Brian’s Brain

Monday was a special father/son bonding day. Microsoft doesn’t have the day off, so it was just me and the boys. I decided to celebrate by taking the kids back to the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. Our last trip there was a little over three years ago, which is just so odd to recall. In my memory of that day, Alex seems so old, yet he was younger then than Patrick is now. Memory plays odd tricks, I guess. As the eldest, Alex will likely always seem old in my memories, and my mind will always refuse to accept that Patrick is growing up at all.

One nice thing about our trip to the Point Defiance Zoo is we actually saw animals. That may seem an odd thing to say until you tag along with our family on one of our trips to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. The kids now have a routine that involves remarkably little animal watching. They love getting the kids’ mac & cheese meal at the Rain Forest Pavilion (it is remarkably good mac & cheese). Then they head over to the Zoomazium for a good twenty minutes of climbing and sliding. We always have to drag them out of there to see the animals.

In contrast, our trip to Point Defiance was filled with animals. It started the moment we walked through the front gate, when we found the two free-roaming peacocks. One of them was safely perched in an area beyond the reach of kids. The other, unwisely, was right on the main walkway. I had to keep sternly reminding Alex and Patrick, “Don’t scare the peacock!”

I don’t think it worked, because it didn’t take too long before the bird was in full look-at-how-big-I-am-BEWARE! mode with his tail. (Although, in my kids’ defense, the peacock spent most of his time facing down an oncoming stroller with his tail on full display, so perhaps that was scarier than my boys.)

As we made our plan to see the zoo’s sights, we each picked an animal we wanted to see before we left. Patrick picked the walruses, Alex wanted to see the meerkats, and I picked the polar bears. We chose well; each animal visit was cool in its own way. The meerkats themselves weren’t any different than the ones in Seattle, and they didn’t hold the kids’ attention that long. However, they were in the zoo’s outdoor Kids’ Zone, which really set both Alex and Patrick’s imaginations on fire. It didn’t take long for Alex to start pretending to be a hermit crab:

…and Patrick found a kid-sized nest and transformed into a baby bird. He spent the rest of the zoo visit flapping his arms like wings.

The walruses were amazing because they were so big yet so graceful in the water. (The zoo’s male walrus weighs over 3000 pounds!) It was hard to pull Patrick away from the underwater viewing area where he watched these giants glide silently past, over and over.

But the real stars of our visit were the polar bears. By pure luck, we got there just as the zookeepers started feeding the bears. Instead of watching white furry rocks sleeping, we got to see the ten-foot-tall bears swimming through the water to catch their fish, just inches from our faces. It was the coolest thing I’ve seen at a zoo in a long time.

At this point in our lives, trips to the zoo are so commonplace that I don’t bother writing about them. However, the weekend before last, we had a particularly nice trip. We ran into old friends:

And the animals were unusually photogenic.

What’s that? You’ve never seen a wolf picture from me before? Well… that’s right. In five years of bringing a camera to the zoo, I don’t have a single picture of a wolf. Most times we don’t get to that part of the zoo, or when we do, everybody’s napping. Not this time!

(And there are more where that came from!)

So all in all, a really nice trip and a really nice way to start 2012. Even if it made me think that at least one of us would be happier in a wolf pack.

Yes, there are stories behind each of these… but they’ll have to wait until I have more time.

Patrick tries out ice skating for the first time:

And Alex has run away to join a pirate family. Watch your valuables.

It was my third year in a row visiting the charming town of Prosser for the Balloon Rally (you can read about trip one and trip two). The big difference this year? The whole family came, too!

We drove to Prosser on Friday night. We expected our kids to fall asleep quickly in the car, but that didn’t happen — probably our fault for letting them watch movies on the iPad. In spite of them getting a few hours’ less sleep than normal, both kids were still up before my 6:00 AM alarm clock. That gave us plenty of time to get dressed, grab coffee from the corner Starbucks, and get out into the chilly desert morning air before the balloon launch.

Watching the balloons take off with my kids was very different from photographing them by myself. On the plus side, there’s the clichéd joy of watching the event through their new eyes. Everything they saw was new and exciting.

The downside is the attention span of youth. On my past two photography trips, I stayed out snapping pictures until the last balloon landed, about two hours after launch. On this trip, Alex was cold and back in our car within 45 minutes. The sky was still full of balloons.

This then presented the next challenge of traveling with kids. We were done balloon watching by 8:00… now what? A small town may have lots of “charm” and “wineries” to occupy adults. What about the Nickelodeon demographic?

It turns out that after a slow start, it was easier to occupy the kids than I thought. The annual Harvest Festival opened at 9:00, and with it came the magic of pony rides and inflatable slides. The playground at the town park is also top-notch. Those two activities kept us going until lunch time, when we let the kids eat at the McDonald’s off the interstate with its indoor playground. By this point, Patrick was showing his lack of sleep, but Alex was going strong. We headed back to the Best Western and I went swimming with Alex while Molly tried to get Patrick to nap. One great thing about being five years old is a tiny indoor swimming pool is as much fun as the biggest water park. Alex and I stayed in the pool for almost three hours. Every now and then I’d ask him, “Do you think Patrick is sleeping now, or is he causing trouble?”

“Causing trouble!” he answered.

Alex was right. Molly brought Patrick down to the pool for the final hour. He hadn’t slept at all in the two hours he was in the hotel room with her.

By the time dinner rolled around, exhaustion claimed the good spirits of both children, and it was taking its toll on the adults. It was too bad, because I wanted to take the kids to the Night Glow. Something to look forward to for next year, now that we understand the importance of forcing the kids to take naps!

One little postscript on our adventure. I’ve heard it said that a photographer should always have a camera, and now I believe it. Picture the scene: Our kids are melting down and need food. We take them from our hotel to Johnny’s Pizza Stone and Pub for a quick dinner. I leave my camera in the hotel. I’m not looking for photo opportunities… I’m just looking to survive the next 90 minutes until we can get everybody in bed.

When we get to the pizza restaurant, though, the strangest scene greeted us. The restaurant next door, El Rancho Allegre, was playing loud mariachi music, and in the parking lot were five cowboys on horseback. The cowboys were getting their horses to dance to the music. It turns out that horses dance just like Patrick: They move their feet up and down quickly, sort of bounce in place, and maybe turn around. Some of the horses had lovely braided manes and tails. The horse dancing went on for at least half an hour. During the dance, the restaurant had an MC talking on a loudspeaker to the audience… but everything he said was in Spanish, so I have no idea what was going on. It was an amazing, unexpected sight, and I wish I had a camera. You all will just have to take my word for it!

Gone are the days of shorts and sandals. Saturday morning, I slid on my beloved Ariat cowboy boots and a pair of jeans to ward off the early fall chill. We were heading off to the second Skagit River Ranch farm day, so my footwear wasn’t so out of place.

You may remember our adventure there two years ago. This trip was just as much fun. The biggest difference is the three-year-old on this trip was Patrick and not Alex. For a while I wasn’t sure we would get Patrick into the farmyard proper; I couldn’t get him to leave the chickens. When he found a chicken that had escaped from their fenced yard, he was thrilled and ran up to it. The wise chicken scurried back under the fence. (The farm takes free range seriously.)

Once I got Patrick to catch up with his brother inside the main yard, the kids loved exploring the outdoors and watching the different animals. Alex’s favorite was the horse that Nicole, the farmer’s daughter, rode around the farm. He was part of a flock of children that followed her from spot to spot to stay close to the horse.

We left two hours later, full and content. (They serve excellent food and had two world class chefs on hand doing cooking demonstrations.) The kids were happy and tired. I hope George and Eiko keep inviting us to their home and hosting a farm day. As long as they do, we’ll keep coming back!

Patrick’s close encounter with a chicken.

Everybody gets in on the Chicken Poop Bingo action! Number four was the “winner.”

What is a farm without a horse?

Late August, the rainy & cool weather returned. The first weekend it happened, I tried to escape by throwing the kids in the car and driving east on I-90. In less than two hours, we made it to Lake Easton State Park. As you can see, we didn’t drive far enough to make it out of the gloom, but we did make it out of the rain.

The boys threw rocks in the lake, explored the forest, and made instant friends with another family who was there to camp. Alex had walked up to the six-year-old boy and asked, “Do you want to play chase?” That was all it took. Everybody ran around the park’s little playground for almost an hour.

The kids slept well that night.

Wow, we didn’t have places like this when I was growing up!

I have fond memories of summers spent at the wave pool at Cameron Run Regional Park. But that’s nothing compared to what kids can do at Great Wolf Lodge. For starters, we could only enjoy Cameron Run during the hot summers… but not too hot, because you can’t be in the pool during a thunderstorm!

The water park at Great Wolf Lodge is indoors, though, so even on a dreary, damp, February weekend – when everyone on the East coast is digging out from two feet of snow – you can spend lots of time getting wet. And there are a lot more ways to get wet, too. Sure, there’s the wavepool, but there are also innovations like The Giant Water Bucket, which is easier to show than explain:

The kids had a wonderful time. Patrick was a little hesitant at first, but he eventually warmed up and had a blast going down the water slide (over and over and over again).

Alex had one little adventure with Molly down the big water slide – a long fast ride for multiple people in a raft. He only did that once, though, because he didn’t like waiting in line. He spent most of his time playing in the kiddy pool with his brother.

The rest of the resort is clearly optimized around keeping little kids entertained, and extracting as much money from parents as possible while doing it. The big draw outside the water park is a scavenger hunt game called MagicQuest, which involves waving a magic wand at different items throughout the hotel. Apparently, if you do the full game, it takes 4 hours and you walk 10 miles up and down stairs, which makes the $25 seem a bargain. What else occupies kids that long and gets them that tired? (We got Alex a wand, but didn’t enter him in the game… he could just wave it at things to make them move.)

Overall, it was a successful trip. Both Patrick and Alex loved every single minute of it. In spite of the cost, I bet they’ll drag us back again.