See-Att-Uhl, Day 4: On the Waterfront

I realized that family starts to descend on Milwaukee as early as tomorrow for Mr. Jonah's second birthday, and I still need to finish any blogging related to our Seattle trip from nearly a month ago. Where the heck did this month go????

With this in mind, I will try to make this one a bit less long winded than the previous posts. This was our last full day in Seattle, and we still had a couple activities left with our City Passes: The Seattle Aquarium and a Harbor Cruise.

We started the morning with a trip to Starbucks #1 store, which isn't in the original location, but is located on Pike Place, where it moved after several years in its first location.

Is it a real Starbucks? :)

The line to place an order wasn't bad, but the pick-up line took forever! I hung out with Jonah outside (he was in the backpack) listening to the guy with the guitar in this photo while Michelle waited inside for our order.

Then we continued the walk to the Seattle Aquarium. We got in quickly with the expedited City Pass lane. From the start, it seemed like it was going to be a good time. Jonah was enthralled by the big tank in the entry way, which had a diver cleaning the glass.

Checking out the diver with the other kids. 

"Fish!"

Happy boy at the aquarium!

Unlike the touch tank at the Pacific Science Center a couple days before, Jonah loved touching the star fish, urchins, and anemones at the aquarium.

The green anemone was one of Jonah's favorites. He still mentions it.

 

One of the employees brought this starfish down for Jonah, but other kids kind of took over.

One of Jonah's favorite parts of the aquarium was the jellyfish tank. It is a big ring shaped tank set into the floor that has a light that cycles through the colors of the rainbow. 

Jonah particularly liked when the jellyfish were green or blue.

We made our way through the rest of the aquarium and saw lots of cool stuff, but it was clear Jonah was getting tired toward the end.

The octopus was *very* active!

It even came over to visit!

"Big fish!"

Pointing out the fish to other kids.

As usual, lights and floor outlets were just, if not more, interesting than the exhibits.

Riding Daddy's shoulders.

The otters looked very comfortable.

If you go to the Seattle Aquarium, we highly recommend the cafe. They had great food and reasonable prices.

After lunch, we picked up harbor cruise tickets. With a little time to kill, we hit the carousel again before taking in the sights on the cruise. Jonah was excited to be on the boat at first, but he soon found it more interesting to climb from seat to seat.

Boat! Boat!

"I want to sit over there, now!"

Taking in the sights with Mommy.

Yoga on the boat?

This way works to get over, too.

After an active day, Jonah was pretty tuckered out, and fell asleep in the backpack on the walk back to the hotel. Plenty of people noticed the sleeping baby... 

Sleepy boy!

That just does not look comfortable.

We had dinner at a Thai restaurant that night. Jonah wanted "noodles!" but wouldn't eat the ones in his meal. Fortunately he ate the rice. The restaurant was at a mall in the area which had the most un-family friendly family bathrooms we've ever seen.

Really? Who is going to do this? Do these bathrooms (three of them lined up) ever get used?

All in all, it was a nice final day in the Northwest. We look forward to visiting again some day when we can better take in the mountains and surrounding area. Thankfully the flights home were uneventful apart from a somewhat tight connection at MSP where we had to make our way across the entire airport. Jonah was happy to ride the train at the airport, though.

Summer loving had me a blast!

With the arrival of warmer weather, we've finally been able to engage once more in the activities that we enjoyed with Jonah last summer. Only now that he is much more verbal, mobile, and skilled in general, things are even more fun.

On the first hot Saturday this month, we pulled out the inflatable pool. Jonah was eager to get in it right away, but we knew he wouldn't like the water at that temperature and convinced him he would enjoy it more if it warmed up and he waited until after his nap to get in.

Learning how to use the watering can.

Watering Mommy's arm (it was so hot, this was actually quite welcome).

Discovering he could create puddles on the driveway when he pushed down the lip of the pool.

We also resurrected the water table that Jonah got for his first birthday last year. He enjoyed splashing the water and pouring with his cup and watering can.

Note: he is dressed only in a onesie here because he poured a ton of water down his front.

Practice with the watering can.

We also added some water beads so he could watch them "grow" and feel some different textures.

I wanted to plant a few seeds with Jonah to reinforce the lessons in Eric Carle's book, The Tiny Seed, which Jonah has enjoyed and to which he often returns. I picked up some zinnia and marigold seeds thinking that they are usually good growers and would likely give us some success. Planting them with him was an interesting challenge, however, in that he wasn't interested in the seeds themselves and didn't understand that he couldn't just grab a handful of dirt from the pots once the seeds were in them.

Preparing the dirt and opening the seed package.

Getting the pots ready.

Looking at the seeds.

The experience has continued to be interesting in that while Jonah attempts to help water the plants, he is just as likely to drown one pot as leave another one dry, and he typically puts his hands into the wet dirt while watering. So, while we have some plants coming up in the pots, there will be barren areas as well. I suppose this is very relatable to the story of the Tiny Seed, as many of those seeds did not survive either.

Watering the seeds.

We've been taking our bikes out for longer rides, getting in somewhat decent workouts for Ben and me while stopping at a number of different parks for Jonah to experience a variety of playground equipment. While he was very reluctant about wearing his bike helmet last summer, he's much more cooperative this year, thankfully. And given that we saw a father completely tip over his child's bike trailer last weekend, I will most certainly be requiring that Jonah wear a helmet for our rides together!

On the swing at Jacobus Park.

The view down one of the steep slides at Hart Park. Jonah isn't afraid of this one, though he definitely gets some speed and has also taken a couple of nosedives.

One of the smaller slides in Hart Park.

The bike rides have also provided us with the opportunity to stop along the Menomonee River to "throw" stones, "throw" being a bit laughable in Jonah's case, largely because he's interested in picking up some of the larger rocks that don't allow him much distance.

I want to throw that one right there!!

We also opened up the sandbox, but Jonah has spent very little time in it. Few things can compete with his Cozy Coupe police car in the garage/back yard.

What a smile!

I'm sure we'll make many more fun memories this summer! Tonight is the first of our neighborhood's concerts in the park, and there are so many wonderful things to do here in the greater Milwaukee area.

Do Art!

Jonah enjoys art projects, like most kids his age probably do. We're lucky in that he engages in some sort of art project nearly every day at day care. I have no idea how they manage to keep him as neat and clean as they do, but those that we do here at home usually result in large messes. While those are certainly fun and have their place, there are also times when one wants to provide artistic experiences without having to expend a lot of effort in the clean-up process. While he enjoys playing with the homemade playdough I made for him, Jonah mostly "shreds" it into small pieces with his hands, rather than using the various rollers, cutters, and other fun tools we make available to him. Over the past couple of months, we've found some new activities to let Jonah "do art" (his label for these activities) that have been lower on the messiness scale:

"Painting" with the paints inside a plastic bag. Here he had the opportunity to do some color-mixing that ties in really nicely with Leo Lionni's book, Little Blue and Little Yellow, which is in regular rotation in our house.

"Painting" with bingo daubers, though he enjoyed putting his finger on the tip and getting ink on his hands. (Note: bingo daubers can be cheaply acquired at the Dollar Store.)

Hmm ... what happens when I touch this?

Using a paintbrush and watercolors from the paintbox.

Playing in the water is really as much, if not more fun than painting!

The paintbox itself is a learning experience!

It's always fun to do these art experiences together and I hope we can be better about doing them more regularly. I've lots of ideas, but don't always seem to be very good about pulling out materials for him. We've been actively saving egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and other supplies, and I try to put Jo-Ann's coupons to good use stocking up on tissue paper and the like. Now I just need to get them out and encourage play and discovery!

Jonah the Jabberbox

In the past months, Jonah's vocabulary has expanded tremendously. Even if we wanted to inventory the number of words he knows at this point, I'm sure we would miss many, particularly as he learns new words and concepts every single day. He repeats words and phrases that he hears us say, "sings" simple songs, can complete couplets from books that are a part of the regular reading rotation, and pretty regularly uses 4-6 word sentences (sometimes longer). He does now use some prepositions and articles, such as "the," but he does not generally employ pronouns yet (for the most part, he still refers to himself as Jonah rather than using I or me or mine). He creates regular plurals without a problem and has started to use some past tense as well.

For the most part, he is pretty understandable, and his words sound like they are supposed to, though we've heard some changes in how he uses the letter "s" and "p" at the beginning of words: "school bus" now sounds like "cool bus;" "spoon" now sounds like "foon;" "pancakes" now sounds like "cancakes," and "police car" sounds like "colice car." We're not sure what is going on there, as he used to say these words without a problem. Perhaps some of the younger kids in his room are influencing his speech patterns??

While we often wish that he didn't wake up quite so early in the morning (pretty much between 5:45 and 6:15 each day), Jonah is generally pretty happy to stay in his crib and jabber to himself. It's amazing to listen to him across the baby monitor, and we often wish we knew what exactly he is thinking and how he moves from one idea to another. Sometimes the "transitions" seem logical, but more often than not, we have no idea how he gets from Idea A to Idea B.

Last week, Jonah was particularly talkative at bedtimes. On Thursday - Uncle David's birthday, as well as that of our friend Kristin - he went on saying "happy birthday to you" ad nauseam, mixed in with some other concepts and ideas, for nearly an hour. I set my phone to create a voice memo via the baby monitor in order to capture some of his jabbering for posterity's sake. Here's a sample from that with a fairly recent picture as backdrop so I could actually upload it to YouTube (Grandpa Gregg should be glad to hear some references in there to Popperville!).

See-Att-Uhl, Day 3: Hiking and Relaxing

Compared to Day 2, Day 3 of our trip was pretty low key. We took the Cee-tee Bus to Discovery Park to do a little hiking. It was great to stretch our legs and take in what we could of the scenery. Unfortunately, the day was a bit overcast.

We were hoping to see some of the birds that are known to be around Discovery Park, like Bald Eagles, but the extent of animal life we saw was limited to common birds, slugs (which Jonah liked), and bunnies (which we learned from a sign later are not native to the park and are only there because people release unwanted pet bunnies there).

That wascally wabbit

Jonah, as usual on our hikes, loved the uphills and downhills. Who wouldn't if they were riding on someone else's back? He really wanted to see the lighthouse, too.

Downtown Seattle is back around this area, to the left...

Still a ways to go to the lighthouse

At the lighthouse

Despite the fun he had riding in the Kelty, I think Jonah's favorite part of the day (apart from riding the city bus) was the playground at the park.

Fun sliding with Mommy

More scenery from the hike is on our web album.

When we got back to downtown, the fun of trying to find a place to eat began anew. Most places around the Pike Place Market (near where the bus dropped us off) were swamped. We managed to find a diner that did the trick. After wandering the market just a little more after lunch, we headed back to the hotel for nap time.

Post nap consisted of some more wandering around the waterfront, where we ended up on the Carousel at the Waterfront Arcade. Jonah loved it so much, we each took a turn going around with him.

"Reawwy fast!!!"

Catching just the right shot on a fast carousel is very difficult...

We finished off the day trying to find a place to eat. After little success finding a place with a reasonable kid's offering that didn't have a long wait, we ended up at Gordon Biersch. It was fine and got us a meal.

Walking back to the hotel, we heard an "It's Ben Sweetser!" from across the street. We were pleasantly surprised to run into Dave Zipkin and Abby Klingbeil, friends and fellow '97s from Dartmouth. On their own little mini-vacation. Just walking down the street. It truly is a small world. We had a nice visit with Abby and Dave on the street for a bit before it was time to get Jonah back to the hotel for bed.

With all the hiking, sleeping was not a problem that night.