, sea stars, and shells. Evan especially love to stick his hand in the tidepools and touch the sea stars and sea cucumbers. Ryan prefers the plastic variety. With Nana and Grammie in tow, we enjoyed all the Aquarium had to offer, with a strong emphasis on the outdoor activities.

I didn't have my camera handy for this, but we have a big slide very close to the house. We've gone over to it occasionally, and the boys love it. It's not something I can do by myself. Some one has to be at the ladder, with each boy, it's really big, and once you send one boy down, he's bound to come running around to the ladder again and start climbing before you can get the other boy down. So it is really a two person operation. Cindy and I took the boys over one afternoon, Ryan must have gone down this slide 30 or 40 times. It wasn't long before he realized that he could turn around at the bottom and yell and scream and point "request" that Cindy join him at the bottom of the slide, via the slide. It was really cute and funny, and I think Cindy made at least 20 trips down the slide herself.

Ryan tried to feed Nana potato pancake. And Evan says, no, if I can't see you then you can't leave! We had such a nice visit with Grammie and Nana. Visits are always too short and we are sad to see our family go home. Grammie had a great time watching the boys interact. She got a kick out of our "ritual" (or how we get Evan to open his mouth to eat) of singing at mealtimes. Sorry again for me being out of tune! and best of all, the boys got some wonderful quality time with their Grammie and Nana.



Sunday we went to the Zoo with our friend Tobin and his Dad Philip. I of course didn't take any fun pictures of us, because that would require me remembering to take out the camera and do so. I did remember to take these photos.

Why you ask?

We are still working on being out of the stroller in public, so today we would move from exhibit to exhibit in the stroller and in relatively controlled environments, let the boys out, to hold our hands as we walked or looked at the animals. It was getting pretty near lunch time, and both boys wanted water, (did I mention it was almost 80 degrees at the Zoo today?) I gave them their cups. I was walking with Evan, and he became distracted and no longer wanted to carry his cup. So, I had his hand with one hand, and his cup with the other, we were standing on Monkey Trails right up against the wire fence. Mind you, I could see it all happening in slo-mo. Evan was sticking his leg through the wire, his heel on the lowest wire. Just as I was getting "Evan, we don't..." out of my mouth, yep his shoe went flying. Down, Down, Down. My reflexes were not even close to being able to catch it before it went over. We then spent the next 15 minutes looking in the bushes trying to find this brown shoe, in amongst bark and mulch. No luck. Scott climbed over the barrier that keeps Zoo guest a safe distance from the animals. No luck. Finally, on one last attempt, we tried to estimate the trajectory of the shoe from above.

So the first picture is the bush where we FINALLY found the shoe. And the second, I'm pretty sure that's the guy that tried to attack Scott as he was climbing through the bushes, yes, that is why they have that buffer zone between the guest and the animals.

Before we hit the freeway, this was the cuteness in the backseat. The upside of all this out of stroller activity? VERY tired boys.