Whew! What a Week!

I hardly know where to start… I think I will make this a random post and then focus in on specifics with photos during the next week.

We had family arrive on Sunday and a big family party, Monday we hit OMSI, Tuesday paul and I were sick sick sick, Wednesday we were better and hit the A.C. Gilbert House Discovery Village (a children’s museum in Salem), Thursday we headed to the beach and went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, Friday we celebrated Independence day with a ton of awesome activities, Saturday Liz got sick at about 2:00 a.m. so we headed in from the beach later that morning and spent the afternoon recooperating from a crazy crazy week full of fun and family.

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Today I am home from church with Liz – who is better, but we thought best to keep home today, and Emily who hasn’t thrown up, but has a low fever that seems to just be hanging about. James is home too – mainly because he can’t go many places without me. 🙂

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Tomorrow my parents get in! Woohoo! And, Paul’s parents are in town too, so we are looking forward to even more fun over these next couple weeks.

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James had his 6 month check-up a week ago this last Friday. He didn’t even cry when the gave him his shot – my brave little guy he is. All is well, though there is one minor issue which has us going off to see a urologist (sp?) over. His left T has not dropped yet, and as he is 6 months old, our pediatrician is concerned. Basically what he told us is that if it was going to drop on its own it would have done that by now. Even more concerning was that the pediatrician couldn’t even find it. So, we have an appt. with the specialist scheduled for the end of August. Chances are they will find it with an ultrasound and be able to give him some injections that will make it drop – if not, well – we will cross that bridge when we get there (it could involve exploratory surgery and other nasty things, so we are really hoping they find it on ultrasound). In the meantime I am focusing on being positive and not getting paranoid or worked up over something that is probably nothing – which is a bit harder than I had anticipated. *sigh*

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And here are some pictures from our OMSI trip I mentioned in an earlier post – their special exhibit right now is Dinosaurs – which the kids just loved.

Dinosaur!

Walk Like a Dinosaur

Building a dino skeleton

The dino skeleton building spot was full of those tiny little rubber things – kinda like sand, but not. 🙂 I snapped this photo just as Jacob let loose in a moment of pure excitement.

On our way to the sub – you can see it behind the cousins – the two littlest cousins stayed with Paul (he had seen it with GuMike a month ago)

Everyone got a chance to look through the periscope – here is Emily taking her turn:

Torpedo Room

The Galley

And lastly a shot of the submarine going group beside the submarine propeller (minus me as I took the photo).

O.M.S.I.

It seems that every time I sit down to write lately I either get bombarded by screaming kids, or I start falling asleep. 🙂 With the joy and fun of the Christmas season comes the crazy business that seems to rob me of all time to sit and write about the things happening. 🙂

On Monday we took the kids on a special outing to O.M.S.I – Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The reason for this (taking the kids out of school and everything) was so we could see the Star Wars display before it left at the beginning of January. I made sure it was a very educational experience. 😉

We are huge Star Wars fans and the chance to see models, props, costumes, etc. that they actually used in the movies was really cool. Not to mention all the really cool activities they worked in to teach you how they did different things, or how things apply to today’s world.

They taught about how magnatism is used to lift and propel trains.

They also taught about how air is used with hover crafts, and each of the kids got to go for a ride. Even Jacob. 🙂

At another station they got to explore and build robots.

And then there was all the fun we got to have looking at all the models, costumes, props, etc.

I even managed to employ the use of the force quite well with my husband, though I have found him some what immune to Jedi mind tricks.

“You do not need to take pictures of me.”
“Give me the camera.”
“You do not need to take pictures of me,” this time with a subtle wave of my hand.
“Hand it over,”
“You do not need to take pictures of me.”
“Your Jedi mind tricks do not work with me.”

*humph* well at least I tried, heh. 🙂

The only thing that I really wished that had been there were some of Padme’s wild costumes. There was just the normal one she wore on Taatooine in the first movie. All in all it was a ton of fun, and a really neat experience.

Oh, more photos can be found on my flickr account.