Nelson's Birthday

The kids and I, along with my co-worker Jennifer and her baby Logan, went to Jill and Shayne's to celebrate Nelson's (Nellie) first birthday. She squealed with delight with every toy that made noise, and sported some pretty good dance moves too. I have never seen a one year old handle the huge crowd and overwhelming stimuli so well; it didn't seem to faze her one bit.

Logan had a great time eating an enormous chocolate cupcake and managed to share the joy by getting chocolate cake and frosting all over his mom and himself!
I tried to talk Seth into eating his cupcake with a fork, but he informed me that he was going to "eat it like a man". He watched Grover eat the cupcake this way, so he figured if Grover could do it, then so could he.
At the end of the party, Nellie showed us how she had the whole birthday thing "in the bag".
Thank you for inviting us to share this day!

Wow!

I had to share what I saw tonight. I was sitting in my chair working on the computer and I looked up and saw this beautiful site! I went and grabbed the camera quickly before it got away from me. What do you think?



Even as brilliant as the colors in these photos appear, the intensity of the colors were ten-fold in real life. I love sunsets! It was worth the mosquito feeding frenzy that occurred on my arms and legs while taking the photos.

Splish, splash, we're having a blast!

The last two days the kids and I have been in Boise playing in the waterpark - Roaring Springs. On Saturday we played for about 7 hours and even though we had sunscreen on, we all got quite burned. I later realized that the sunscreen I was using was water resistant, not waterproof. The temp reached 96 and there we were offering our skin to the UV rays! Needless to say, I bought waterproof sunscreen today and that, along with temps of only 86, made for a much more comfortable day. Here's Seth playing in the spray area, waiting for the bucket to dump:

On Sunday, we met up with some friends we met at the CHASA retreat at the Great Wolf Lodge. This is Maggie and Lacey. Lacey had just come down the blue slide and her hair was pushed over her face. Maggie didn't like this slide but she made Lacey get over her fears of the other slides as you can see in the next picture.
This is Lacey and Maggie as they came down the "family" slide. They were nearly the last people allowed to go down this slide since the park closed at 8:00 and this picture was taken about 7:55. Once Lacey got brave enough to go down the slide, she wanted to do it over and over again. I had predicted this very scenario earlier in the day and sure enough I was right. Thank you Maggie for getting Lacey to do the rides!
There are a couple more pictures on the Picasa site. Unfortunately, I didn't get very many because I was in the water quite a bit. Also, I have hardly any of Seth because he was always with me if I went in the wave pool or lazy river. He had a great time though and has already fallen asleep about 15 minutes into his new movie. I'd say it had something to do with the movie being boring, but if you know Seth, you know he can watch the dumbest movies and think they are totally entertaining, so.....I'm betting it's all the fun he had!

Southern California!

Yesterday, we arrived home from Disneyland and San Diego. My plan, of course, was to post pictures while we were there, but we were on the run from 6:30 in the morning until midnight almost every night. We packed a lot of activity into 5 days! Our flight to LA was as nice as a flight can be (I'm not a fan, but I just grit my teeth and bear it). There were extra seats on our plane on the way down so Coconut and Black Dog got a seat to themselves. Lacey insists on buckling them in whenever possible. = )

We started our vacation in California Adventure because two years ago, we did not get to spend much time there and it was raining. Lacey and Seth enjoyed their time in this playground area that had these rope bridges and ramps that were as far as three stories above the ground.

This time the weather was hot, hot, hot, but it made for beautiful evenings. This is looking out from the pier at the sun dial carousel and the swing ride in the orange. Behind the sundial is the Maliboomer (looks like three towers). Seth and Erik rode this ride, you zoom up to the top in about 2 seconds and then bounce similar to being on a bungee. There is a video on the picasa site http://picasaweb.google.com/familyhendrickson/ . As you can probably imagine, I was holding my breath and cringing the entire time they did this ride -- scariest 30 seconds of my life. = )

Next was the electric parade. I have uploaded videos of this too and they turned out really nice. Everything about this parade was gorgeous, I could have watched it for hours.

Lacey was able to get a few signatures for her autograph book. Here she is with Cruella DeVille. She also got Cinderella, Fairy Godmother, Jasmine and Sulley.

Seth wanted to pose under this Indiana Jones sign. Unfortunately, we got two different fast passes for this ride, and still were unable to get on it because something always happened during the hour of our fast pass. Oh well, we will have to wait until next time.

On Friday night, Lacey and I did the wait for the fireworks by getting up close to the castle. We watched the show from Main Street the night before but Lacey couldn't see how the castle changes colors so on Friday we waited it out and got some good pictures too. Erik and Seth got bored waiting so they left and rode rides.

After three days in Disneyland/Anaheim, we headed for San Diego and went to Sea World. Seth and Lacey were third in line to get their picture taken with a Clydesdale. We watched him getting all prettied up for the event too and looked through their stables. I have a couple hundred pictures of Sea World and events from that day, but this was a unique picture of a flamingo. You must check out the flamingo video posted under the Sea World album on Picasa! We caught some bullying flamingos -- just watch -- you'll see what I mean.
Tuesday we only had a little time and probably should have done the zoo instead of the Wild Animal Park, but we did go on the Journey to Africa tour and got up close and personal with this lion. Unfortunately, Seth was just about wiped out after 4 days of walking, not to mention the "feels like" temp had to be about 120 degrees! Not exaggerating. While on the Journey to Africa tour, we truly felt like we were in the middle of Africa, complete with flies, smell, etc.

Well, this is long and only a sampling of the 530 pictures and videos that I took. If you want to look at all the pictures, sit down with a nice cup of coffee and use the slideshow.