Picnic Day

Today is Picnic Day, the UC Davis student run "open house." We went to the parade this morning, which featured various things such as the Co-op's electric car (at left), various ag school floats (such as the enormous cow), and lots of people on funny bikes, this being bike-obsessed Davis.













Dan and Douglas enjoying the parade





Owen last night







Dude on old fashioned bike

Get Well, Mom.

Eileen is recovering from surgery to remove a benign golf ball (damn neighbor kids!) earlier in the week. All went well, though rest is the order of the day. No word on what Dad will be eating in the meantime.

Get better soon!

pictures

Douglas waiting for Owen to get out of school today.










When Owen's friend came over they ran around in the back yard in the sprinklers.







The flower his teacher made with the compliments






Douglas with best friend Tobin.

Open house

Last night was Owen's school's open house. We got to visit classrooms, hang out with other families and help to man the Davis Schools Foundation table. So far around $21,000 has been raised at our school, which sounds like a lot but actually another one in town has raised over $90,000 so ...

Apparently 11 kids in Owen's class got in trouble last week for some boy-girl fighting - luckily Owen was not among them - but this week she had them all write down compliments about each child in the class and she typed them up, cut them out and glued them to construction paper "flowers" that she put on the wall. They are really nice.

On the evening of my birthday we went to the Wed. night Picnic in the Park / farmer's market downtown. We had dinner there and split the cake Dan brought home with several friends and their kids, so it was a really nice evening.

Happy Birthday, Katherine!

Baseball

Owen had a baseball game tonight. The other team seemed to have an awful lot of big and older players, so it wasn't much of a contest, but they had fun anyway.

Douglas enjoyed a snow cone during the game.





Dan managed to stop by briefly between work and a meeting.








Owen hitting the ball (you can see it just to the right of his sleeve). He just barely was out by a couple of inches at first base. The kids have a tendency to stand right on the base which makes it hard for the incoming player to get there.

New camera!

Owen and I went to the camera store today and got a new digital camera, and were fortunately able to save the pics that were still on the old one.

This is a shot of the current state of the garden. It's doing pretty well now that spring has sprung!




And a picture of Owen in the front yard. He and I took a nice bike ride today while Douglas was at a birthday party.

SF zoo ... but no pics

When we were in Berkeley last week, Douglas asked for a piggy back ride, and when I picked him up the camera fell out of my pocket. It died that day (RIP). I took it to the camera store but they told me it would be minimum $130 to repair it and new cameras started at $120 with far more pixels and so forth. So I guess we'll be buying a new camera.

We went to the San Francisco zoo today. It was a beautiful day. We had to leave a little late because Owen had his baseball team pictures in the morning. Then we of course got lost en route to the zoo (their website was down and Mapquest gave us the wrong directions. Stupid Mapquest). But when we finally arrived it was really nice. The SF Zoo is in a beautiful spot near the ocean in the southwest corner of the city, and it has amazing landscaping. There were all kinds of unusual plants blooming.

The kids most enjoyed the grizzly bears (brothers?), who were tussling together in the water mere inches away from the Plexiglass we were standing in front of. That was pretty cool. I also enjoyed the peacocks who were wandering around, the koalas and the baby giraffe. The tiger exhibit creeped me out a bit given the recent incident - although the cage was pretty clearly new, but still.

Tomorrow Douglas gets to go to his first birthday party at Pump It Up in Woodland. He will likely have quite a fun time.

Slacking

I have not been doing much blogging lately.

Owen has a baseball game starting right about now. Dan is umpiring. Today it's behind the plate, the hard part because the kids cannot catch to save their lives so he is constantly getting beaned back there. You can't flinch because you have to be watching to make the call accurately. He wears full protective gear from head to toe but still ended up with several bruises last time.

It is starting to warm up. I took the kids for an ice cream cone after school. Baskin-Robbins has a new kind, presumably temporary, called "Tax Crunch" that Douglas likes. In other summer-type news, our old grill died and now we have a new one but so far don't have a canister to hook it up to so we haven't used it yet.