summer activities I

Jed and I have been keeping busy this summer so far, doing lots of fun things.  Here are a few of the activities we have done recently, that aren't exciting enough to warrant their own blog post, but that I don't want to completely overlook (I will probably do a post like this several times over the course of the summer):

National Train Day
On May 11th National Train Day came to Washington, DC, and Scott and I decided to take Jed, since he loves anything with wheels.  There wasn't a lot to do for a 1-year-old, which wasn't very surprising.  But we walked through some historical train cars - some passenger, some dining, some fancy, some not.  I didn't last very long in that part, as I get claustrophobic.  But Jed seemed to have no problem with the small spaces, and loved running down the corridors.  Toward the end of the day we found the model trains, and the area to play with the toy trains, and Jed loved both of those.

Petting Zoo
For one of our Playgroup activities we went to the petting zoo at Watkins Regional Park, and Jed loved to see all the animals. He appreciated them being in their cages, though - when any of them walked too close to the fence he got nervous.  His friend Ivy was glad to see him, and though she had been crying before Jed arrived (scared of the animals), once he got there she quickly warmed up to the activity.  They both enjoyed playing with some buckets that we found.  When we got around to the peacocks, one of the other moms bought some food and passed it around so all the kids could have a turn feeding the birds; but when I gave Jed some of the corn kernels, he tried to feed them to himself instead.  After the kids had seen enough of the animals, we took them to the park across the street.

Memorial Day
For Memorial Day we went to BBQ with some old friends of mine, and we convinced the St. Clairs to join us.  David and Nadine live out in Rockville and have a huge yard, which the kids loved running around in.  We played Bocce and lawn bowling (which Debbie and I lost at spectacularly, which was embarrassing because we played against my dad and someone's 10-year-old), and had really delicious food.  Jed enjoyed some potato chips that my dad gave him, and when I tried to save Jed by eating the last little handful on his plate, I nearly choked because I hadn't realized that they were salt and vinegar (so, so gross).  Jed hadn't minded, apparently.  At Jed's bedtime, we put him in his pajamas and got ready to go; as we did so, Jed stole my dad's cowboy hat and began running around with it, very pleased with himself.  He looked pretty funny in his Toy Story pajamas, brown sneakers, and white cowboy hat:

Luau
Jed actually wasn't involved in this at all, but it was a big part of my life for over a month.  I'm in the Stake Young Women's Presidency at church, and we recently threw a multi-stake youth dance - with a Hawaiian Luau theme.  I was in charge of all the food and all the decorations (so basically, everything except finding a DJ).  It was a lot of work, but it turned out well. I carved a watermelon - part of it held cubed watermelon pieces and looked like ocean waves, and the other part was carved into a family of turtles.  There was a Mama turtle, and 4 babies following behind her.  I made them heads, but didn't have time to make feet and tails - so I told everyone who asked that they had them tucked up into their shells.  My landlady has been getting rid of all the bamboo in our side yard recently, so before she hauled it away I took some pieces, cut them to all the same size, and lashed them together to make a bamboo facade.  I painted "Tiki Hut" with 2 palm trees on some newsprint and hung the sign on the front.  On the tables with all the food I had lots of little things scattered around, like seashells, shark puppets, fish netting, lots of flowers, ceramic fish and turtles, etc.  I put the chips and salsa in plastic beach buckets.  Across the front of the stage I hung more fish netting, leaned some boogie boards against it, and placed a "gone to the beach" sign.  Tiki torches lined the front walkway, and the sign-in table was covered in vintage postcards from Hawaii (the little wooden table was saran wrapped to keep the postcards in place).  I pinned up some things on the wall - sarongs, fans, and beach shorts.  The dance was a success, and our biggest problem was that the air conditioning in the gymnasium was broken, so it kind of felt like we were actually in Hawaii (I told everyone that I had done it on purpose...).  But the kids seemed to enjoy it anyway, and we had about 100 people there. I took pictures of some of the decorations, but not all of them.

Virginia Renaissance Faire
Since my dad jousts semi-professionally, and was jousting in the Virginia Renn Faire this year, we went down on the last weekend and watched him.  Scott, Debbie, Jed and I drove down together, and stayed about 6 hours.  Since it's a 2-hour drive each way, that made for a long day and a tired, tired baby (who didn't take much of a nap while we were there)!  It rained a little that morning, but was sunny the rest of the day - but during the first joust, at noon, they couldn't actually joust because the rain in the morning had made the field too slick.  So they did some skill games instead, and was able to joust a little during the 3:00 show.  Jed loved to look at the horses, and would point and exclaim excitedly, but wanted nothing to do with them up close.  (Can't say as I blame him; they are only about a million times his size!)  Right before we watched the 3:00 joust, we caught a show in the woods called Circus Stella, which was really cool.  The couple who did it were cute and funny - and did trapeze stunts, tight-rope walking (and tight-rope unicycle riding), torch and chain-saw juggling, silk rope acrobatics, and brought out their dogs.  Besides watching my dad, it was definitely the highlight of the day.