Late Night Parties

Wow, so I've finally crossed the line and started an online journal (sorry, the word "Blog" makes Ryan nauseous.) I figured everyone was sick of getting no pictures or emails from me for months at a time, then getting a glut of 30-plus pictures at once. This will force me to be a little more selective, and allow me to actually explain what the pictures are of.

This week has been way more eventful than our family is accustomed to. Last Saturday night we went to the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium down near Long Beach to see the grunion run. Grunion are these little 6-inch long fish that, on certain nights in the summer, swim up onshore to spawn. They only do it on particular beaches between about 10:30 and midnight.

I stole that picture from some other person's blog, since we never actually got close enough to the grunion to get a good shot of them (we did see them, though, it was pretty cool!). What ended up happening was that there were thousands of people there that night. Way more people than fish. Everybody was waiting around for hours waiting for these fish to show up, and when the aquarium staff gave people the okay to get closer, it turned into just a bunch of strangers splashing around in the ocean together in the dark. Kinda weird, but it was fun anyway.

The kids had a good time, but were pretty wiped out from being up that late -- we barely made it to church the next morning.

Monday night I got my Mother's Day present of tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie downtown at the Nokia Theater. See if you can guess where our seats were:

They were right near the little letters saying "MEZZ" -- okay, not the best seats in the house, but we had alot of fun anyway. I didn't want to lose my camera so we didn't get any pictures of the concert, but it was really cool. The kids were up pretty late again with the babysitter, especially Elise.

Tuesday night, we put Connor to bed around 10, but Elise just decided that she'd been up late for the past couple nights, so why change now? She actually freaked out and screamed in her room so many times that I just gave up and took her into the living room to play for awhile. Around midnight she decided she was done and let me put her to bed.

You might be wondering about her Angelina lips. Earlier that night, right after dinner, she took a deep breath, clenched her fists and deliberately BIT her upper lip so hard that blood ran down her chin. She quickly realized that this was not a fun activity, but her lip swelled up pretty badly, and was puffy for a couple days afterwards.

The next night, Wednesday, we went to some friends' house for dinner, and Connor had been inside for about two minutes when he discovered a light-up hula hoop. He picked it up and their german shorthair went ballistic. She jumped at him and bit the front of his shirt before the owners could pull her away (they locked her up immediately and were very apologetic). We didn't want to make a big deal of it while we were there, but it did leave a nice imprint of dog teeth in his poor little chest. Here he is showing it off:

Notice the nice rabid drool pouring from his mouth. Actually, I should inform any worried family members that Connor was okay. The dog was fully vaccinated, and the pediatrician told me by phone that I didn't need to worry about it - just clean it with hydrogen peroxide. We've used this as a good opportunity to teach him that all dogs are not Portia and Wiley, and this is why we don't pet strange dogs we see in public.