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It’s kind of nice, that it’s nearing the end of July and we still have some flowers alive in the landscaping.

Here’s a macro shot of a rather nice red flower (anyone know what this particular flower is called?):

Sophia was standing by my side while I took this picture, repeating: “Daddy, you takin pict-tur of da frowers?” It was cute, my little photography assistant.

You really can’t appreciate this, unless you have a boy

Has anyone missed us?? I don’t even know where to start; I hope this post doesn’t get too long!!

Thursday July 11th after work Kevin and Sophia went to an I-cubs game, which ended up not being such a great idea, since Sophia had no interest in watching baseball, even though she talks constantly about it. Derek hung out with me while I spent the night packing for our big trip. While we were downstairs Derek headed over to the stairs and climbed all the way up…what a big boy!!

Friday afternoon all four of us headed to the airport for our big family trip to Las Vegas and Southern Utah. The kids were perfect angels the entire flight and on the bus to the rental car. Then it turned into a nightmare…It took over a half hour to get signed up for our (already booked) rental car, then we spent another half hour in the super hot, really busy garage trying to find the car, another half hour in line trying to tell the lady our car wasn’t there. Turns out the car showed up while we were waiting in line. So back we go across the hot black pavement to the car, only to find that our second rented car seat was not in the car. This time I was not nice and I went straight to the front of everyone and finally got the car seat. By this time it was rush hour in Las Vegas, so we decided to hit the nearest McDonald’s for some supper. Sophia was tired and cranky, but it got even worse when she decided to share her chocolate milk with Derek, who picked it up and poured it all over his lap and Sophia. After outfit and diaper changes it was back to the car for the 2 and a half hour drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s. We were all so happy when we got to Grandma and Grandpa’s house!! Sophia got a second wind and ran around the house for a few hours, Derek was just happy to get his feet on the ground to crawl around, and Kevin and I were exhausted and happy to let the stress roll off!

We all had a great time while visiting Grandma Marilyn and Grandpa Steve. We spent a day at their friends pool, which the kids just loved. On Monday, we packed a picnic lunch and drove to Zion National park for a day. Zion was gorgeous and we went on a little hike up a paved trail. At the end of the trail was a little river, so we spent some time enjoying the scenery…until it started to thunder. If only we had left 10 minutes earlier!!! We hurried back to the bus, but didn’t make it in time. The sky let out the largest rain drops I’d seen in a very long time!! There were so many people trying to get on the bus, that it took about a half hour to get onto the bus and another hour to make it through the park back to our car. Whew…I didn’t know it rained in the desert!!

We had a great time visiting Grandma Marilyn and Grandpa Steve, but on Tuesday it was time for Kevin and I to head back to Vegas for some much needed alone time, which meant Sophia and Derek got to have some fun with Grandma and Grandpa. As we drove away all we could talk about was how much we already missed the kids…it was the first time we’d ever left them!!

The real reason for the entire trip was because I had a conference Wednesday through Friday at the Mandalay Bay, which was a great hotel. So while I was at the conference during the days, Kevin was…I’ll give you one guess. Yup, in the hotel on the internet. I should be happy that he’s not a big gambler!!

Despite me being at the conference most of the time, we had every night but Wednesday to explore Vegas. The furthest we went was to MGM Grand, but we did a lot of walking and spent some time in almost every arcade trying to win the kids gifts (we just ended up buying them gifts since we never really won anything good). Did you know there is at least 2 Starbucks in every casino?? Thursday we had a wonderful romantic (expensive) dinner and Friday night we got tickets to Kathy Griffin.

On Saturday Grandma, Grandpa, Sophia and Derek came to pick us up. We were so happy to see them. Time to ourselves was great, but we missed them so much. They seemed pretty happy to see us too!! We spent Saturday night relaxing at the Hilton. Grandpa Steve got a great deal on rooms, so Sophia ended up having a room all to herself!!

So the kids slept every night all through the night for Grandma and Grandpa, but Derek welcomed us this morning with a 2:30 wake-up call. Neither Kevin or I could get back to sleep after that. The rest of the day got even better. We got to the airport and through security by 6 am, then a little breakfast and boarded the plane at 7:30. The plane got about 10 ft from the gate and stopped…we sat on that non-airconditioned smelly tin can with 200 sweaty, drunk people for almost an hour when it finally headed back to the gate to deboard. After the long wait for our next plane, we were the first to board, where we sat in yet another non-airconditioned smelly tin can with those same 200 sweaty, now completely hungover and grumpy people for another hour before we finally got into the air. Since Derek has a very bad cold and somewhat fever, he was completely miserable and Sophia spent half the time screaming and kicking the chair in front of her. Once we took off the kids were pretty good as long as we kept food in front of the. It was a pretty challenging flight, but we made it (3 hours late)!!

All in all it was a wonderful trip. Thank you so much to my wonderful parents for showing us such a great time while we were there. And most of all for watching the kids while we had some alone time!! We truly appreciate everything you did to make the trip a great one. And a huge thank you for Grandma Robin for taking our furry child, Lexi, for the week. I know she had a great time too!!

I’m sure looking back we will only remember the good times and not the bad experience of our travel days. However, Kevin and I decided that we will not be flying anywhere for family trips until the kids are out of diapers!!

I went a little crazy downloading/buying games and applications tonight:

My apps so far:

• AIM
• AOL Radio
• Band
• Crash Bandicoot
• Enigmo
• Evernote
• Exposure
• Google Mobile
• MixMeister Scratch
• Ap News
• NetNewsWire
• Pandora Radio
• Apple Remote
• Shazzam
• Sketches
• Super Monkey Ball
• Twitteriffic
• Yellow Pages

What a remarkable picture:

I would have expected it to be a Photoshop composition, but the fact it was posted to a Nasa website, gives it a higher level of credibility.

You can get the full story here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070205.html.

Already!?! Well not quite, but we have a lot going on in the next couple of weeks, so we had Derek’s 9 month check-up a couple of days early. He is a happy, healthy and very active 9 month old!! He is a whopping 30 inches tall (95%), he certainly is taking after his Daddy in height! And he is 21 lbs 6 oz (65%). His ear infections look to be clearing up and he’s eyes look a ton better than last week when we took him in. And best of all…no shots today…YEAH!!

I am also happy to report that Derek’s first word is in fact…”MOMMA”!! Sorry Daddy!

I’m not sure that I mentioned that the other night at supper Sophia said her first really long coherent sentence. She told us…”I watched Caillou and Sesame Street on TV.” She seems to be using more and more words and putting them together in a sentences. Sunday we were on a walk and we were talking about airplane rides and she said…”like Caillou”. This morning I asked Denise if Caillou went on a plane ride and she said last week they watched the show and Caillou did in fact ride on an airplane. She is so smart!!

Look what I got at Amazon.com:

Lynnette says we should send this picture to Amazon.com, because they might be interested in a new online advertising campaign. What do you think?

I don’t want to jinx tomorrow by saying…what a great weekend we’ve had so far.

On Friday we got up early and went to the parade. When the first band was in sight, Sophia’s face froze with amazement. It was the sweetest most sincere excited look I’ve ever seen. It took her a little while to catch on to what the candy was all about, so most of the kids were nice enough to share their candy and put it in Sophia’s bag for her. She was too busy watching everything that was going on. One float was playing the song “You got to Move it Move it”, which is one of Sophia’s favorite songs, and she broke out into a dance on the side of the street, everyone thought she was adorable.

The entire day was full of excitement for Sophia. We had a picnic, played in the neighbors’ giant inflatable pool and water slide, played with water balloons, in a bouncy house, played with a ton of kids, and had blast in the little castle with filled with balls. Derek even loved the bouncy house. It was a great little play pen and he couldn’t hit his head on anything. One little girl was jumping around and he was bouncing up and down and just giggling the entire time. I think we might end up purchasing one of our own. Sophia stopped to take a quick nap with Daddy around 5, then off for some more fun. We ended the night watching the fireworks from our back deck. “WOAH, that’s neat!!”

One of Kevin’s better shots of the fireworks from our back porch.

This morning Daddy made us a great breakfast, with ham, egg and cheese, toast and bacon. Maybe we need to start our weekends out with those types of breakfast, it seemed to keep us all happy for most of the morning. We found Sophia’s old baby pool in the garage and cleaned it up. I filled it with warm water so that Derek could take a dip after he woke up from his nap. Sophia came in from helping Daddy and asked for her diaper to be changed and some shorts on, then back outside she went. I looked out about 5 minutes later and there she is laying in the 2 inch deep baby pool having a blast. We took Derek out later and they had so much fun playing together, splashing around in the water. They played in the water for most of the day.

Tonight we made a quick trip to target and got Sophia a sleeping bag, Dora blanket and a indestructible digital camera that Kevin (I mean Sophia) just had to have. We also got the kids a giraffe tent. When we got home we got the sleeping back and Dora blanket out and Derek fell in love. He would crawl right over to it and lay his head down and just sighed. I think he was in heaven, until Sophia realized he had her stuff and then she run away with it. But he’s so quick that he just chased after her and would sometimes catch up. We had so much fun, we didn’t have time to get giraffe tent up. I guess we’ll have something to do tomorrow.

Hopefully tomorrow is just as fun!

It’s always the simple things that make life so great; things like a box for example:

Sophia defines a new usage for oven mits: