::first beach visit::

On Saturday, after Kris got done studying for his board exam we grabbed some fast food and headed down to the beach. The weather was nice and the sun was bright. We got down there around 5PM or so. There were people there swimming which was truly nuts, but we just set up our lawn chairs to enjoy the view.

Max sort of ate, but really was just too excited to be at the beach. He had to run to and from the water constantly. Over and over. And luckily the water was too cold for Max even to get into it. I think this was maybe the first time ever that he's admitted the water was too cold. Otherwise he'd have been in up to his neck after the first 5 minutes.
There he goes:


And he comes:

He's so cute.


Can you read the sand?

We had a great time. It was a little chilly when the sun started to go down, but the beach is just so awesome, you can't go wrong. We're hoping for some serious beachy time before it's time to move. We'll see how it goes.

On the way home we were impulsive and stopped at one of the many roadside ice cream places. Kris and I shared a banana split and Max got his own serious cone. He was way serious about it too.


And he made a very serious mess.

We had so much fun. And by the way Kris's board exam is over with now, for better or for worse. I'm thinking for better. Hooray for a big thing over with!

::last day::

Today was Max's final day of nursery school. I can hardly believe it! I mean, it seemed like the winter lasted a lifetime, but it feels like his school year just flew by.
The kids have grown so much in the last nine months--in lots of ways.

I don't know if I've talked about this before, but this school is a co-op school, where parents are involved in all aspects of the school. That means that I got to go in and be the teachers' aid at least once a month during the year. It was so nice because it let me have a little window into his world. I got to know the other kids at school, as well as the teachers, and I was able to observe the way their days went, so I could ask him better questions.
The co-op set up builds a community of parents around the kids, and it's really cool.

Today we all got together at the end of class, and the kids sang a long silly song they'd made up. Then each kid got a little certificate of completion. Then they all got ice cream. TONS of ice cream.
It was a fun little party.

I had to extract Max from a lip locked bear hug at one point with a little boy that adores him. It was pretty funny.
We're going to miss the kids and teachers, it's been a great school year!

(Max's b-day didn't get celebrated in school because we were out of town all of feb--they put him in with the summer birthdays today, and he was pretty happy about it.)

Thanks to our wonderful friends that told us about this school, we were lucky to know about it and to get him in!

::fun, food and (fond) farewell::

We had so much fun with Kelly here. Thanks to his wife Lechelle for sharing him. We hadn't seen them since last year, before we left Kansas City. It's been a while, and Max has grown quite a bit. Thank goodness for blogs and stuff that let us share photos and keep each other posted on life.

We ate some really good food with Kelly. After our kite flying fun on the coast we went to a little "crab shack" kind of place in Narraganssett, right by the beach called Iggy's. Kris and I had been there once before and we knew it was tasty.
Kelly got the fish and chips he'd been dreaming of. Kris joined him. Max got a hot dog. My fish sandwich so was big I hardly made a dent in it. It was really good though.





They also have these things called "doughboys" at this place. These are not WW1 soldiers, as you might think, but are like deep fried scones covered in cinnamon sugar. They're strange and quite scrumptious. We also found out while there that there's one of these places really close to our new house. So next visit we'll take you there.

We bar b qued. How do you actually spell that? Anyway, we did it.

We didn't get to eat outside because although it looks really nice and sunny in that photo, sunday was a thunderstormy day.

We got ice cream--this involved a broken credit card machine, a lot of driving around to get cash, and five dollars worth of ATM fees. The ice cream wasn't worth it, but the company was.




One of the best things (as far as I'm concerned) done over the weekend was the bathing of the stinky Sultan. He was SO so so stinky. And the guys all got together and cleaned him up. It was wonderful. And he's much shinier now. And less yucky.

He sure looks hangdog.

He thought I was going to save him from the crazies with the hose, but NO.


Then of course, just before Kelly left we made the Bad Max movie. (as linked to in the post below). Production was quite fun, as you might imagine.

Wardrobe change--bad max to good.

Action shot--you get an idea for some of the production magic that goes into these films.

BAD MAX! Look out, he's scary.

Now we're just trying to remember how to get back into real life--between moving, visits and weird weather it's been a strange month.
Max is also hoping that the sun will remember to come back out. It's been cloudy, rainy and under 60 degrees for the last few days. How are you supposed to use squirt guns under those conditions?

::sharks, mice and the future::

Disney World is just so fun.  Even if you're not a big time disney fan, there's so much to do, and everything is so thought out, to the last detail. They work so hard making the lines where people wait entertaining and fun. I just love getting there and looking around at everything.

One of my favorite places there (and at Disney Land) is Tomorrowland. It's just so fun and retro funky futuristic. I especially love the rocket ride. Well that's not technically true. I actually hate riding on it, it makes me totally sick, but I love looking at it.

Check it out. Isn't it beautiful?

I love how many colors there are, and also how many weird things are hanging or rotating or dangling from it. Fun stuff.

And here's Max's favorite ride (well, ONE of his favorites. He did have at least three.)

Recognize it?
Yep, space mountain. The same space mountain that I didn't ride on until I was like 14 because everybody told me it was way too scary.
I didn't really want him to go on it, but Kris got him all hyped up about it. He was so excited. So I said that at least Max needed to try riding Thunder Mountain first. That one is crazy, but at least it's outside in the light so you can see what's happening, rather than dark and super fast like Space Mountain.
Well, Max loved Thunder Mountain of course, and we had to do it twice. Then we moved on to Space Mountain. I was really nervous for him because the way it's set up only one person sits in each seat--like I mean there's no bench seats, just three people in a row behind each other.
But he loved it. He got off and said "That was AWESOME!!!" and we had to do it again. He's nuts.

We were on the dining plan for our trip, which means we paid for all our meals upfront, then got a sit down meal, and fast food meal and a snack every day. So Max got to eat all sorts of things that normally he wouldn't get to. Like ice cream and churros. I was always dying for churros at disneyland when I was little. He didn't like his much. Strange.
Anyway, he loved the mickey mouse ears ice cream bar.



Kris and I were thinking that the boy just has no idea how lucky he is! Didn't we all wish we were only children at one point, and got to eat and do whatever we wanted? Well, hopefully that won't be the case here for too long. He needs a bit of the hard knock life. Don't we all.


Max loves the Nemo ride at Epcot.

The outside is so fun looking. They have this fake beach sort of area with splashing surf that comes in.

The silly seagulls stand by the surf and say "MINE, MINE"

There are big models of the fish nearby too.

So cute.
We took a picture of Max by Nemo when we were there last fall. He's almost falling over, it's a crack up. See?

He looks older now. I guess that's what happens in a year.
Nemo used to be Max's very favorite movie. He's grown out of it a little, but he's still very fond of fishies.

After the Nemo ride you come out into a building with a lot of different fish in aquariums. There's a pretty scary shark there too.

Yikes!

Then Max dropped his gum out onto the floor, and Kris had to go around and pick it up. Gross!
Pretty fun...
I'm missing the nice light jacket weather now. It's freezing here. With all the snow, at least it looks christmassy, which is nice.

::Summer::

See his pink cheeks? We took a walk down the street to run some errands, and by the time we were done he was so pink and hot. I felt bad for him and got him this ice cream sandwich. He'd been craving one for a while.
He took it out back (not his choice). In these photos he's sitting in the window of the back neighbors garage that backs up to our backyard (um, get the idea that it's the in the back??.) He told me he was "getting some fresh air in the dark" over there.
I love the way he puts things sometimes.

It actually finally cooled down today. It felt great.

::NYC week 2 day 2::

Max and I spent most of the day exploring Park Slope on monday. Park Slope is a nice area of Brooklyn that's just a couple of subway stops away from where we were staying. I had read that there was a good toy store over there, so we went to find it.
I thought it was kind of ghetto, but Max liked it. We stayed for a long time. He rode trikes and scooters and played with all sorts of toys. I found him some workbooks--alphabet and numbers. He can read pretty well by now but can't write many of his letters and numbers. We're going to work on that.

When Kris got done with work we decided to go down to Coney Island to have hotdogs at Nathans and so Kris could have his own personal Coney Island experience.



Here's Nathan's. Can you see the countdown on the left side? 361 days until the next hot dog eating contest!
I'm thinking maybe some of you readers don't know about the hotdog eating contest? I hope you all do actually. It's quite the exciting event that happens every 4th of July. It's been going on ever since the early 1900s when a couple of immigrants got together to see who could eat the most hotdogs. I'm assuming this happened at Nathan's. Pretty funny, huh? We usually like to watch it on ESPN. It's hilarious. But we don't have cable this year, so we didn't get to.

Here're the stats for the last couple of years. Yeah, that's 66 hotdogs in 12 minutes. Isn't that disgusting?

Look at 1988. He won with only 13 hotdogs eaten?!? What?!? Kris thinks he could've dominated in 1988. I don't really want to see it.

But while we were there he trained.

But I would only let him eat one hot dog.
Max looked on:

I'm sure he wants to be just like his dad. Yikes?

Max and I ate corn dogs. They were really tasty. And they tasted like they were very very bad for us.



After the nutritious dinner we decided to let Max have a dip in the surf. We were actually smart enough to bring his suit and a towel this time! Kris brought his suit too, in case he had to go in for any ocean rescues.
Max was thrilled. When he's at the beach he's like a ball of pure joy. I took about a billion pictures, here are only a few. Check it out.

Yes, that's just yucky crud lying there on the beach. It was a pretty dirty seedy place. But Max didn't care.







They're cute, huh?



The water was pretty cold. But again, Max didn't care. It didn't stop his leaping and jumping and dancing and pretending to swim.





We finally dragged him out by promising a $3 ice cream cone.

At least he appreciated it!
Kris took a photo of me that I don't mind to much.
Then we headed home. That was enough fun for one day!