Pretend City and Farrell's

First I'm going to apologize for the blurry pictures. I allowed Clark to play with our camera and now it's lost. :( So I took all these with my phone camera.

This Saturday Clark and I attended Merrik's birthday party at Pretend City. (FYI Clark and Merrik are best friends)
Pretend City was AMAZING. Not only for Clark, but it was awesome for me too! As long as you didn't think about germs, you were golden! :) Clint would probably have issues there... but Clark and I had a blast!

It is a large building set up to be like a small city. There was a grocery store, a police and fire station, a beach, gym, a theater, a water station, an art room, a construction site, a house to build and a garden. The best part was that kids were expected to play and mommy didn't have a big mess to clean up after once done. :)

They try to make it as real as possible.

Here are pictures from the fire and police stations, the water stations and the garden.






Clark playing in the garden, with Merrik, building at the construction site, and communicating with a chick.





Sawing the "house", painting, hanging with Merrik and gardening.





After Pretend City we went to Farrell's for lunch and to celebrate Merrik's birthday. Farrell's is an ice cream parlor/restaurant. It's a great place to celebrate birthdays because when ever it's someone's bday all the waiters come to your table and sing rather loudly while beating a drum. For Merrik they sang their version of "We Will Rock You" and this is a picture of Clark screaming with excitement while they were singing. :)

Clark's First Camping Trip

This weekend we took Clark on his first camping trip. We went this weekend because Clint will be gone most of March, all of April and almost all of May. Then we won't have much time after he gets back and before he moves to have any "Weaver Camping" trips.
Our trip started out very eventful. We stopped at Jack In The Box to get some breakfast. Clint and I took Clark in and walked up behind a family that was ordering. Clark walked up to the mom and slapped her in the butt. Thankfully the clerk laughed as did the woman and I have another memory to check off on the list of things your child does to embarrass you.
Hanging at our camp site:



The girls "potty":

What a life saver this was! As you can see, there was no where else to go.

Jack and Clark:



Clark loves his Uncle Jack!

Clark got to ride around with his Uncle Jack, Papi and Mimi while Clint and I rode the quads. There was one trail that was too small for Jack's truck to go through so he had to back up. Clark started going "Beep, Beep, Beep" when the truck started to back up. Hilarious! He also would say things like "Whoa" when they went over the bumps.

Clark loving the dirt and the whole camping experience:






He played and played in the dirt! I was exusted at the end of the day and by 7pm I was so ready for bed, but I had one little amped boy. Around 9 we went into our tent to do our bed time routine. My plan was to have Clark wear a light pair of pajamas under his fleece zip up pajamas. Well in full 2 year oldness, he flat out refused! I got the light pair of pajamas on him, but he screamed and cried when I attempted to put the warmer ones on him. Oh well. I on the other hand had 3 pairs of bottoms on and 4 tops. I was worried that he was going to be too cold.

Clint and I read stories to him then Clint left (Our tent was too small for all three of us) and I sang my songs to him him. Clark was way too excited to be in a tent. You could just see the expression on his face that said, "Wow, this is cool!" In fact he kept running his hands around on the side of the tent and lifting his butt in the air. Each time he did this, cold air came under that blankets and I started to worry that we wouldn't be warm enough. Finally around 11pm he fell asleep! I had to sleep with the blanket over my head, but Clark slept with his arms and head out of the blanket.

Family pics:



Boys being silly:



On one of our rides, we stopped at the Gas Dome which is where gasses bubble up in a spring which was a 5 foot long pool and the ranger told us was at least 1,000 feet deep. Who knows.
Part of what the rangers do at Ocatillo Wells is give demonstrations of the surrounding areas. They had a little table set up that told about the Sloths that used to live in the area. They were as big as Saber tooth tigers, but looked like sloths of today's world. The difference is that the pre-historic sloths had a sort of shell that protected them from attacks from predators like the saber tooth tiger.

Attempting to take pictures of us with the glow sticks. The camera wasn't very happy.


I bought glow sticks for all of us and Clark thought they were totally awesome! In fact he spent more time playing with these then eating his dinner. I think that Clark and I both ate our way through the camping trip. I think Clark ate most of the chips we brought and had the jumbo marshmallows for dinner along with his fair share of Twizzlers. :)

To end our trip with a bang we hadn't been on the road for 5 minutes when Clark was eating some chips, bit his cheek, started to cry because of it, then started to choke on his chips. Jack pulled the truck over very quickly and he and Clint freaked out. I don't think I have had drinks handed to me so quickly. Clark has choked on me before in the car, so I was able to stay calm. He cleared his throat, cried some more and got to drink most of a freska because of the scare.

Poor Clint didn't have the best of trips either. On Friday he had stayed at home because he was sick. He thought it was because of vaccines he got on Thursday but by Sunday morning he had a full blown sinus infection. Clint usually gets one bad sinus infection every year.

I'm happy we got to go. It was a lot of work for one night but I cherish the time we had as a family. Maybe we can sneak in another trip before we move!

Zoomars

On Saturday Clint, Clark and I went down to San Juan Capistrano to check out Zoomars. I had never heard of it before, but what a nice little treasure. For me it was mommy heaven. Relatively safe environment, aside for him getting bit by an animal, I felt very comfortable there. There was a caged in "arena" for rabbits and guinea pigs. This was our favorite because we could pick up any of the animals there and pet them. Clark got pretty comfortable with this little white guinea pig who was friendly and didn't mind Clark holding him unless Clark squeezed him a little too tightly.








As we walked around and pet the animals I realized that they were very gentle.

They had two Zedonkeys. Zoe and Zeke. They are a cross between a Zebra and a Donkey. I think Zedonkey sounds dumb so I named them Zonkeys. :) I've never seen one before, but they were very friendly. I was worried that they would be a little aggressive with being fed but they very gently took the carrots. I felt relatively comfortable with Clark feeding them without too much of my help.


They also had some Llamas that despite them pinning their ears back, they liked being fed. In the same pen as the Llamas they had an Emu who let us pet it. Fun!

To end our adventure at Zoomars we got to see the train go by. Clark hasn't seen one or been on one before. Originally I had wanted to ride the train down there and back but it wasn't going to work so well. So we decided to just drive this time. Thankfully right when we were leaving a train pulled into the station and we got to see it drive by.

Bye bye Crib Ceremony

Seemed like Clark was accepting the transition with ease so we had a bye bye crib ceremony this morning. Clark and I took apart the crib and did a happy dance to celebrate his graduation to the new bed.

Happy Dance


Last night I put pillows on the floor in case Clark fell out. My neighbor has suggested it and seemed like valid advice. When I came home from book club I asked Clint if there were any problems and he said, "No, but the kids has WAY too many pillows."
I was a little confused because I didn't put any pillows IN his bed.
This is what he had done after I tucked him in:


Also for about the last month, the trend has been for me to put a blanket not only on Clark but on his trash truck too.
Today at nap, when I tucked him in, he had the trash truck on his right side with its own blanket, and his gorilla on his left tucked into the same blanket that was on him.
This is what I found when I checked on him today:

Big Boy Bed

Clark and I bought his big boy bed today. I went to the library and got a book about staying and sleeping in his new big bed.

Clark and I picked it up today and put it together. He was very helpful, mostly. :)
He was all excited until I put his mattress in the bed. Then he got a freaked out look. So we went next door and I borrowed Merrik to show him the bed, which then made Clark much more excited. Slowly he started to warm up to the bed. He hit his hands on it, then started to bounce his hands and eventually half laid on it. Clint, Tavi and I all made a big deal about his bed.
Then we went back outside to wear him out some more. :)

Seemed to work...today...


I realize that this is probably the "honeymoon" phase, but hopefully it will continue to stay easy.

Wait, what am I talking about?! He's 2! There is NOTHING easy about a 2 year old. Just google, "My 2 year old makes me want to drink" and that will give you a good idea in case you aren't blessed with a little demon angel that is 2. :)

Hopefully next week we can take the crib down. :)

Nex Stop...

...South Korea!


Unless the Army changes their mind at the last minute, we are set to go to South Korea in July. I'm VERY excited and so is Clint. Our families on the other hand are not as much, but we all knew our time in California wasn't going to last forever.

We don't know which base we will be assigned to yet. Clark and I have to get command sponsorship to go. Basically a bunch of paperwork making sure that we don't have any health needs that we won't have access to if we do move. Once we get command sponsorship the commander will have to assign us to a base. We hope to be in Soul or the base about an hour away from Soul. The jobs are different. Some are strictly running a clinic, others are just the food mission and some are a combination of clinic and deployment training. Clint won't deploy though.
Part of why we picked S.Korea was so that Clint doesn't have to deploy. I "kind of" freaked at the conversation we had about deployment. (kind of: extreme understatement of my reaction) Maybe, hopefully the idea of deployment won't be so horrible.

We hope to be able to do some traveling while we are there. Tickets to China and Japan are about $400. Same as our tickets were from KS to CA.

Now we have to figure out what household goods will be shipped and what has to stay. They only allow about half of your belongings to be shipped, but they have furniture rental places.

We also will be selling both our vehicles. The word is that Korean drivers are CRAZY!

So we will keep you posted on the progress.

Rainy Day Play

Last week we had a few days of rain. A rare occurrence in Cali. So Clark and I got dressed in our rain gear and headed outside to find some good puddles.

Puddles were a plenty in our neighborhood!





Clark and I found some puddles so deep that the water was running into the top of his boots. He hasn't really gotten the concept of what an umbrella does, but he loved being able to use it.

As you can see from my pants, I had a good time splashing in the puddles too!