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.