All Fun and Games Until the Second Lap

The Easter egg hunt we participated in in Ohio (see previous post) came with a "free" ride on one of their historical trains, but the line was extremely long at the conclusion of the egg hunt. Rather than wait in line, we decided to return later in the day after lunch and naps to take advantage of the ride. Unfortunately, Grant was in trouble at the time we were ready to go back into Findlay, so he wasn't able to join in the fun. Ben, Julie, and I took Alex and Jonah back for the adventure.

Jonah has been extremely interested in trains for some time: he hears the whistles in the distance here and always points them out; Freight Train and Terrific Trains were some of his favorite books last fall; and he loves playing with his wooden train set, which last largely taken over our living room. We were looking forward to the opportunity to ride the train with him and were excited because the "museum" had out their quarter-scale steam engine, which we had never seen in past visits.

A view of the steam engine as we rounded the first bend.

Getting ready to add additional coal to the engine.

Jonah was more than excited to get into the train at the outset of the ride,

but once we passed the starting point for a second loop around the track, he totally broke down and wanted nothing more to do with the train:

Get me outta here!

We have no idea what happened. The train did blow its whistle shortly before he broke down, but he had previously heard the whistle at the beginning of the ride and didn't react negatively at that point. Perhaps he was just expecting one loop and was afraid we would never be able to get off. Who knows...

Unfortunately, he was unwilling to cooperate for photo opportunities inside the building as well:

This just reminds me of the one outside!

The best image we could capture of the two boys together...

All was not lost, however, as Jonah thoroughly enjoyed watching the model trains they had set up and running indoors. They also had some track and cars that Alex and Jonah played with a bit.

Looking at the model railroad.

 

Alex points out features of the model on the opposite side of the room.

Concentration!

I'm betting we'll go back on future visits to Ohio. Hopefully Grant will be able to join us for the fun times too!

Going on an Egg Hunt

With Ben's crazy travel schedule the past couple of months (plus a business trip for me and a family vacation), we're a bit behind on posts. Hopefully we can catch up in the next week or so and then stay on top of things moving forward. However, given that Jonah's birthday is at the end of the month and we'll have preparations for that and tons of activities in association, I think I'd better just aim to get caught up by then!

The local neighborhood association sponsors and Egg Hunt for kids each year. We didn't bother taking Jonah last year, but were curious how he would respond to the activity this year.  The day was cold and it looked like it might rain, but we all bundled up and walked the 4 blocks or so over to the park.  They had an Easter Bunny there to entertain the kids while we waited, but Jonah clung to me in fear.

There wasn't much "hunting" at this location: the eggs were simply all over the ground in a roped off section of the park (a few were placed a bit strategically behind legs of tables and up on columns, etc.). Fortunately, they allowed the kids to enter by age range, so Jonah was in the first group to gain entry.  He was raring to go and could hardly wait to get at the eggs!

He didn't seem to have any problem grasping the point of the activity, though it was really interesting to see how kids that age go about picking up eggs. He walked right past some eggs to get to others that caught his eye for some unknown reason.
 

To keep things fair, they limited the number of eggs each child could pick up to ten, and we were able to meet the quota before the next age group gained entry.  Jonah wasn't terribly happy about being pulled from the hunt before he was finished participating, but he showed off a couple of his finds for Daddy:

We opened the eggs to keep the candy - pretty much all Starburst in his eggs, not exactly ideal for his age - and turned them back in for use again next year. I'm sure we'll come back for this activity again!

Fast forward a week to an egg hunt in Findlay, Ohio sponsored by Northwest Ohio Railroad Preservation, Inc. Jonah still didn't like the Easter Bunny:

but he was raring to go at the start of the hunt (a hunt in an open field where kids of all ages have access at the same time and can gather as many eggs as they want/can. The eggs are empty, however, and are turned in at the end for a standard gift bag):

In general, his search strategy was the same as before, walking (and tripping) over eggs right in front of him to get to others that caught his eye, but this time he was more particular about the color of the eggs he picked up.

Ignoring all of these eggs at my feet to find that perfect other one!

However, after a short period (around a dozen or fifteen eggs), he had had enough and wanted nothing more to do with the egg hunt. I love the long pouty face he puts on when he is sad or upset:

By the time we left, he was in a much better mood, chilling on Uncle Dave's shoulders:

See-Att-Uhl, Day 2: Seattle Center (AKTJA* Monorail)

*Also Known To Jonah As

Seattle Center, location of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and the famed Space Needle, was our destination for day 2 of our trip. After a bite to eat at the hotel, we hit our first Starbucks in Seattle just outside Westlake Center and the entrance to the Monorail.

Before getting coffee, though, a couple things caught our eyes:

This clothing store had a great collection of old sewing machines in the windows.

The trees in Westlake Park are painted blue!

Then it was on to the Monorail. Jonah was *VERY* excited about this. Per recommendations we had read online, we were sure to get seats up at the front so Jonah could watch out the windshield. He loved watching the cars (and City Buses, of course!) driving below the track and watching the buildings go by.

So excited, his tongue was hanging out!

The Space Needle from the Monorail.

The "Red" Monorail we rode to Seattle Center.

First order of business was to get over to the Space Needle to retrieve our City Passes (a great way to get discounted entry into common attractions, and better yet, expedited entry! - This message is NOT sponsored in any way by City Pass. This is just the second city in which we've used them, and it is almost worth it alone just to get through the lines faster). We were able to go directly to the Will Call window to pick up our City Passes, which actually got us two trips to the top, had we chosen to go a second time). This allowed us to bypass the long line for tickets and to go right to the entrance line.

We enjoyed the view from the top and probably picked the best day of our trip as far as visibility.

Olympic Mountains

Mount Ranier was visible, but it was hazy enough that it looked painted to the sky in the distance.

Jonah and me at the top of the Space Needle.

After the Needle, we looked at what we could of the Chihuly Garden from outside because it wasn't open yet. With more time, we might have gone back to see that, but it looked like tickets for it were scheduled and needed to be purchased in advance when looking from our phones.

That was fine because we headed to the Pacific Science Center, another location on the City Pass. We wanted to take Jonah to see the butterfly exhibit, and opted to see how he did with the IMAX seeing it was included and the worst that could happen was that we would leave (We chose To The Arctic in 3D).

As usual, Jonah loved the butterfly exhibit. He did get really sad about one butterfly that wasn't doing so well and wasn't moving. He does so love seeing the butterflies, though, and he was always very careful not to touch the butterflies while watching them!

Butterflies on the ground

Butterflies on the plants

Up close with the butterflies

Later Jonah got his first taste of chess. He needs a little work on how the pieces move, though.

"I don't care how it is *supposed* to move, Mommy! I want it over here!"

When we got to the IMAX, I was a little concerned Jonah wouldn't make it because he refused to keep the 3D glasses on, but even without the glasses, he LOVED the movie and kept going on and on about the polar bears and sat enraptured for the entire 40 minutes of the movie. His favorite part was one where they showed how they disguised the cameras to film the polar bears, but the bears discovered the camera and started batting it around. Or maybe his favorite part was the cup of popcorn he got to eat while we are watching. I'm not entirely sure.

After the movie, we found a big table that made him feel really small, but he didn't want to leave.

"Where's lunch? It will be proportionally sized to the table, right?"

We finished up at the Pacific Science Center in the fountain area, where Jonah got giddy seeing the water spraying from the fountains and firing the water cannons.

Ready? Aim! Fire!

Cool fountain!

It was time to get some lunch, so we headed out to brave the crowds at the Northwest Folklife Festival. As with all our meals, the tough part was trying to find something Jonah would eat. We ended up with pizza from a pizza by the slice vendor and sat by the International Fountain to eat. After lunch, Jonah wanted to splash in the puddles created by the fountain, but he didn't want anything to do with the jets of water spraying from the fountain (and, frankly, we didn't want a wet Jonah to carry around for the rest of the afternoon, so we were a bit glad for this). He also enjoyed seeing some brief rainbows.

"Puddle!"

With little interest in dealing with the festival crowds, we made our way to the very interesting building known as the Experience Music Project. It would have been neat to explore this museum more and partake of some of the hands on activities they have, but it is not really kid friendly at all. We took them up on their free stroller to get Jonah around with the laughable idea that he might take a nap so we could enjoy the museum. First of all, they have no single elevator that will take you to every floor, so to get from the entrance to the third floor requires going to the second floor on one elevator, traversing half the building to get to a different elevator. It isn't even a problem with the elevators not going all the way. They only allow the public to go to certain floors on the elevators.

Second problem was the "Sky Church," which had a painfully loud band playing right in front of the music museum entrance. Jonah went on for a bit about "too loud," covering his ears.

Third is that there wasn't much to visually attract an almost two year old in the music portion of the museum. There were some interesting exhibits, but it was taking me longer than a tired baby had the patience for to read. With Jonah not going to sleep though, we couldn't stick around for the Sci-Fi portion and opted to head back to the hotel to get the poor kid a nap.

Back to the monorail, which got Jonah excited!

The EMP Museum

The monorail tunnels through the EMP

"Monorail!"

While Jonah slept, I paid a quick visit to the REI flagship store, which was huge and beautiful. There are trails to test bikes, waterfalls, trees... it is like a little oasis in the city. In the shoe section, they even had a little trail you could walk to test your shoes on terrain.

We finished the evening with dinner. Jonah was requesting "Pasta!" We found a couple places in the area and settled on one that was pretty close. When we got over there, it was closed for the holiday weekend (really?). So we opted for one of the backups, Il Fornaio, which shares a name with one of my favorite little Italian restaurants in Little Italy in NYC. We were able to get right in, and everything was fantastic. The staff was wonderful with Jonah and generally great from a service standpoint. The food was really good. I would highly recommend it.

One last anecdote because this post is getting way too long. Traveling with kids is a totally different experience. People talk to you and make comments to you completely out of the blue. As we were finishing up our dinners at Il Fornaio, one couple came over to comment to us about how well behaved Jonah was and to interact with him a bit. They said their grandchildren would have been little terrors at dinner. At least the comments were positive! Though Jonah usually is very good, so I wouldn't expect otherwise.

More pictures from the trip are available in our family album.

Vacation interlude

There is still more to post from our trip to Seattle, but I thought I would post this quick one... Jonah's known his shapes for a while, but he's always been a bit stubborn when we try to capture it on video. This morning he was just naming shapes to put in one of his shape sorters that he hasn't played with in a while, and I was able to capture a bit.

See-Att-Uhl: Who Needs to Travel?

When we finally got checked into our hotel in Seattle, Jonah had a great time checking the place out. One of his favorite things was the little springy doorstops.

Every so often he would just start playing with these doorstops.

He also had some fun playing in the closet (and associated playing in the closet with drinking milk, so whenever he opened the door to the closet and entered it, he would turn around and ask for milk). Michelle got some video of that she may post later.

Who needs to travel when there are so many simple things to entertain a little one?

See-Att-Uhl: Cee-tee Bus!

One of Jonah's early words was "bus," but that eventually became "-chool bus!" For all buses.

To work on distinguishing between school buses and other buses, we started to call out city buses. He picked up the differences really quickly when he called out "Cee-tee bus!" (no, he is not saying "seedy bus"). While we were in Seattle, he was constantly pointing out all the various modes of transportation, particularly the city buses. Here we were waiting to take a city bus to Discovery Park to hike on the Sunday of our trip.

Jonah's sixth sense of knowing when a camera is pointed at him turned on when I tried to capture this, and he wasn't quite as emphatic about it as he was when there wasn't a camera capturing the moment. Imagine this about three times as excited at EVERY street corner. This made a lot of people around us smile.

He was very fond of the monorail we rode and enjoyed saying monorail as much as riding it. His recognition of taxis was particularly impressive: different colors and styles (vans vs. sedans vs. Prius). We couldn't get him to say what made it a taxi, but we figured he was picking out the signs or the writing on the side. Trucks (including "mail truck!" for all trucks that looked remotely like a postal truck), motorcycles, bicycles, airplanes, and trains... the kid loves his transportation.

If you checked out the photos before tonight, be sure to check again. I've added the pictures from my phone to the family album.

See-Att-Uhl, Day 1: The Day That Didn't Happen

Jonah certainly gets around. He has now been to the east coast (New England), Ohio, the south (Houston), and now he's made it to the west coast with our Memorial Day weekend trip to Seattle.

Seattle!

Before the trip, we started to teach him to say Seattle and talked about how we would take a big airplane to get there. In "Jonah-speak" each syllable is very pronounced to be See-att-uhl. He somehow picked up the association with Washington through us talking about it and surprised us one day by saying Washington when we talked about Seattle. Because of this, we taught him that Seattle is in the state of Washington. While he doesn't know what that means yet, we do show off by asking him what state Seattle is in to make some jaws drop when he says Washington.

We left for the airport right after work on the Thursday before Memorial Day. Scheduled to get into Seattle pretty late, we were looking forward to having a somewhat relaxing day to get adjusted to the time change and see a couple sites. It wasn't meant to be.

Even before I left home to pick up Michelle and Jonah, I was getting updates from Delta stating that our first flight was delayed. The time kept getting pushed back. When we finally got to the point to drop off our luggage, the airline had formed a line so they could make the appropriate re-bookings for people who were going to miss their connections.

After waiting in line for a long time and watching a couple of Delta agents not being very useful behind the counter, we finally got our opportunity. Because the airlines pack all the planes as full as possible, they no longer have any true backups for the times when people miss flights, even when it is the airline's fault. The agent told us the best she could do was get us into Seattle about 8:30 pm the next day, which we didn't like as an option because we would lose an entire day of our vacation trip and because we had tickets to a baseball game.

The agent was trying to come up with other options, and at one point even mentioned some crazy plan to send us from Chicago to Cincinnati to Salt Lake City to Seattle. I don't want to do that solo. With a kid? No. Freaking. Way.

We got lucky. As she was checking, two seats opened up on one of the five flights to Seattle from Minneapolis the next day. She double booked us in the very slim chance we were able to make the flight that night (the Milwaukee to Minneapolis flight was delayed because of weather earlier in the day causing delays that eventually forced an issue with flight crew schedules).

To make a long story short, we missed the flight. Jonah got to learn a new word  (sh**) from the guy across the aisle from us who also missed the Seattle flight (The kid repeats anything you don't expect him to repeat these days). The airline put us up for the night and gave us meal coupons to use for breakfast the next day. I called the hotel in Seattle to make sure we didn't lose our room (which had its own little adventure... They had us checked in already!), and we called it a night.

We got to the airport early the next morning and were shocked at the length of the lines to get through security. I think it was the one time Michelle has been thankful for the traveling I do for work, because we were able to go through the expedited security line with my airline status.

At any rate, we had a nice sit down breakfast and then hung out at the airport until our flight. We got Jonah worn down pretty good walking around the airport. He slept nearly the entire flight after the plane went "really fast!" and took off. 

Getting to the shuttle at the SeaTac was grueling with all our luggage. What an absolute pain between the ups and downs and all arounds to finally get there. But get there we did. And get to the room we somehow managed to check into from Minneapolis we finally did, as well.

After getting settled, we decided we didn't have enough time to do much besides leisurely make our way to the ballpark and grab some dinner. On the way, we stopped briefly into the mobbed Pike Place Market and found the quilt shop Michelle wanted to check out.

We eventually ended up at a restaurant near the ballpark for dinner. Just as we were paying the bill, we looked outside to see it raining really hard. Jonah liked seeing the police car across the street and wanted to "get in!!" By the time we began walking the final stretch to the ballpark, the rain had lightened up quite a bit. There was enough rain for them to close the roof, though.

According to our seat neighbors, once they close the roof, they don't open it again, but we were surprised when they opened the roof up just before the game began.

Opening the roof at Safeco Field in Seattle

We had seats out in right-center field and really enjoyed the game. We got to see Ichiro have a pretty good game.

Ichiro!

And we got to see Albert Pujols, now of the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) hit a home run about six seats away from us. Jonah had a great time dancing with the music, ...

...cheering with the crowd,...

...playing with the seats,...

...and giving Mommy funny looks.

We ended up leaving after the 7th inning because we were exhausted and still needed to get back to the hotel, so we missed the Angels coming back to win it in the 9th inning. Oh, well...

Check out more pictures from the game and Seattle on our picture site. More posts from the trip to come!