::peas::

It's something special about peas. Whenever our Sand gets peas in his mouth--after the initial snarfing because of hunger--he spits.

And he spits, and he spits and spits. I'm usually covered with little spots and so is everything else.

He makes like he's hungry for a bite. Then comes the tricky part. Sometimes he is hungry enough to just swallow it. Other times he spits it at me right away. I'm never prepared and it's always startling, disgusting and funny--as long as he catches me on a day when I have my sense of humor intact.

He does think he's pretty funny.
Besides this evening, last time he did this we were out to eat. Luckily we were in an outdoor courtyard where it was loud, so hardly anybody noticed and nobody could complain. I was a little bummed though when I pulled my sunglasses out of a bag under the table and the lenses were all coated with peas.

Please note the concentration--the flexed muscles--the amazing embouchure. He's serious about his spitting exercises.
If only you could hear the sound effects. Maybe someday soon when you come and visit. I'll let YOU feed him the peas.

You won't be able to resist.

::NYC days 6&7::

zoos and food and hanging out....
On day 6 I decided to take Max to the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn. The park is really close to the place we're staying. The problem that I didn't think about is, the park is HUGE. It's like 585 acres or something. (I learned that off of their website of course).
It took Max a good while to get started in the morning. He wanted to hang out and read books and stuff like that. So we did. We left around lunch time. So the first thing we did was walk up to the park and find a place to eat somewhere on the outskirts. We found this cute little italian pizza joint that was just delicious. Unfortunately we couldn't eat our whole pizza. We ordered a "personal" sized pizza. It was by far the biggest personal pizza I've ever seen. A definite steal for $5. We needed Kris there to help us finish it up.

So now, you guessed it, more eating pictures. Hooray!!!

I'm sorry, but I really think Max makes some of the most hilarious faces when he eats. I don't ever notice them until I take pictures and he's frozen in time.



The above photo is my favorite.

You can't really see the pizza because I had to make Max double it over. It was way too gooey and delicious and was getting ALL over him.

After lunch we headed out to try to find the zoo.
Unfortunately for us, the zoo was completely on the other side of the park. Across in the narrow direction, but still all the way across. And the other bummer which I hadn't realized was that there is a lake in the middle of the park, so we couldn't just walk straight across. So we had to walk down and around the lake.
It was hot. We walked. And walked and walked and walked. At one point Max weaseled out of my grip and tried to jump in a really nasty green portion of the lake, but fell in a pile of sticks and rolled ten times instead. It was pretty funny. Served him right.
The rest of the time I just dragged him along by the hand and kept telling him--we're almost there, we're almost there. I didn't realize we really WEREN'T almost there until we finally got there.
I really should've brought the stroller. But, hindsight, as they say, is always 20-20. And we lived to tell the tale, so it couldn't have been that bad, right?
We finally made it to the zoo after lots and lots of sweaty trudging.
It wasn't the most amazing zoo I've ever been to, that's for sure, but it was fun.

It was definitely geared towards little kids. They had a whole "discovery" area that was pretty fun.
Prairie Dog holes of course.

I was cool with him going in every single one until he decided to hide from me in one of the tunnels. He waited to come out just long enough for me to really think he might be lost. Then popped out. Not so funny, huh?

It was so hot that none of the praire dogs would even come out!

They had a spiderweb for the kids to climb on, and lily pads to walk over the water on.
Max thought the dinosaur egg nest was pretty cool.


Being a turtle was probably the highlight of the whole day though. He loved it.



After this he just basically sprinted from exhibit to exhibit, and nothing seemed to hold his interest except the poison dart frogs. I think they're really cool too.
It was like he was a little too overstimulated from the week--the monkeys didn't even hold his interest.

We took the subway home, which took forEVER and then went out and had some dinner with Kris. It was a long hot day, but fun!

Day seven was great. All Max wanted to do was hang out in the apartment. He wanted to read and watch some movies, so we did that basically all day. We walked to McDonald's for lunch--his special request--which was about a mile away.
So we spent all day just hanging out.

Turns out Kris didn't have to stay for friday classes after all and so we left thursday night. It was a fun day, and nice to go home.

I think we'll be going back with Kris for his third week--taking a week off in between. We're enjoying the New York adventures!!

::KC's Fame::

(Warning--I don't know how to spell barbeque. So I've spelled it several differnet ways in this post. I think one of them has got to be right. Just keep in mind, I'm not a dummy...right?)
While my dad was here we thought we'd better let him in on one of the things that makes Kansas City famous. The Barbeque!
He's certainly had barbeque before, and of course he's cooked stuff ON the barbeque a billion times, but he hadn't ever had Arthur Bryant's--those of you from out here know that if you haven't eaten at Arthur Bryant's (or Oklahoma Joe's of course) you haven't really had true barbeque.
So we took him.
And I think he liked it.

He's eating ribs here. We had a platter with ribs, sausage and burnt ends. Mmmm burnt ends. Max likes it too.

I actually don't like going to this place that much, although the food is tasty. It's just really greasy in there, the people you have to order from always look at you like you're the dumbest idiot in the world, and somebody always tells me I can't sit where I want to. Oh, and at lunch the line goes out the door. That tells you something though, right? It sure tastes good.
I found out that people don't like to get interrupted while they're concentrating on ribs.



Which may be why I wasn't able to get a picture of Kris where he wasn't making some sort of ridiculous face.

No matter how hard I tried.

I guess he was trying to concentrate.

This is a decent picture though.

He's cute, even though he needs a haircut really bad.
Basically how this place works is that they give you a big plate full of meat--assorted or all the same, whatever you want. And then you have 3 or 4 squeeze bottles at each table that are filled with different kinds of bbq sauce--Arthur Bryant's signature sauces of course. So you can add whichever flavor sauce you want to your meat. The fries taste great when they're dipped in the bbq sauce too. They also give you as many slices of wonderbread as you want. Sound healthy? Oh yeah....
So we ate and ate--

and ate and ate

and showed Max how not to eat bones

and then when we were all ready to explode, we left.

It was good.
If you want to visit this place with us you'd better hurry up and get out here. Only a month left....