Walking With Dinosaurs A Must See!

Yesterday we took our 3 kids (7,5,3) to an amazing show called Walking With Dinosaurs at HP Pavilion and it was great! The show covers the age of the dinosaur and features a combination of huge animatronic animals and smaller human powered puppets. The kids loved it though they did cover their ears during some of the load simulated fight scenes and dino roars. The visuals are fantastic and the dino's themselves are impressive if not scary!

Here is a great short youtube video if you want to get an idea of what it was like.



The hit of the afternoon is the dramatic entrance of T-Rex to cheers and applause. The show was very high on production value though light on science which is probably appropriate considering the number of small children that were there.

Walking With Dinosaurs is a traveling show and it appears to be working its way back east so if you have a chance to go I highly recommend it.

Reconnecting...

I love all of the social and professional networking sites that exist now like LinkedIn and Facebook. Since I started using those tools a few years ago (well linkedin not facebook since it is new) I've steadily built networks of friends and acquaintances.

Every now and then though something cool happens and it just did for me. When we lived in Australia we met the nephew of our good friends Terry and Ann. Steven was a great guy but we fell out of touch not too long after we left Australia. Well he just found me again on LinkedIn the other day and we reconnected. After graduating from uni (as they call it in England) and working a bit in the North Sea (geologist) he gave that up and followed his passion for responsible travel (gained in part when he was in Australia when we met him) and started a web site that is a resource for anyone who wants to travel differently and more responsibly. It is called Make Travel Fair and is a great site and if you are going to travel I urge you to take a look at it as a resource.

Interestingly one of the things they have on the site are socially oriented news articles which highlight various issues around the world. There are several articles on Burma and specifically on the Karen people which are the refugees we hosted in September.

Great work Steven! I am glad we were able to reconnect and I wish you great success!

Train Challenge

Nicolas is very into his trains. He plays with his GeoTrax almost every day. Now Melissa and I are often involved in the construction of the tracks that Nicolas plays with and lately we have gotten into a bit of a competition over who builds the better tracks. There are lively debates over what makes the best quality track like how many trains can run at once and the likely hood that they will collide, if the track is "self correcting" etc.

This is one of Melissa's creation. While it is clever and gets points on the elevated loop back (very cool) and parallel bridges the trains basically only go in one direction once they have turned around. I'll post some pictures of mine shortly to let the collective be the judge.

I think Santa will bring more track for Nicolas so I see this as a long term thing! Either way Nicolas will be the benefactor of some seriously cool creations to play with!

My theme song for when the girls are older

My friend Philip sent me this link from YouTube - this will be my theme when the girls get older! Watch out!

Early risers...

It's 5:30 am (i would blame jet lag but that would be fooling myself) and I am sitting at the kitchen table trying to catch up on so many thing I rarely have enough time to do (like blogging).

Lea has just come down, as she did yesterday and as she commonly does. She is not a normal child in this regard! I just tried to convince her to go back upstairs and lay down but she refused.

Weird!

I blame my parents for my insomnia (although mine did not start until after college), I guess she will do the same.

Knock Knock...

Dinners at our house can sometimes be pretty roudy and fun. The kids lately have been on a tear to tell and here knock knock jokes which has been very funny. What's funny is not necessarily the jokes themselves rather that they are all telling the same 2-3 jokes over andover again and cracking themselves up.

It goes something like this...

"Knock knock"
"Who's there?"
"A cow"
"A cow who?"
"Cows don't say who they say 'moo'!"
Fits of giggle and laughter.

"Knock knock"
"Who's there?"
"A pig"
"A pig who..."

You get the idea, they will repeat this for the entire barnyard and giggle and laugh the entire time.

Busy Busy

It's been nearly two weeks since my last post. Things have pretty well been crazy busy around here. I've had my first of two nearly back to back trips. There have been more rehearsals for Julia's upcoming play. Christmas preparations including putting up the tree and other shopping related activities have kept us up late.

So while I don't want to make excuses the holiday season is always a busy time for us.