Doot and Wee-why

Luke came over to play a couple of mornings last week while Kristen was out of town. She said he didn't even mind her leaving, since he knew he got to come play at "Wee-why's house." When I told Levi that Luke was coming over, he yelled "Doot, yay!" They really like each other. Their names are just a bit tricky to say at this age.

They are 9 months apart; when Levi was a baby, Luke couldn't wait for him to grow up so they could play together. He just knew they were meant to be friends.

Now that they're both talking (sort of), they can even have little conversations with each other. They really crack each other up.

Cousins make the best kind of friends!

Airport Day

Our tiny little airport does an Airport Day every year. I took the boys a few years ago when Dave had to work (I'm so glad he doesn't do urgent care anymore), and they've wanted to go back ever since. They were hoping to get free aiplane rides, which they missed last time, but they didn't have them this year. They did have helicopter and plane rides, but they were $75 and up. No thanks. They loved watching this helicopter land right in front of them. It got very breezy.

But at least they got to get all buckled into the helicopter seat. That was fun. (Thanks for the tip on making collages, Carol! I did this on Picasa, which is a free download. Pretty cool.)

We went there early in the day to beat the heat, but it was still pretty dang warm. I spent most the time sitting in the shade of an airplane and eating kettle corn. Yum.

We watched the remote control planes do stunts and such. I liked it when they moved to the beat of the music

Spencer bought shaved ice for everyone to share. What a nice brother.

It was very cold.

They had a little combat show in which the remote control planes tried to hit each other's tails. The plane with the longest tail at the end won.

Spencer happened to be at the right place at the right time when someone asked him if wanted to launch this rocket type of airplane. They did a big countdown and everything. That was fun for him. I even got out of the shade to watch.

Summer sledding

There is a little astroturf hill in the center of the Santa Barbara Zoo that is made for sliding down on cardboard. I have no idea what it has to do with animals, but it's one of my boys' favorite things there. We had a few minutes to wait for the dinosaur show, so they all went down a bunch of times.

Meditation sledding.

We even saw people bringing their own huge pieces of cardboard into the zoo for this. It's quite popular.

The sledding was too scary for Levi. He had more fun playing in dino eggs.

Santa Barbara Zoo

We went to the Santa Barbara Zoo a couple weeks ago. We bought a membership to our little local zoo, which only cost $50, but it gets us into lots of other zoos for free. Otherwise it would have cost us $64 for one day. It's a pretty sweet deal.

We were trying to decide between Fresno and Santa Barbara (which are both about 2 hours away), so we checked the weather forecast: 99 degrees in Fresno and 75 in Santa Barbara. That made the decision easy.

Levi loves animals right now, so we were excited to take him there.

The elephants are my favorite.

And the lions. Levi has been roaring like a lion ever since.

We even remembered binoculars. Go us! But one thing I love about this zoo is that the animals are all nice and close.

Obviously there is no resemblance between my sweet little boys and those primates.

Then again...

A couple of bald eagles. Very majestic.

The California condor, an endangered species that is hideously ugly.

But it has a huge wingspan, so I guess that makes it kinda cool.

We happened to go on Vulture Day, so there were stations set up throughout the zoo with docents teaching us about the various kinds of vultures. Brennan is demonstrating the actual size of the California condor wings.

The weather was fabulous - overcast and cool when we first got there and then warming up enough to take off sweatshirts after lunch. As my sister Jen once said, bad weather is against city ordinance in Santa Barbara.



We also happened to be there during their dinosaur show, which was actually pretty funny and entertaining.

Duncan the dinosaur walked around the stage and roared, which scared Levi at first. It even pooped on the stage - right in front of my boys. Of course this was a huge hit. They laughed about it forever.

See, I was there too.

This leopard had his head down for the longest time, but then he finally looked up for a quick picture.

This picture cracks me up! Levi is smelling the flower.

Another great smelling-the-flower picture. Too cute.

Tyler LOVES taking pictures. He thanks me all the time for the camera we gave him for his birthday.

See that red train in the background? We didn't do that this time. The lines are always super long, and the prices have gone up. Totally not worth it.

I'm thinking about printing out a bunch of the animal pictures and making a little book for Levi. He loves looking at them.

Okay, I'm done now. It was hard to narrow down all my pictures - I took a couple hundred. Going to the zoo is way more interesting for me when I am taking pictures.