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.

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.

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.

So, Little and I had our standard pancake breakfast this morning. And as we have done for the last few weeks we went looking for tadpoles afterwards. With the same results as the last few times - we didn’t find any. I don’t know if it’s still too cold here, or if we just don’t know where to look. But we’re going to find some! And oh yeah, today was the first time Little Matt fell into the mud. It was quite a sight. I was dipping the net into the muck along the bank (scooping up water bugs and crawdads, just no tadpoles). Little was being his active self along the slippery bank when he slipped and fell backwards. I’m sure it didn’t hurt as the four inches of water and soft mud he landed in must have cushioned the fall. But he cried nonetheless. Of course, I told him to quit crying and that he wasn’t hurt. He told me chocolate milk and a Kit-Kat would make him feel better. And I guess it did. It made him forgot all about being cold and riding home in his underwear.

After lunch we drove out to Buckroe Beach for a bit of kite flying. It was a little cold for the baby so she decided to just stay in the stroller with her blanket while Little Matt and I got our shark and Batman kites aloft. It was very windy so it wasn’t much of a challenge getting them up. But it was still fun. Maybe next time we can make our own kites like the kids from the Little House on the Prairie. I think that should be kind of fun. We can start studying some of the principles of physics and see how we can put them to use.

Okay, wrapping up now. Pictures of todays events are here. And since last week I added one of Maggie Belle with food all over her, the next picture that every baby needs is one where they’re sitting in a clothes hamper. So there you go. Maggie Belle sitting in a hamper. How cute.

Every few months or so, Little Matt and I like to make straight-chain polymers out of of polyvinyl acrylic (PVA) and sodium tetraborate. It’s pretty simple to do. We just mix one part PVA with one part dihydrogen oxide. Then make a solution of about 40 mg of Na2B4O7, and 400 cc of more dihydrogen oxide. Then slowly mix this solution into the PVA mixture. Of course, we add a little food coloring for effect. The result is this great fun-to-play-with polymer!

Okay, so Polyvinyl acrylic is just Elmer’s glue. Sodium Tetraborate is household Borax. And dihydrogen oxide is water. And our polymer is more commonly called slime. I figure it’s never too early to start teaching Little Matt the chemistry behind what we were doing. Check back in a couple of weeks when we set up our meth lab.

Just a regular Sunday here. Little Matt and I had our regular pancake and Hotwheels breakfast. Our weekly treat is to go to McDonald’s for pancakes and then if he’s been good we go to Target or Toys-R-Us and get a Hotwheel car. Lately he’s been more into Legos though.

I just uploaded a few new baby pictures for this week. Nothing too exciting happening here. Maggie Belle is sitting up and wiggling around a lot, but still not very mobile. And she’s still a pretty quiet baby overall. She doesn’t cry too much, just a little bit when she’s trying to tell us that she’s hungry. That’s all. This week’s pictures are at: March 30, 2008.

So last night, Little Matt is upstairs, supposedly getting ready for bath time, when we hear a big crash followed by the extremely loud wailing of a five-year-old. He had pulled out the drawers of his dresser in a nice stair-step manner so he could climb up to the top. Of course this didn’t work and he pulled it over on himself. We’re lucky that he only managed to scratch one finger and one toe, but as he knew he was in trouble, the crying was really something to behold. I’m sure he was scared, and he should have been because he could have really gotten hurt, but in the end he was fine. Maybe he figured if he cried hard enough, he would get the sympathy vote from us and we would forget that he was climbing up his dresser. I would have probably tried the same thing at his age.