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.

Two Success Stories

Well, the Wizards just beat the best-in-the-NBA Celtics. GO WIZARDS!

The other big news is that Jake's doing great with potty-training! He's been out of diapers for the past week and except for one slip-up in my closet on the first day, no accidents! And last night we went out for BBQ with the Jacksons, and Jake got to use his first public potty! GO JAKE!!

"And what that guy say?"

Lately Jake has been fixated on conversations that real or imaginary people may be having. If we're in the grocery store and they call for more cashiers over the PA system, Jake will immediately ask: "What that guy saying?" When we read stories, Jake interrupts every page to ask "What little doggie saying? What she saying? And what that guy saying????"

But we realized that he's been storing up all of our answers to his questions and creating his own conversation-based stories. We first started noticing this while driving around the other day. From the back seat, we heard Jake narrating a conversation between two cows. It went something like this (and he used a slightly different voice for each cow, both named "cow"):

"Cow says: Hey what you doing"
"Cow says: Oh, we just walking here"
"Cow says: Oh, look out!"
"Cow says: I fall down, but I'm ok"
"Cow says: You need some help cow?"
"Cow says: I'm ok, I'm just a little bit scared of cows"

He comes up with the best material. I told him he should cross the writer's strike picket line, but I don't think he took me seriously.

Recent pictures

A few people have commented that there is an imbalance in the number of Jake pictures versus Sadie pictures. I thought about it, and realized the real victim here is me. There are hardly ANY pictures of me on tripdub. So here's one for Sadie and me:


This is from a wagon ride yesterday:
And these are from today's trip to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. They don't allow photos on the tour, so here are a few outside, just to prove we were there.

Christmas pictures

First post of the new year and I'm already looking back to 2007. Here are the photos from Christmas, from our and Deni's cameras. We're still waiting on the official group photo from Kate's new camera (SUBTLE HINT!)....

I also uploaded the pictures from our visit to the World War II memorial just before Christmas. It was great to finally get Pop there and the kids had fun running around before we moved on to the Air and Space museum.

Happy Friday!