Went to the Museum of Transportation yesterday with Nate and our Friends Ben and Laura and their son Logan. Of course Lynn was there too....
Nate loved it, we got to ride a trolley and their smaller gauge engine. Pretty cool...
here Logan and Nate are sitting on the smaller gauge engine seat. Nate proceeded to try to mess with the controls... Here's the engine.
Two random engines. Our tour guide was a father/son duo. the son was no more then 12. it was pretty cool to see his knowledge..
Here is Nate and I in front of a train. You can see Ben and Logan in the background.
Here's Nate in ONe engine ringing the bell.
One bit of excitement that happened. I took my eye off Nate in the car museum and he proceeded to run over and OPEN the emergency exit, which of course, turned on the alarm. Employees were pretty nice about it though...... Scared Nate though.
We've got a surprise for Nate this morning. We are going to meet up with his friend Logan and his family (and probably more) at 9:30 to tour the Museum of Transportation. There are lots of trains and stuff that he can climb up in and stuff.
I took him there back in October of last year. It was a misty rainy day, so we didn't get to enjoy it much, but I got him an opportunity to play in the Creation Station there (basically a big room filled with interactive activities, and a big box of Thomas Track and cars...).
This is a quick easy recipe that Lynn and I like to make. One of the less elaborate recipes we can find in the Paula Deen book. We're having this tonight! We usually just do a simple vegetable like green beans with it.
The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook by Paula H. Deen (Paula Deen)
Paula Deen's Chicken in Wine Sauce
Serves 4
4 large skinless boneless chicken breasts
6 ounces Swiss cheese slices
One 10 3/4-ounce can condensed cream of chicken soup
1/4 cup white wine (more if desired(
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup herb-flavored Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, crushed
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, melted
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place chicken in shallow buttered casserole. Layer cheese on top. Mix soup, wine, salt, and pepper; pour over cheese. Sprinkle stuffing mix on top and drizzle with melted butter.
Nate, I, My sister and Mister Dave all went to The St. Louis Mills last night. Mister Dave had 3 tickets left over from the NASCAR experience arcade so Nate got to ride his favorite ride, thanks to Mister Dave.
This is a pic of Nate in his Bob the Builder Hat. I think Mister Dave found this for him at a yard sale...
This is Nate's favorite ride. You should see his Smile as he goes really fast around the turns. I have to ride on the outside or I would squish the boy....
Nate got to ride this car for free thanks to Mister Dave asking the attendant. The rides at this place used to be free for under 3 years old...
Here, Nate is riding a game, but not actually playing.
Here Nate is playing on the stomp the spider game. Of course, he's not playing this either....
Here he is playing this game again... YOu can see how he's hopping around.
Below is a movie I took of Nate on his Favorite ride, thanks to Mister Dave....
On Saturday, My sister, Mr. Dave and I took Nate out to his first Six Flags Excursion. Nate loved it. He couldn't get enough of the rides, like any kid I guess, and proved to me he's able to do a lot of things. Funny, his more favorite rides were the log ride and the scrambler. He was tall enough to ride on Thunder River, but I wasn't quite sure how he would take getting completely soaked under a waterfall. We did ride the tidal Wave, which is pretty much a soaker ride. I made sure to shield him when we hit the water, so he didn't get that wet.
We took a break to go eat at the Ponderosa. I even treated him to a game of Crazy Taxi there. When we got back over to the park, we took Nate over to the kids area and he rode the airplanes about 5 times. He also got to ride the park's train and had a blast doing it...
Thinking about names for the papooses. Was looking over boy names from 2007. Within the top 15 you have Aidan, Braden, Kaden and Jaden (Hayden rounds out at 54). Does anyone think that there is going to be a problem in 5 or 6 years with teachers and moms at busy playgrounds yelling out their kids names and 5 kids showing up because they thought they had heard their name being yelled by the teacher.
When it came to naming Nate, I thought we would never give him a name from the top 10 of names, and thought to go the more traditional route.
So if you are curious, here are the Boy names from 2007: 1 AIDAN 2 BRADEN 3 KADEN 4 ETHAN 5 CALEB 6 NOAH 7 JADEN 8 CONNOR 9 LANDON 10 JACOB
Well, we just got back from Springfield for a nephew's birthday. It was a good visit all around. Nate had a blast with his nephews, but was in a rare contrary form. He was saying "No" a lot. Kind of weird. But in his defense, he was up pretty late on Friday night and up pretty early on Saturday.
He got to feed some ducks today at the pond near the grandparent's place. He didn't want to come back. He did sleep a good portion of the distance back to St. Louis.
I think tomorrow I will get his Pool and slide out again tomorrow so he can slide down it again.
Lynn's Blog stated that "Today is the Day!". We are going to the big ultrasound to figure out how the babies are doing. we'll know gender's then. I don't think I can blog to you what they are, since I don't think my parent's want to know. So, I'll have to e-mail you all personally if you want to know....
Spent most of Sunday afternoon trimming a branch off the Ash tree in the back yard. There's one branch that goes out across the yard and gets dangerously close to the power lines. Not anymore. My sister had lent me a pole saw to deal with it. I had to drag Nate's climber out in the yard to give me an extra 3 feet to reach the really big branch. Now the yard looks like a windstorm hit, but we won't need to worry about any wind storms for a while.
We cleaned some of the basement this weekend. Lynns got some stuff to take to Goodwill. I've put about 18 items on ebay really cheap also, hopeing to get some bidders, got one already. We'll have to see how the rest go.
At the Pioneer Days, Nate participated in a children's Tractor pull. The kids were supposed to pull a tractor pull weight behind a pedal tractor.
Nate won third place in his category (ages 3 and 4, boys).
Here's some picks.....
I don't have any actual pictures of him on the tractor. He got on it and tried once to move it, couldn't, and then got off and ran down the track. Oh yeah, there were only 3 kids in his class also....
Okay, Hopefully by having the above title, I will be the top search item on Google for the Queen City Pioneer Days (and Jr. Livestock Show).
This is our experience at the show with Nate.
I arrived Wednesday night with Mr. Dave. We drove up seperately from Lynn and Nate. I had missed them both the couple days they were up there. There was a talent show that night, which my sister won. She sung the "what's your daddy's name" song. There were some other people there and one guy was like drunk and fell off the stage with his Guitar. Funny.
We headed up on Thursday morning to see my nephew and niece do the swine show. Ashton won champion showmanship, Matthew lost cause he didn't tuck in his shirt. But he did win some other type of trophey for his pigs. ( I think there was a knowledge test in there ). Below is a picture of Nate during the show. He was actualy occupied with playing with the rocks during most of the show.
One of the "rides" that they had at the fair was a huge blow up slide. Nate loved it. He had to have gone up and down it over 50+ times during the three days we were there. he started out the week not being too good at it, but by watching other kids he learned how to bounce down the thing and roll.
Lloyd Dufer had a smathering of John Deere tractors out for display. His wife let Nate sit on one. He had a blast. Lloyd had about 5 tractors, he also had an old time trasher. They ran it during the fair and on Friday night, they had a "Straw Scramble". There was candy and Money buried in the straw and they kids had to go in and find it. Nate really wasn't too interested in finding any, more interested in taking the straw and carrying it over to the street. funny. he did get some pieces of candy, and was eating them as he found them.
Thursday night, we entered Nate into the Little Mr. Pioneer contest. there were 13 boy entries, and only one actually won, not Nate. the boy next to Nate was grabbing his arm though, it was cute. Guess I should have dressed him up also.
Here's a video of Nate and the slide:
Well, I have more pictures and stories to share, so I'll have to stop with these for now...
