Fun with Gavin

One of the fun things we've done so far this summer is hang out with Colleen and G-man.

When vacation began for me, we met up to go to the zoo.  It was the first time the kids seemed to be really into the animals, and it was fun to compare with Gavin, at just 13 months, riding along in his stroller.

It's a baby tiger!

The highlight was, of course, the petting zoo.  And the highlight of the petting zoo for Max was the duck pond.  That kid just loves his "birdies"!

We brought a lot of change for the animal feed machine and Caroline and Daniel seem to be getting much more comfortable around the goats.

OK, maybe they're not always comfortable with all the goats.

And finally, some pictures with Gavin in them!

I just love how Max is marching into the scene.

There's a baby giraffe!

Max is checking our location on the map

Daniel and Uncle

We bring the kids to the zoo in the wagon, but they really prefer to run around, so mostly it gets used to tote snacks.   At the end of the day, Max climbed in to be led out, but Daniel and Caroline wanted to help Uncle pull the wagon.  I couldn't get enough of the rick-shaw vision of Max reading his map and directing traffic.

A few weeks later, we got together with Colleen and Gavin again to go to the movies.  The theater by their house has periodic "family friendly" weekend matinees - the theater lights are left on and since everyone else who chose to attend knew it would be totally toddleriffic, you don't have to worry about your kids' behavior.

Or at least you have to worry less.

The feature was Monsters University and it was the kids' first movie in a theater, and Colleen said Gavin had only made it through 40 minutes the first time he went, so we were prepared for them to check out early.   We seem to have underestimated the extent to which these kids LOVE popcorn!  Uncle bought them a bottomless bin and got three little bags to fill up for personal snacking.

Here we all are, snacking away.

Gavin started getting squirrelly about ten minutes into the feature and after a couple of trips out to the lobby, Colleen decided he needed to head home.  Surprisingly, we made it through the whole thing!  Daniel stood for nearly the entire movie and Caroline wandered around a little, especially when she saw some slightly older kids hanging off the hand rail on the stair case and she simply HAD to try that out.

At one point Max and Caroline both sat on Uncle's lap

but Max never relinquished his seat

After the movie, we headed over to Colleen's for pizza.  She'd ordered ahead of time so we wouldn't wait around, so of course it was an hour late.  No worries - the kids think Gavin has the coolest toys of all time, not to mention that he has a dog to terrorize and he's kind of cute himself. :)  They had an overall amazing and exhausting day.

On Sunday, Caroline saw the Datebook page of Friday's paper, with a picture from Monsters U on the front page and pointed to it, saying, "Mommy! Look! Monsters!  I see that movie with my brothers and Gabbin!"