Our Child Star

We had a small video crew over this afternoon to video how Gage does at meal time.  I had a hard time not laughing at him when he just starred at the camera for the first 10 minutes.  In his defense:

1. He was taking a nap when they arrived and set up, so he woke and came downstairs to find lights and a camera waiting for him.
2. We actually woke him up for this, so he may have still been recovering from sleep mode.
3. Cameras are cool.
4. If you've got someone shooting your good side, you might as well give them as much footage as you can so they have plenty to use.

It was an interesting experience.  They wanted to see him get a snack, so Aimee gave him a snack to eat before dinner while she was cooking (I wasn't in this shot).  We typically don't just give him snacks unless he asks for food and we don't give him more snack unless he asks for it either.  At least it was a healthy snack - apples and oranges.

We then moved on to dinner which didn't go very smoothly since Gage had just had a snack and we were eating way earlier than we normally do - 4:30pm.  But, they were actually hoping to film a kid not cooperate at a meal time, so Gage went along with that.  He wasn't really that bad, he just wouldn't eat much and wasn't too interested in being at the table.  I certainly can't blame him since I wasn't that hungry at 4:30pm either and he just ate.

I haven't decided that this was really worth the trouble for us.  I guess we get a copy of the DVD even if we aren't in it, a book by Ellyn Satter (The woman working on the video), a $50 gift card to Safeway, and a bookmark advertising the Ellyn's books and website.  Unfortunately, we didn't get as much done during Gage's nap as we would have if we hadn't been dealing with a video crew and didn't need to wake the guy up, but Ellyn did give us a few thoughts and tips after the shoot was over, which was nice.

Perhaps this will spark Gage's rise to stardom as he moves from this video to commercials to a supporting role in a TV series to the movies.  We'll see what happens and get some of the footage up if we end up being in the video.

Benjamin Allen Saul has arrived

Look what the stork brought!

Benjamin Allen Saul was born at 12:04 PM on March 29th, weighing 7 pounds 12 oz and measuring 21 inches long (The same weight as Gage, but 2 inches longer). Both mother and baby are doing well.  We now get to re-learn how to function on short sequential nightly naps for a while.

We tried to take a picture of him that was similar to the picture of Gage that we posted two years ago when he was born for comparison since we kept looking up that picture to compare Benjamin and Gage while we were in the hospital.

Gage, Ben’s big brother, was able to come visit us in the hospital.  We had to laugh when one of the first things Gage did when holding his new brother was say “Honk” and honk Benjamin’s nose.

Here are our other visitors while we were in the hospital...

Las Madres Spring Fling and Easter Egg Hunt

We took Gage to the Las Madres Spring Fling and Easter Egg Hunt.  He had a good time checking out the animals at the petting zoo, but was not very interested in the egg hunt.  The one picture we have of Gage during the Easter Egg Hunt is him putting down his basket so he could go play at the park.

Wicked good time in SF for our aniversary

We enjoyed our stay at the Serrano Hotel while we were in San Francisco, it was in a great location, not far from Union Square, allowing us to walk everywhere we needed to go. The staff was very nice, the room was clean, the free continental breakfast at the restaurant next door was good, the Wi-Fi was free, and they upgraded us to a king size bed for free too. We can't speak for the price since it was sort of free to us - we used some United Miles on it. Apparently, the previous occupant of our hotel room on the 16th floor loved the room and location so much that he didn't want to leave.

Wicked was very enjoyable and we both highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. We did sit in the cheap seats, but still had a great view of the stage as well as a prime location by the women's restrooms (Aimee only had to wait behind two people to get in and walked by a line of 20+ leaving). From the probably inebriated woman who wandered in front of traffic to the incomprehensible babblings of toothless grinners and 7-10 police vehicles that passed us, the 13 minute walk back to the hotel at 11pm felt adventurous. We'd probably find a ride if we were to make that trip again that late at night.

Thanks to Steve and Emily for watching Gage, especially while he was barfing all over the place.

Visiting Adele and Manzi

We made a quick trip to Davis,CA to visit our friend Adele who has an African Grey Parrot named Manzi.  She has been flight training him for some time and asked if Glen would bring up his video camera and shoot Manzi flying while we were there.  Adele edited the video into segments to highlight Manzi's talents.  You can see Aimee and Gage in the video, though they mostly played at the park where there were some cool toys that Gage just couldn't resist.






We're back dating this post so that it will appear around the time that it actually happened, but we're actually posting it 8/24/2010 because we just ran across the video after checking out Manzi and Adele's blog.  No, we aren't posting this now because we're about to go visit Adele again and wanted to butter her up before we go.  If we were trying to do that, then we wouldn't back date the post.

Grandma's Birthday Dinner

Family all gathered at Moody Springs for Aimee's mom's birthday dinner.  Andy, Aimee's brother, came down from Portland for the occasion.  We all had a great time visiting with each other (as usual).

Bowling with the Boys

We had a great time bowling with my dad and brother Andy who was visiting from Portland. We had the bowling alley all to ourselves since it was the middle of the day.

Gage did really well hanging out with us. Right at the beginning I turned my back for a brief moment while finding a ball and when I turned around Gage was laying flat on his back in the middle of a lane! Oops, apparently they really do "grease" the lanes.

 Andy is on a bowling team...look at that technique!