::more dog park--not gross::

I hope nobody is bored with the dog park yet.
We go there a lot. It's close to our house, and poor Sultan needs a place to have fun.
When funny things happen there, sometimes they get to show up here.

The other day (a while ago, when it wasn't so cold outside that your ears would fall off--and when there were some leaves on the trees) we headed off for some dog park.

Sultan found some cousins to hang out with.

He was pretty excited about it.

And some lady in the background wore some weird socks. But that's not actually part of the story.

Max and Kris went off to play catch, as usual. And as usual some dogs tried to catch the ball when it was thrown to Max.

That gets on Max's nerves a little bit, so he quit the catch game when he saw a fun and exciting stick lying on the ground.

Wow. Sticks are fun. If you're four.

This dog was hanging around him, salivating over that stick.  Kris and I told him to throw it. So he did.

(this is actually a photo of him just before he threw the stick at ME, but that's another story altogether.)
Well guess what happened after he threw the stick for the dog?

This cute dog ended up with the stick. Max was very upset. He kept telling the dog that he hadn't meant to do it, and that's not what he wanted to happen!!
Eventually the dog gave up on the stick.

Ewww.
And boy with stick headed back out into the wild.

He's just not experienced enough to realize how dogs feel about sticks I guess. Sultan doesn't care about sticks at all, so I guess he has no reason to know.

that dogs love sticks!

I love how the tiny dog is chasing him so confidently, like he could actually do something, while the big guy who could just grab it straight out of his hands is just watching.
It was pretty hilarious.

But then evidently Max smelled something "stinky" (big shock at the dog park, right?) and so he went to do something else.
(check out the crazy dog in the background of that last picture. All four feet are way above the ground!)

He went to play in the shot put cage. Or whatever that is.

"Sultan, come! Sultan come! Sultan come!" Sultan does a bad job listening to Max and I. We're working on that currently.

Other dogs show up of course, but no Sul. He's kind of a butt that way.

He finally showed up. Then Max pretended to be a sad puppy in a cage.

Cute! Sad!

Then we went home.
And since there were still leaves on the trees I took a picture of one.

And here we are again at the end of one of my loooooooooooooong photo essays. If you made it to the end I hope you enjoyed it. Can't go wrong with the dog park (unless of course a dog mistakes you for a fire hydrant.)

::bike man::

Kris has been trying to teach Max to ride his bike without training wheels. At first it was a huge ordeal. Max cried and cried. He just wanted his training wheels back!
But then Kris somehow convinced him that it was super duper cool to ride like dad. And so Max gave it a try. Before this trip he's practiced twice, and he's started to really get the hang of it.

There he goes!

Yikes! He's getting good at swerving, that's for sure.

At our dog park they have this long strip of softish pavement that I think is used for long jump or something. It's perfect for Max to practice riding on. Especially since this day we forgot his helmet, jeeps creeps! That's not a mistake we like to make.

Kris is like "Don't forget to USE YOUR BRAKES!" That's Max's biggest challenge. He forgets about his brakes, takes his feet off the pedals and drags them along the ground to stop. It's not very efficient, and makes for some rather spectacular wipe-outs.

Sultan likes to run alongside--or more usually in front.  See him there just barely in the left of the above photo?  That's made for some pretty good wipe-outs too. He likes to make sure Max is ok, but I don't think he understands that he stresses Max out more than otherwise. But that's ok. He's just a nice and silly dog.

But sometimes it's hard to stick with the practicing.

"Um, Max? We're not here to ride up and down this strip by ourselves!"

And whoever else is there usually feels the need to run alongside too--just like Sul. The other day when we had Max out practicing I raced the boy up and down that strip for what felt like hours. Finally I got tired and Max said that I ran out of "juice."
Luckily as Max says, Grandpa NEVER runs out of juice.





Grandpa didn't run out of juice.  He's tough.  Max is having a great time. He's very proud of himself when he can make it all the way down to the end.

It's about right here he starts to get worried. He's trying to remember how to stop.
By the time we left he was stopping pretty well. So well in fact that I didn't even get a picture of a crash. I'm glad he wasn't crashing anymore, but I'm seriously bummed I didn't get any good action shots.

To finish up Kris rode a couple of races against the bike man.

It was a good day for bike riding. Pretty soon he's going to be riding everywhere, all on his own! And we've found a few places around here that are actually conducive to a small cute boy riding around. It's hard, being in the middle of the city, but we're going to make it work.