Grandma Dana’s comment about toothless Davison reminded me that I wanted to do a post with before and after pictures of Davison. Being impulsive, I decided to stretch it into a “find pictures of each of our kids taken during the timeframe between when their baby front teeth fled the scene and their adult front teeth arrived”. Although I spent way too much time going through old photos and digital images, I was not very successful. I had some “near misses” and we have some children who smile a lot but don’t show their teeth (I’m looking at you Danaya!). So, here is what I arrived at – only Davison and Daelynn, so I added in some of the older content that applied as well. In the picture of me (Ben), I am showing my teeth, but the timeframe is probably close to either losing them or having them in again. I was really hoping to find pics of Layne and Rett that matched, but fell short.
Also, I’m trying out a WordPress gallery feature. This particular one allows comments on each of the individual pictures, although I haven’t tried that out yet (maybe you can)… Also, the thumbnails are clickable if you want to switch into big picture mode.
On Wednesday, September 18th, a coworker gave me three tickets to the Houston Astros baseball game that evening. After a hurried supper, Heidi, Davison and I hopped in the car for the drive (through some lousy traffic) to Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros who were playing the visiting Cincinatti Reds. We got there a couple of pitches into the game, and settled in to enjoy it. Our seats were in the lower section in the outfield foul section off the first base line. There were a lot of empty seats around us. I guess the Astros were the worst team in Major League Baseball this year (either that or the Toronto Blue Jays were). We aren’t baseball fans per se, so had no idea who any of the players on either team were (although I recognized the name of one of the Reds players). The seats were metal, without any padding. Apparently the ballpark has a retractable roof, but nothing so exciting happened that evening.
Ticket check, Cotton Candy check, Heidi check
Being a wise parent, I limited how much money I had in my wallet, $8.00 to be precise. Actually, this wasn’t planned, it was just the way it was. Anyhow, guess how much the little blobs of cotton candy were? You guessed it, $4.00 each. So Heidi and Davison each got one and that was it for treats. I’m sure there was an ATM around, and there were for sure concession stands that would take credit or debit, but strangely enough I’m sure that did not occur to me at the time. I went without cotton candy – sort of the martyr thing that would make the kids feel guilty asking for something else. It didn’t work that way – actually I didn’t complain about getting nothing, we had eaten at home and I’m not a big fan of cotton candy.
Gah! It’s bigger than his head!
A little ways into the second inning Heidi asked if we should go home (because it was getting dark outside). Having driven for at least 50 minutes to get there, I wasn’t ready to leave 30 minutes in. Anyhow baseball turns out to be somewhat of a boring sport, there was a general noise level in the stadium from people talking to each other. We decided to leave at 9:00, which ended up being the end of the 5th inning. Houston was down a run, the kids had had the experience, it was getting to be bedtime for both the kids and me, and I was just fine beating the traffic.
A fun time was had by all, some memories made, Heidi and Davison don’t really understand the rules of baseball yet as I was explaining it on the fly in my own unique manner, and here I am a week later telling the tale.
Dad and the Cheezer Man
Just for fun, I checked one of the sports websites the next day to see how the game ended. I guess it was a nail-biter (or a snoozer) that went all the way to the 13th inning, taking 5 hours and 18 minutes to play. That would have gotten us out of there at roughly 12:30 am, so I was happy that we had made the decision that it was okay to cut out before the end of the game. Maybe when I was younger and foolish, I would have made our first two boys sit for the full 5 plus hours so as to build character (Layne and I sat through a snowstorm at a football game once), but I’m smarter now. (either that, or fully cognizant that my alarm would be going off as per usual at 5:00 am the next morning).
Heidi and Dad, opposite expressionii
I was going to fill in enough text to accompany all of the pictures, but I’m sort of running out of steam here. In other news, we have purchased our plane tickets back to Calgary for the big wedding. We are flying back on October 12th, a week before the wedding. The return flight is on October 28th, giving us roughly a week after the wedding to try and wrap things up with the house in Calgary. We figured out that it woudl be cheaper to drive, but with having to probably buy a small trailer to haul baggage in, the decision was that the extra money on the plane tickets was well worth avoiding the equivalent of 8 days of driving with little elbow space. Not to mention meals, hotels (two rooms per night), and likely an uncountable number of rest stops. With the flights, we have a stopover in Phoenix, so we have a new airport and flight path to explore.
Our section at a glance.
Some youthful exuberance on display, unlike the front teeth
This post has nothing to do with the above picture, I just thought it would be fun to add some visual appeal.
Anyhow, I wanted to point out if you are in the mood for reading, Lori has just posted a bunch of stuff. Some of the articles were back-dated so they are not showing up here on the front page and you might miss them. Here is the list of Lori’s posts from the last three days. They are well worth the read.
For those of you that are interested in getting email updates of new posts to the hubcrate.com blog, I’ve added a new control on the right sidebar that allows you to sign up for those usually infrequent events. Ben
Mr. Monkey quite enjoys his reading lessons with Timmy and Cool Alligator (not shown). Sometimes Cool Alligator has to hold the book in his jaws, making it hard for him to talk. Timmy seems to talk a bit without opening his mouth.
Mr. Monkey is doing well. He is learning his phone number, address, the days of the week, the months of the year, etc. He is also learning to count by fives and tens, and adding up to 10.
He is reading well, working most recently on words that end in “y”, like “funny” and “penny”.
He particularly likes bananas, strangely enough. Well, and raisins and milk.
