A trip to the zoo

Evan is on spring break so we decided to meet up with some friends at our local zoo. Its a small zoo- very managable and still lots of fun for the kids. The first photo is of the boys checking out the hyacinth flowers for which I am named (Hyacinth is my real first name). Then next one is of Derek petting a goat which he kept calling "dog" :) The last one is of the worlds largest rodent. I forget what its called though but it was about the size of a really fat bull dog. All in all a very good outing!

Scenes From A Sunny Day

Don't you just love those first few good days of spring?! After a long winter its so great to get outside to play. The boys were doing it all...bike riding (Evan is trying to learn to ride without training wheels), baseball, playing on the swing set, etc. To make it even better Dave was able to get home by 5:30, which by todays standards is very early. So we got to enjoy a beautiful day together as a family. It doesn't get much better than that.

"Mom My Ride" Video

I saw this one on another blog from my Jan 2007 DTC group. It is really funny!

Why I need to learn Chinese :)

I saw this video clip on youtube and very quickly decided I needed to visit the Rosetta Stone (company that teaches various languages online and with CD-ROMs) kiosk at our local mall! The guy there was very nice and asked if I would like a demonstration of the program. I asked if I could see the Chinese one. Two minutes into it I felt completely panicked! I had absolutely no idea what was going on...I just wasn't getting it & I kept thinking of this youtube video! So he offered to show the program to me in English (for people learning to speak English) so I could see how the program works. Instead I asked him to show me in Italian. I don't speak any Italian but immediately I could understand how the program was supposed to work and I was picking up a little Italian. Then I asked for German because I grew up in a German speaking household. Yes, this Rosetta Stone program was great, I was sure of it! I get it! Then I asked him to show me Chinese again. Again, I just couldn't get it. Here is what was making it so difficult for me. Let's say I wanted to say "The dog is under the table" in Italian. In English it takes 6 words to complete that sentence. In Italian it's around the same I guess (I'll tell you for sure when I get to that lesson! Ha!) but in Chinese it looked like a 25 word sentence. I had no idea of the breakdown of the individual words or articles. Where Italian seemed intuitive, Chinese seemed "foreign". Oh well, in the meantime, the boys and I are having fun learning Italian now but soon enough I will make the big leap to Chinese so I don't end up like the poor Dad in this video ;)

Mardi Gras Carnival

They had a carnival at the elementary school school Evan will be going to next year. It was very crowded and noisy but we had lots of fun. Did you ever see one of those boths that you go into and it blows around money everywhere and you have to catch as much as you can? I think I have seen them on TV on a game show or something. Well they had something like that at the carnival only you had to catch pieces of paper and the paper said how many "dollars" (fake school dollars) you have won. It was very popular and we waited in a long line to try. But it was worth it...Evan loved it! He was grinning from ear to ear the whole time he was in the booth!The second photo is one of Evan, his friend Patty and Ryan. They had a great time!

Wild West Day!

They had Wild West Day at Evan's school last week. I found some cowboy hats and bandanas leftover from a birthday party and stuck his vest on him. Presto...instant cowboy! Of course, his brothers "needed" stuff too so back I went to the basement for more cowboy stuff. I thought, its only a little extra effort on my part and everyone will be happy plus it will make for a good photo. Of course, I wasn't able to get all three in the photo at once with the assorted cowboy gear in the few minutes I had before I had to drive Evan to school. This photo was a close as it came.

Dave's Celebrity Look-a-like

OK, the first celebrity that they matched Dave with was Rodger Daultry! But it was absolutely ridiculous! They also match you with a few other celebrities and David Schwimmer was one of the other celebrities listed. So I posted his photo. "David Schwimmer" is actually the reason we met. It was 1996 at the Beaux Arts Ball held that year at the Philadelphia Naval Station and Dave (my Dave) walked by and I grabbed his arm and said "David. You look like David Schwimmer". He wasn't thrilled about the comparison but it started our first conversation. And that my friends, is the very simple story of how we met.