Today was the last day of gymnastics for the kids. Today was also the last day of JJ's visit as he returned to Richmond. But he wasn't the only one that went to Richmond, Catherine has gone down to visit Grammy and Pop Pop for the weekend.
We actually had a really nice (and needed) rain yesterday and last night that left lots of picture taking opportunities.
So last night JJ and I watched Fearless. It's the latest, and if you believe the marketing, last Jet Li martial arts film. As always with Jet Li films the fight scenes are a thing of beauty. The story isn't the strongest I've ever seen, but it's a vehicle for fight scenes. For the most part the fights are realistic (meaning no people with mystical superpowers flying around like in Crouching Tiger or Iron Monkey). I won't bore you with the plot, but it involves a fair amount of hubris and it's eventual toll and the self discovery journey back. What I found much more interesting was the undertone of the movie. It's a set in China around 1900 and the "West" is depicted as expanding their influence and power into China. Now as I was watching it I was disturbed to notice a couple of scenes that had throwaway lines that were almost completely unrelated to the plot of the movie. The lines were driving home a theme about how the West was without honor and unduly expanding their influence. None of which is overly surprising in today's day and age I suppose, but during those couple of scenes they would actually comment on how China is it's own worst enemy, but they can be triumphant over the West if they learn from them and country unites to use the West's own tactics against them. It felt more than a bit like propaganda to me. Kind of scary stuff when you consider some the moves China has been making in the global arena recently. Anyway, overall the movie was pretty good, but it had a typical Chinese film ending (meaning much like the ending to Crouching Tiger, I have no idea what happened or what they were trying to get at, but it's an ending). Overall, good martial arts movie if you like that sort of thing.
After all the posts yesterday today's post seems pretty darned boring. The kids went to gymnastics and I went to work. Wow. How thrilling. Might as well toss in a photo of Catherine from tonight and another photo from the park yesterday to spice the post up a bit. Not that I'm saying my daughter is spicy. Or hot. I mean she's cute, but I wouldn't feel comfortable saying... I'm just gonna stop now.
After the last post we all headed home and showered and changed clothes (again) and then had some lunch. The shower was in case we came into contact with poison oak or poison ivy during the hike. The changing clothes was simply because the kids had gotten dirty. At this point though we ran out out of red, white and blue themed clothes for Catherine so she ended up in a white dress. We played some Mario Party while we waited for Ginger's cake to bake, then we finished off the day by heading over the Barry's place for some playing, dinner and (unbeknownst to us) some fireworks.
After the last couple of posts, I'm not sure I can stay up much later typing all this out. Suffice to say that Barry did not lose a hand and put on a great show for all of us. The one bad thing was that with it just having rained, it was a bit muggy out, so the fireworks generated a lot of smoke. And I mean a lot. You could practically get lost in it a couple of times. One thing I found highly amusing was how we had everyone moving around to avoid the smoke, then the wind would shift and suddenly the smoke was heading right to the new spot where everyone was.
Since I didn't know there would be fireworks, I didn't know to bring my tripod, so the fireworks shots are probably less impressive than they could have been. The were better in person obviously. Of course, with the laws around here, it's not like you can have any of the really fancy 'shoot up into the air' fireworks anyway. Heck, I don't even think bottle rockets are allowed anymore.
Some shots of everyone watching as the fireworks are set off. The kids are still a bit put off by the loud noises except for Jacob, who evidently isn't affected in the slightest by loud noises. Also, look at the size of Barry's boys. Reuben is just about as tall as Quinn (if not taller), and he's two years younger. I'm not saying those boys are mutant freaks or anything, but man either they're tall for their age or Quinn is short for his. Hmmm, maybe it's a side effect of Quinn not eating any fruits or vegetables.
Did I mention that they generated a lot of smoke?
And a big thanks to Barry for getting sparklers for the kids. I had never been allowed to let the kids use sparklers in past because we were worried about the kids burning themselves. But they did a great job of keeping them away from their bodies. Catherine was Ms Fearless and was one of the first to want to hold one. Quinn on the other hand had to watch everyone else get to handle one before he decided he wanted to give it a shot. You can see from the photo that even after he got it, he was still a bit timid. I will point out that was a photo at the start of his first one, after that he got much more nonchalant about them.
All in all a really long day. I think I ended up taking close to 400 pictures once all was said and done (and even though it feels like it, no, I didn't include them all here in the posts). Hope everyone else out there had an entertaining Fourth.
So that first Fourth of July post, that covered the day up until about 11 am. From there we headed home and after some clothes changing (my shirt was kind of sweaty and Catherine had gotten popsicle juice all over her shirt) we headed out to Frying Pan Park. Now the kids have been here before (Catherine a couple of times and Quinn at least once), but this was my first time there and since Ginger's brother Uncle JJ is visiting, it was his first time there also.
It's a neat park with lots of interactive stuff and animals that the kids can see. No real surprise, they weren't running the wagon rides today. I was kind of surprised the park was even open to be honest. But the good news is for a weekend I did not think there was a very big crowd at the park at all (probably has to do with everyone thinking it wouldn't be open since it's a holiday).
It's a pretty big park. We eventually ended up around back where the horse riding area is watching some people ride horses and doing some jumps. The kids meanwhile had the best time just climbing on the rocks. It's always amazing to me to see what's going to grab their attention. All this stuff there and jumping around on rocks pretending the ground is lava is what they end up doing.
After a brief snack, Quinn decided we needed to visit the waterfall. Now I've never been there, so I know nothing about this waterfall. And Ginger mentioned that the map for the nature hike was available at the park's store (which we had not been to so we didn't have the map). But Quinn, who heard about this 'huge' waterfall from the guy that was giving the tractor rides last time he was there was convinced we could find it. So I played along. All of this was much to Ginger's dismay since at this point I think she was ready to head home and get the kids some lunch and had been verballing 'hinting' to me that we wouldn't be able to find it and that we should wait until another day. I would have none of that though and feigned ignorance at the verbal hints (the reason Ginger believed that is due to how often I don't pick up on verbal hints normally).
So off we went, walking around the edge of the park until we came upon "Nature Trail 1". There's more than 1 trail? What could go wrong? So off we went down trail 1. This plan lasted all of five minutes until we hit the first branch in the trail. We took the one less traveled and ended up at a dead end after another couple of minutes. Then it was backtracking time. This happened about two or three more times until finally we hit one that diverged and I went one way and the rest of them went the other. Luckily I came across a stream and was able to call everyone back over. If I'm going to be honest about all this, I had an absolute blast walking around through the woods. Even when we would end up going down the wrong trail, to me walking through the woods is just fun (and for the most part I think the kids agree). And not knowing where we were going made it even more entertaining. Although as I pointed out to Ginger, it's not like we could have gotten lost, I mean how large of an area of undeveloped land can there really be around this area?
I found a little tiny place where the water dropped about six inches and claimed that we found the waterfall. No one believed me and then Ginger called us downstream a bit to where we located what I believe is the real waterfall. It's only about a six foot drop, but for the middle of Northern VA, I would say that's pretty impressive.
Having now declared victory in finding the waterfall, we headed back, but I foolishly decided to take a path on the other side of the stream and we ended up at some bridge crossing some road we had never seen before. So then it was time to backtrack some more back to the stream and take the path we came in on, but even then I decided to keep going the way we had been heading originally rather than backtrack (and I still can't believe Ginger went along with this idea given how we ended up at the bridge after my last directional decision), but luckily we ended up on a horse trail that ended up being a great shortcut back to the park.
Surprisingly I didn't take as many non people photos as I would have expected. in fact, the pickings are pretty slim looking over the shots I took. The one above is one of the better ones, which isn't saying a lot about the ones I'm not going to show.
Happy 4th of July everyone. Bring on the fireworks.
This morning we all got up and got ready to participate in the annual community parade. The parade (if it can really be called that) is simply a fire engine that drive around the neighborhood and the kids bike / scooter / get towed along behind it. The kids get streamers and decorations for their bikes / scooters / carriages and then an ambulance brings up the rear.
If you'll remember Quinn was leading the pack through most of the parade last year riding his bicycle. This year, he decided he was going to take his scooter. Huge tactical error on his part. I'm not sure what the deal was, but as fast as they went in the fire engine last year leading the parade (and I remember thinking the pace was pretty fast), they had to be going faster this year. I ran almost the entire thing and we still fell behind. I will leave open the possibility that I'm simply getting older and can't maintain that pace anymore, but I'm pretty sure the fire engine was almost going the speed limit through the neighborhood (a slight hyperbole, but it felt that way).
I was impressed that Quinn manage to stick right behind the engine for as long as he did. To his credit he was right there behind it up until that quarter mile of going up a slight incline. And during that climb the fire engine stepped on the gas and sped up. With only being on his scooter this year and the fire engine moving at such a faster pace he just couldn't keep up.
I've already informed him that if we do this again next year, he's taking his bike and they'll be none of this scooter stuff. To give an indication of how much faster the fire engine went this year, last year I lost sight of Ginger and Catherine around the point of the fire turn, this year I think I lost site them almost as soon as we left the parking lot and got on the road. Ginger later informed me Catherine got trapped behind someone that couldn't get over the speed bump in the parking lot and that set her back to near the end of the pack almost immediately.
Now having said that Catherine gets huge props because this is the first year where she actually completed the entire course and didn't end up taking the short cut that cuts down the length of the parade by about half. She also didn't show up until about 10 to 15 minutes after Quinn finished the race (and I think he was a couple minutes behind the fire engine).
So after both kids finished the parade they had a Popsicle and we all rested for a little bit before heading home. In case you're wondering about why the pictures are so grainy, that would be because I screwed up the camera settings again. I swear I'm going to look into getting a D200 or something if they have multiple programmable customized settings. If I could turn the camera on and simply hit a couple of buttons and know that I'm in the correct mode, that would solve a lot of these problems I have. This one came about because last night there was a rabbit out in our front yard that was pretty fearless (barely even moved unless you came within 10 feet of him). So I got the camera and set the ISO to 1000. The pictures were still too dark (which is why you didn't see a rabbit picture last night, which presupposes I guess that you read this each day, otherwise I suppose you simply might not have seen yesterday's post and thought it had a rabbit picture, but didn't care since rabbit pictures have to be pretty common one would think).
And how did I manage through all this? I felt like I was dying after having finished the parade. I don't know where Quinn and Catherine get this much energy. Must be a youth thing.
We had a moratorium on Wii playing today. So instead we decided to have a semi impromptu play date with Amanda over at Ken and Karen's (I use the term "semi" because I think it had been planned out earlier, but I don't know all the details and there was no official time to meet, and why do I feel the need to explain all this). While we were at their place I made the command decision that the kids really needed to get outside some since it was such a nice day. So we walked over to a park which is practically right beside where they live.
And why Catherine is wearing a dressy pair of shoes playing in the park I'll never know. Actually I do know, I asked Ginger and she told me 'she wanted to wear those'. That's the reason? When did the child suddenly have the decision making power around here? I guess I see who's the boss around here (it's not me, I know that, and apparently it's not Ginger either).
Quinn will be coming home tomorrow so we're all looking forward to that. Except for maybe Quinn, who based on what we hear has been living high on the hog getting completely spoiled by his grandparents. I've heard tales of bowling, mini golf and multiple visits to Friendly's.
In celebration of Quinn's return, I threw together an image that I had meant to do a week or so ago. Even though I took these shots on a tripod and used manual focus and didn't adjust anything, the various pictures were still not exactly lined up. I guess just pressing the button on the camera was ever so slightly affecting the position of the tripod. Off topic rant: I really really hate the Crocs shoes all the kids are wearing these days. I know they're trendy right now, but I just don't think they're good shoes for playing outside. On vacation to walk to the beach? Sure. A quick trip to a store? No problem? Running around and climbing stuff outside? Not so much. And yes, that's just my opinion since if you look at their website you would think that's what the shoes were designed to do.
