My new favorite picture of Sadie

Sadie is pretty close to walking now. She takes steps here and there, and sometimes three or four in a row. The problem is, as soon as Jake sees her taking steps, he runs over and screams "GO SADIE!!" and she gets startled and plops back down.

See more recent pictures of Sadie here.

Fun at National Building Museum

On Sunday, we headed down to the National Building Museum to watch the DC Maxecuters demonstrate their rubber band-powered airplanes. They have a variety of styles, but most are built out of balsa wood and tissue paper, and powered by long rubber bands. They twist them up and let them go in the main hall of the Building Museum. After a series of test flights and adjustments, the competition begins to see whose plane can stay aloft the longest. The planes are designed to slowly climb in a spiraling motion, and then slowly descend as the rubber bands unwind. Here are some pictures of the planes and their owners from last year's competition. We've been a couple of times before, and Jake's loved watching them go round in circles, but this time, Jake wanted his own plane so he could participate. Luckily, the gift shop had a little glider that he had fun throwing around.

But he quickly realized that his little glider didn't have a rubber band or propeller and couldn't fly for more than a few seconds. I may have to try my hand at building one of those planes - for Jake, of course. Stay tuned....

More pictures here.

Go Wizards!

The Wizards just beat the best-in-the-NBA Celtics for the second time in two nights! After beating Boston in Washington Saturday night, I just hoped the Celtics wouldn't beat the Wiz by the average 26 points they've beaten the next team following a loss. And when Washington was down 14 with 6 minutes left in the fourth quarter at the Garden, I told Ali to go to bed so she wouldn't have to watch an ugly ending. But she stayed up (eyes closed) in support of her team and I think we both had jaws dropped as seconds ticked down and the Wiz appeared in control of the game after a hard-fought comeback.

Go Wizards!

Pokeeno

Ali's been feeling a bit under the weather for the past several days, with varying degrees of queasiness. Well, I could tell she was stressed out about something and she finally said maybe we should pick up a pregnancy test. Even though I was 95 percent sure what the results would be, I knew I had to go pick up the test if either of us were going to get any sleep last night. In the meantime, I caught Ali asking Jake if he wanted another baby sister or brother. He said "ok" and Ali asked him what we should name the new addition to the family. I figured he'd say Pokeeno Baby, since Pokeeno is the pre-fix he assigns anytime we ask him what something's name is. "Pokeeno Tiger" or "Pokeeno Kitty" or "Pokeeno Taxi". But that's not what he said this time. He simply replied, "Baby Jesus".

Oh, the test results were negative, by the way.