Winter Hayward Trip

Late in January we went up to Ryan's parents' house in Hayward.  Due to his father's health problems, Ryan had spent the previous weekend there, and I was concerned whether a family visit was appropriate.  It turned out to be a great experience, though.  
      
Our first morning there, I was half awake when I heard what seemed to be loud turkey noises coming in our window.  We went outside to investigate, and saw a flock of huge wild turkeys on the hill behind the house.  I guess this is a new thing, since Ryan never saw a wild turkey growing up, but it was pretty awesome.  Those birds are not small.  By the time we had the kids up, and found the camera, they had flown to the other side of the fence, but you can see one behind the chain link in these pictures.  The kids spent hours that weekend climbing all over the hill, with no serious injuries.
     

      

You can see the turkey just above Elise's head.  No, I don't mean Connor

We saw the turkeys fly across the canyon later, which surprised me.

Ryan spent his childhood exploring these hills.

Two weeks before our trip, Ryan's dad had a pretty serious fall.  While at the hospital, he was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer.  That wasn't a total surprise, there had been rumors of cancer, and his health had obviously been going downhill, but having to face the reality of Granddad's mortality was a bit of a shock.  (*Ryan wasn't comfortable with me posting this information initially, so I edited the post to remove reference to cancer.  I have since restored it to the original version.*)  The family currently has a health aide there to help him when they can't be at the house, and we were lucky to see him improve quite a bit while we were visiting.  Of course, the problem with improvement is that he wants to do things that just aren't very safe in his current condition.  In these pictures, Alex (one of Merrill's employees) is taking him out to do some work-related business.  Ryan's dad still works full-time running a demolition business at the age of 93.  Wow, huh?
     

  

    
I got Ryan a bike rack for Christmas, so we gave it a try on this trip, and the kids were able to ride their bikes on the private road.  It's the perfect little-kid bike path.
       

Bomi and Elise

      
Monday afternoon we went down to Children's Fairyland in Oakland, which is supposedly the place that inspired Walt Disney to create Disneyland.  It's a little bit run-down and old-fashioned, but that was what made it so awesome.  Luckily, we've been reading nursery rhymes a lot this year, and most of the other stories were familiar, too.  The kids had a great time, with the exception of the carousel.  The attendant there told Elise she was too short to ride a horse, but was welcome to ride on a bench.  It was so, so sad.  We had a hard time not laughing at her.  At the end, we watched a wonderful puppet-show production of "The Gingerbread Boy" (but forgot to take pictures.)
     

Mad Hatter

A Griffin?

Each kid got a cute plastic key that activated voices in the displays.

Steering Captain Hook's Ship

Climbing on Captain Hook's Ship

Train Ride

Oh, she was mad.  And sad.  We promised her a cookie to fix things.

We spent a lot of time at the house, visiting with Ryan's family.  Evan and I had a cold, so we tried not to be near Merrill, but Ryan and the other kids were able to spend time with him.  I'm really glad we went.
   

Doing "Walk Like an Egyptian" on Just Dance 2

     
On the way home, we stopped at the home of Larry Loos, one of Ryan's old scout leaders and family friend.  He gave us a frozen pheasant he had shot himself, and showed off his gun collection (at Ryan's request, I wasn't terribly interested.)  The kids also got to pet horses and throw frisbees for their dogs.  
   

     
Somewhere in the middle of farm country we stopped to tend a fussy baby, and Ryan took the kids on a walk into some kind of empty field.  It was a good way to wear off energy, but they came back coated in thick muddy clay.  Both the kids had fallen down at some point (of course), and everybody's shoes had to go into grocery bags.  Here are my three tough guys showing off before we left. 
       

My Boys

Fun at Home

So, every year I give myself permission to buy $100 of emergency preparedness stuff.  This year, I finally bought one of those cheap little wheat grinders everybody has, so that my pitiful stash of wheat might be useful for something in an emergency.  Anyway, Connor decided this was the coolest toy ever invented. When I finally insisted that we had enough cracked wheat, he pouted in the corner.  It was pretty good, actually, after I figured out how long it needed to be cooked (a long time.)   Don't feed it to your kids three days in a row, though.  Just sayin'.
    

   
One afternoon we decided to see which kinds of nuts squirrels would eat.  The kids piled acorns, pistachios, walnuts, and almonds, I think, on a flat rock near our oak tree.  It turns out they eat everything.
    

    

   
Right around January 2nd, our little guy Evan figured out how to crawl!  I think he's my first baby to really be a crawler - the others rolled and scooted mostly.  It was so funny how hard he had to concentrate at first, but after a few days he was scurrying around like a little bug.  Now I have to baby-proof everything again.
    

   
I've started a tradition on New Year's Day (or near it, since I usually forget) where I measure the kids on their growth chart and take a picture.  This was our third year, and Evan's first mark on the chart!  Measuring him standing up was a little tricky by myself, but we managed it.
   

New Years 2011

This New Year's Eve, we decided to repeat our bad parenting from two years ago and take our kids out at midnight to see the Rose Parade floats.  The kids went to sleep around 8pm, then we got them back up around eleven so we could make it to the staging area by twelve.  We brought along some of those confetti poppers and some New Year's crackers, which the kids thought were awesome because they contained a crown and cheap toy.  It was crazy cold, but we had fun looking at the staged floats up close.  This was the first year that Connor really understood the point of everything, which made our missing the countdown kinda anti-climactic, but he didn't seem to mind.  We just weren't paying attention to the clock, and the people around us must not have been, either, so we did our own little fake countdown instead.

Christmas/New Year's Cracker Treasures!

That's my new purple stroller, by the way.  I love it!

Evan is hidden in my "Baby Wearing Coat"

The Saturday after New Year's Day we had our annual Primary Breakfast.  The point is for the kids to come and meet their new teachers for the year.  Elise was sooo excited to be old enough for Primary, and Connor was all about sharing his wisdom with her.  My favorite thing about the activity is that all we have to do as a presidency is show up with sugary cereal and milk, and the kids think it's the greatest party ever.
    

CTR 5 Class

Sunbeams!

Elise is hiding in the herd.  Gotta love the preschool rope.

    
Lastly, here are a couple other pictures of my goofy kids.  They got to decorate these giant gingerbread man kits over the holidays.  The decorating was fun, but the cookies themselves were sort of inedible.  Oh, and whoever invented little round sprinkles is evil - I was cleaning them up for days.  Also, I walked into the living room one evening to see that Elise had buried Evan in living-room clutter.  He liked it.
   

  

Merry Christmas

We had a great, quiet Christmas this year.  We spent Christmas Eve at the home of some friends we hadn't seen in two years (the "other Browns"), and got home so late we had to wake the kids up to put them in their Christmas Jammies.  Christmas morning we just hung out and opened presents, then had our traditional waffle breakfast.  Later we called family and watched "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer".  
   
Among other things, Connor got a loom (he'd been asking for one since the County Fair), Legos, a Pillow Pet, and a vintage Transformer Dinobot (which Ryan found on ebay.)  Elise got a doll house, a scooter (to replace the one I backed over), a Pillow Pet, a pink tutu, and a huge creepy spider puppet.  She had been asking for a toy spider that could crawl on people, so the puppet seemed perfect.  When she opened it, however, she looked at it in a confused way until Connor shouted, "It's a spider!"  Then she threw it down and backed up, all freaked out.  It was awesome.  A minute or so later, she decided it was cool after all.  Evan . . well, Evan didn't really ask for anything, and he has soooo many hand-me-down toys, that I only got him a few small things.  He got a new stroller (okay, that's kind of for me), a baby squeaky toy, and a cute stuffed puppy.  He seemed content with the wrapping paper, honestly.  Ryan got a bike rack for the van, and I got a new computer desk that makes our living room seem much less like a college dorm (sorry, no pictures.)
    

The camera spent the night in the cold car, so this photo has a nice frosted look

Christmas Morning

I don't know what genius did the marketing for Pillow Pets, but every kid on Earth has one now.

Evan's First Present (wrapping paper was too complicated for him)

What's inside?

Opening . . .

Merry Christmas, Evs!

Christmas  afternoon we met up with a couple of our neighbors and went to the park.  Kinda weird for Christmas, right?  I mean, isn't it supposed to be too cold for that sort of thing?
    

We found a place where there were actually enough leaves to make a pile!

I miss the phase of my life before I discovered ugly yellow spiders.  Leaves weren't cool after that.

  
Anyway, we had fun, then went home to eat our Christmas Crab.  Nice cozy holiday.  
  

A day or two later, after the kids had been put to bed, Ryan and I were talking in our room and heard a strange noise.  Ryan went into the hallway, peeked into the bathroom, and saw this: