San Francisco

Thursday we took a day-cation up to San Francisco. 

We started at the zoo.  Interestingly enough, it was only AFTER we had left that I remembered the story from a couple Christmas ago about how a Tiger got (jumped) out of its enclosure there and killed somebody.  Anyway, the Tiger exhibit was empty and is now behind thick plexiglass.

We started with the giraffes.  Peter seems to like giraffes, but at his age that is probably due to the ease with which he can wrap his chubby little hands around a toy giraffe's neck and gnaw on it's head and might have very little to do with the actual beauty of the animal.

He didn't seem to know what to make of the zebras.

The gorilla exhibit was pretty cool though.  They had even a little baby scampering around.

Notice that in the picture the baby gorilla has his tongue hanging out.  I'm not sure if there is a connection, but this is the very next picture I snapped of Peter after he saw them.

Peter rode in the Baby Bjorn for part of the day and enjoyed seeing the Lions and Snow Leapard with Daddy.

When we got to the Children's area of the zoo we were puzzled to find a guinea pig.  Matt and I both wondered if they went to where ever it is that guinea pigs run wild to collect one, or if this one just came from Petco.  I guess we'll never know.  Also, we were also puzzled to see prairie dogs since they look so very much just like the gophers that tend to tunnel all over our neighborhood here in Monterey.   If you ask me, they could have worked a little harder to find exotic animals for the children.

Then we came to the petting zoo.  Matt did not want to go in.  Mommy ignored him and took the baby in anyway. 

And while we were there squirrels and birds did a thorough inspection of our stroller's contents.

Maybe that shouldn't have surprised us....

The petting zoo part was fun though.  Peter met a goat and an alpaca.

 

I explained to him that Mommy has a very expensive brown sweater made from Alpaca fur that he always seems to try to throw up on.  I don't think he understood my point.  So then he looked in on some little  chicks and rode on a toy tractor with Mommy (who almost tipped it over.)

Finally before we left the zoo we got a picture on this very realistic tortoise statue.  It didn't look that real in person, but in the photo it sure does!  Maybe some day when Peter is older and complains that I never take him anywhere I can use this picture to make up a story about how we went tortoise racing once when he was a baby.

Okay, or maybe not.

After we finished at the zoo, we decided to drive over to Golden Gate park and see what that was all about. 

We ended up at the playground.

(I'm not sure if you can tell in the picture, but both Daddy and Baby have their tongues hanging on, so maybe it wasn't that baby gorilla teaching Peter bad habits after all.)

And Mommy found out that those little baby slides REALLY don't work for grown ups.

Peter had fun exploring the play structure and sticking his tongue out at, well, everything.

And they even had a turtle statue for him to sit on there too! 

After the playground, we walked around exploring the park some.  We saw the botanical gardens and the Japanese garden as well as a weirdo modern building (the white one below ) which actually had grass on the roof, and this other weirdo building which I guess is like a totally famous  museum (even though I've never heared of it and I've already forgotten the name) that actually has King Tut on exhibit right now, but the tickets were sort of expensive and sold out  for the day anyway.  Finally there was like an ampitheater too, even though it was filled with mostly dead looking trees and everything was torn up under-construction.

I wouldn't mind saving up and going back to see Tut, but I'm not sure how much longer the exhibit will be  there.  And I guess if I had any motivation I could do some poking around on the internet to figure out what the deal is with those other buildings, but the truth is I don't care that much.  They were nice to look at though.

Next we loaded back into the car and drove over to Lombard Street, which for some reason has this ridiculously curvy block that is like totally famous.  I figured it would be cool to see too, and drive down, although I guess in our case, Matt drove while I took pictures.  His driving turned out to be a VERY good thing as our car is a stick-shift and this is downtown San Francisco we're talking about and they're not joking with the hills!  Seriously, we used to live in downtown San Diego and never had a problem but... like... wow, San Francisco hills don't mess around.  Here is a picture of a garage taken on the block of Lombard Street BEFORE it gets all silly and curvy, you can see the angle of the street compared to the level floor of the garage.

I'm sort of tempted to dig up an old protractor and measure that angle.  (Don't worry, I won't.)

Have you ever seen the movie The Princess Diaries?  In that movie the princess girl (Mia Thurmopolis) gets stuck at and intersection on one of these hills and ends up rolling backwards and getting in a huge crash.  Well, we didn't crash, but let me just say that Matt burned up a LOT of his clutch at the top of this hill's stop sign.  Still, it's a good thing he was driving because I might have made Mia's accident pale in comparison. 

Anyway, here we are driving down the curvy famous part of Lombard street.  It's very steep the other direction!!!  Also, notice the picture of the road on our GPS, it cracks me up!

Lombard is just a few block from Fisherman's Wharf so we buzzed the area to get our first glimpse of Alcatraz and also spy a few cable cars.

Then we drove across the bay on the Golden Gate Bridge.

There's a nice park at the other side where you can take lots of pictures of the beautiful bridge.

And of the city across the bay.

And of course of The Rock. 

"Green Smoke!  I've got green smoke!!!" 

(What a great movie that is.)

It was crazy windy!

And also, even though nearly all the military bases have been shut down these days, San Francisco has a tremendous military history... particularly for the Navy.  Here is Matt (and Peter) giving a thumbs up to the Navy plaque.

And here is Peter crawling away.

Also, we were surprised to find that that park is the home of a VERY famous Navy tribute statue "The Lone Sailor."  Now, I'm just a wife, but this statue is kind of a big deal I guess.  It's the type of thing you see pictures of or replicas of in Navy gifts shops and sailors get as gifts when they retire... so it was very cool to see the real thing in person.

And then of course I let my son sit on it.  :)

The story of our trip mostly ends there.  Except of course that we needed dinner and ended up stopping at Red Robin on the way home for hamburgers.  Yummmmmmmm!

While we were there I tried to give Peter his dinner but all he mostly wanted to do was stare at the balloons that all the other kids had.  Not to be outdone, Daddy obtained one for the boy as we were leaving.  And Peter was THRILLED.

The balloon kept him happily entertained for a large part of the two hour car ride home.  

Sometimes I guess, it really is just about the simple things in this life. 

A Terrific Tuesday

Big things were happening around here yesterday.

I have no idea what sparked it, but yesterday morning Peter FINALLY mastered the Raspberry. He's been trying to do it off and on since Thanksgiving, so, I think this is a pretty big milestone.

Here's a glimpse:



Also recently because of all the warm weather we've been having lately (Praise Jesus!) Peter has been wearing his little sandals a lot and subsequently has sort of rediscovered his feet. Apparently wearing shows and still being able to see your toes is VERY exciting. Suddenly his feet seem to fascinate him again. All his favorite games yesterday revolved around playing with his toes and feet, as you will see below.


Also, I know I'm biased, but that might just be the best laugh EVER.

Finally, he's made more progress toward walking. Don't get too excited, he's not there yet. It's ironic how I even feel the need to mention this since he's not yet even nine months old, but since he's hit so many physical milestone early, lots of people seem to be convinced that he'll walk early too. For my part, once he really mastered crawling it seemed to me that he would lose any motivation to try walking for a good long while, but apparently I am wrong because yesterday he showed me that it's time for Mama to obtain one of those baby push-walker toys since I'm almost certain that LeapFrog did not intend their music table to be pushed around like this.


Matt and I have been joking with Peter that he needs to be walking before Gramma and Gramdpa and Uncle Jeff and Aunt Amanda and his cousins come to visit at Easter but I assure you that we really did not think he would. On Easter he'll be 9 months and 4 days old. Surely that is just too early.

But I guess, Peter might have a different opinion.

He is his Mother's son it seems.

A Happy Monday

It's interesting how living with out internet for nearly a week has gotten me completely out of the habit of blogging. 

Well, that and Peter is so busy getting into trouble these days that it is difficult to find the time to post. 

But, happily, Matt is on his "Enrichment Week" from school, which so far as I can tell is Navy-ese for Spring Break, except, well, its the Navy, and everybody is getting paid so they feel like they can't just give the students a week off for nothing.  They used to only get a break at Christmas, but otherwise one quarter just rolled right into the next with only, like, 3 days between the end of Finals and the start of a each new term. 

Apparently, the students found this quick turn around to be difficult so the school big wigs recently decided to add a free week between terms.  But since this is the Navy, the free week is supposed to be a time for "Enrichment"... the students are to get head starts on their thesis papers, attend specialty trainings or, in most cases, seek mental solice by taking a vacation. 

In our house, this means Matt is home this week to help me with our son, get our house cleaned before company rolls into town at Easter, and enjoy some quality time as a family. 

To that end, having Matt home meant yesterday afternoon, proved entertaining in many different ways.

First Peter enjoyed his lunchtime bottle.  Recently he's nearly mastered the ability of feeding it to himself...

Then he re-discovered his spatula set.  Yes, I know what you're all thinking:  you're wondering why my son owns his own spatula set.  Well, it's really quite simple: a couple weeks ago at the commisary I had Peter in the shopping cart while Matt picked up vegetables or something and in the baking aisle they had a little rack of miniture spatulas.  They seems just the right size for the baby to help his Daddy in the kitchen so I handed a set to Peter.  Instantly they went into his mouth, so naturally we ended up buying them. 

It turns out Peter thinks they are particularly good teethers.

Daddy thinks they a particulary good for sword fighting.

And, KC seems to like them also.

While I was eating my lunch, Peter told me he wanted to go outside and enjoy the yummy, sunny weather.

So, we loaded up the wagon, leashed up the dog and took a nice long stroll around the neighborhood, eventually stopping at the park.  Peter enjoyed swinging on the swings with his Mama pushing him.

(If Mama knew her butt looked that enormous in those jeans, she probably would have chosen to wear something else.)

He also enjoyed exploring the rest of the playground. 

And of course, we went down the slide a few times.