Okay, we just finished another holiday season and I’ve got some photo albums to make to get this site current. We had a great Christmas with me, Lisa, Little Matt, Maggie Belle and GiGi. We had a great trip to Colonial Williamsburg on Christmas Eve but forgot the battery for the camera so we’ve got no photographic evidence of the visit. But we did go; I promise.  I’ve got a couple more albums I want to make of me and Maggie Belle dropping GiGi off at the airport and of me and Little Matt exploring the railroads here on the Peninsula. We saw a nice CSX engine pulling about a hundred coal cars– and Little got the engineer to wave as he drove by. That’s all for now. Our album of opening christmas presents is here. Happy New Year everyone!

So we just celebrated Little Matt’s sixth birthday (photo album here). We started Friday night by going to Cracker Barrel for dinner and picking up a couple of rocking chairs Gigi bought. They’re going to be great for sitting on the balcony in the warmer weather. Maggie Belle has already taken to hers and so far just likes climbing up into it, rocking about twice, climbing back out and then doing it again. Of course Little Matt got more Lego sets. He got another City set from his cousins, a Bionicle set from Maggie Belle, another Bionicle from his dad, and a Clone Wars speeder from Mom. I had to break the trend and get him the most classic games of naval strategy - Battleship!

We had the birthday party on Saturday at the Norfolk Zoo. It was a great event with an animal trainer who actually brought live animals for the kids to learn about and even touch. There was an African millipede, a Pygmy tenrec, poison dart frogs and the coolest of all… a big boa constrictor! Overall it was a busy and fun day. That’s all for now. Happy Birthday Little Matt. I hope you had a nice time.

And as always, check out our store for some great science Christmas presents.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here but it’s not because we haven’t been documenting most everything that’s happening in the kids’ lives. Since my last post, we took another trip to the Botanical Gardens, visited the zoo, visited with Gigi, celebrated Maggie Belle’s first birthday, watched her take her first steps, went to the Poquoson Seafood Festival, had a fall festival at Little Matt’s school, carved jack-o-lanterns, went to the zoo for Halloween, went fishing at our favorite pond in Newport News, VA and have taken a number of miscellaneous photos. I just finished posting six new photo albums so with a few exceptions, we’re all caught up! The following are the links to the photo albums.

Another trip to the Norfolk Botanical Gardens, August 29, 2008.

A trip to the Norfolk Zoo, September 14, 2008.

A few pictures of Gigi’s visit, September 15-17, 2008.

Maggie’s first birthday party (the day she really took her first steps!)

A cold day at the Poquoson Seafood Festival.

Little Matt catching his first fish!

That’s it for now. I’ll try not to be so long in between updates for the next couple of months. Especially with Little’s birthday coming up and of course, the fall and winter holidays.

Well we didn’t get a real vacation this year, and since we live in Hampton Roads and Lisa and I both work in Virginia Beach, we decided to take our vacation after work one Friday evening. We started at the Purple Cow Diner for an early dinner then drove to the waterfront for the rest of our vacation. Little Matt and I got to drive a race car (video game) and rode wet bikes (again, video game), and even played some skee ball. We window shopped for a little while on Atlantic Avenue and again, managed to walk by all the shops selling hermit crabs without buying another one. We walked along the boardwalk for a bit and heard some Kool and the Gang cover band before getting some tasty chocolate at one of the Forbes’ Candy stores. That pretty much concluded our 2008 vacation and we drove back home to Hampton. Overall, a great night out!

That was last weekend. This weekend we spent Friday having a picnic at the Botanical Gardens and this morning, Lisa ran the Rock and Roll half marathon in VB while Little Matt, Maggie Belle and I ate breakfast and cheered her on. She’s a great runner and we are all very proud!

Check out the best selling Christmas toys for 2008 at Atomic Elephant Science and Toy Co.

Just a quick post this morning as I just wanted to upload a few pictures from Mom and the kids’ trip to the Botanical Gardens in Norfolk yesterday. Unfortunately I had to work and missed the trip but we’re planning another trip for my day off next weekend. We’re going to make a picnic out of it and we’ll make sure the kids wear their bathing suits so they can have even more fun in the fountains. That’s all for now. Check out the photo album here.

I know it’s been a while since posting, but I just uploaded three photo albums tonight covering the last three weeks or so. The latest news is that Maggie Belle is almost walking. She’ll take a few steps if she can hold onto one of our hands, but then she gets tired and plops down to crawl again. We did get her a doll stroller that mainly serves as a walking trainer and she’s been enjoying that. She was so proud this first day of walking behind her little stroller. She hasn’t really figured out which is the front and which is the back, but she’s using it nonetheless.

The next photo album is of our trip last weekend to the County Fair in Franklin, VA. It was pouring rain for most of the drive and for the first hour or so there, but it let up some and Little and I got to go on a few of the rides. I guess “few” being key here as there were only a few rides there. I hadn’t been to this county fair in almost 15 years and somehow I remembered it being much bigger. But we did get to see some blue-ribbon chickens, ducks, rabbits, cows and pigs. And not to mention a humongous watermelon. And while we weren’t quite in the mood for funnel cakes, we did have some deep fried mini donuts.

And the last photo album in this post is of Maggie Belle doing what she loves doing more than anything– eating. This should be a nice way to document how much she’s growing if I can post a few chronological pictures every now and then of her sitting in the high chair. A couple of these are from April, and the rest August. I’ll try to post to this album with a little more regularity going forward.

That’s all for now. As usual, you can check out my store’s best selling toys here.

So, I’m 38 years old today and another great year of my life has passed. I just realized that I’m exactly half way to the average life expectancy of American men. I only feel like I’m about a third done, but for that to be true I’ll have to live to be 124. Probably not very likely. But I’ll give it a shot.

Anyway, nothing too new to report. Maggie Belle is getting pretty mobile with her crawling and Little Matt is doing well with walking. Of course, he’s almost six so he should be pretty good by now. Here are a few pictures from last weekend’s trip to Sandy Bottom Park here in Hampton and of me and Little with my birthday cake last night. And I’ve still got to plug my store selling science kits and educational toys. Check it out here…

Today was a nice, uneventful Sunday here in Virginia. Instead of Little and I making our regular trek to McDonald’s for pancakes, we made our own breakfast with the cool as-seen-on-TV Pancake Puff Pan that I picked up yesterday. If you’ve never seen the infomercial, it’s a cast iron pan with seven round holes in which you put pancake batter. How it’s different from a muffin pan is that it’s made from a heavy iron (in which you use it directly on the stove top) and the holes are truly hemispherical, as opposed to the flat bottoms of muffin pans.

The first batch turned out fine. We made plain ones first and ate them with syrup. They had a standard pancake taste except they were like little balls. We put hot dog chunks in the second batch but we let the pan get too hot so they were a little burnt. That was okay, we ate them anyway. We made a third batch of plain since we had batter left over. We were both full so we gave a couple of these to the dog. He enjoyed them. My overall review of the new Pancake Puff pan: it’s kind of neat, but not nearly as easy as the infomercial makes it look.

After our Pancake Puff breakfast, we drove out to Buckroe Beach for a couple hours of fun time. Nothing too exciting, but you can see the pictures here. Little and I went to Target and Sonic afterwards to give mom a bit of rest time. We picked up presents for everybody! Little got a Lego Bionicle. Mom got a “Goonies” DVD for next week’s family movie night. I got a bargain bin video game (American Conquest), and Maggie Belle got a 92 pack box of diapers. The diapers were our whole reason for going to the store– the others were impulse items. That’s all for today. And as always, if you’re looking for some best selling toys, check out our store: Atomic Elephant Toy.

Today was a nice lazy Sunday here in Virginia. Little Matt and I walked to McDonald’s in the rain for our Sunday morning pancake breakfast. We stopped by Bender’s (our local comic book store) on the walk home and then the whole family drove up to the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News. Little had a mini-fit as he wanted to go to Toys-R-Us instead of some educational museum place but he forgot all about the toys after about two minutes in the museum. Check out the pictures here.

They had a really cool dinosaur exhibit with a Tyrannosaurus Rex, another large sauropod (it wasn’t a brachiosaurus but something similar) and a couple of other theropods. The museum was a really interesting place. Their regular exhibits had all the wildlife indigenous to Virginia including: fish, frogs, snakes, rats and the various river and sea life found in the Chesapeake Bay and James River. And they had a raised wooden walkway that led through several acres with exhibits of wolves, foxes, raccoons, opossums, turkeys, deer, vultures and eagles. It was a very nice setup. If you live in the area and are reading this, it’s well worth the trip.

I also posted some pictures from around the 4th of July here. I had to work all day so we didn’t do anything too exciting like watching a big fireworks show but Little and I watched a few from our balcony off the third floor. And don’t forget, if you’re looking for a list of some best selling toys, check out some of our store’s top sellers here.

A few things have happened since I last posted so I should write a few words to update our baby’s progress. Maggie Belle has a new tooth. She still has her original bottom two and now four on top. I don’t think she’s going to need dental floss any time soon as you can still see a good bit of gums between the top ones. But it seems like she’s enjoying the six teeth she does have.

She also started crawling this week. She’s still not too mobile but she can make her way across the living room floor in a few short minutes. And we think she’s going to be walking any week now. She also discovered a few new sounds this week. She likes to click with her tongue and make hissing sounds. I guess only a parent would think that’s cute. I’m sure the people around us in the movie theater tonight didn’t think it was too cute.

That’s it for now. I also posted some pictures from our trip to Georgia a couple months ago. You can see the photo album here. Oh yeah, anybody who’s reading this who doesn’t know about our educational toy store that sells science toys, please check it out.