Camille has been quite worried because Anders didn't have a helmet.
Fixed that.
We thought about getting the helmet with construction equipment on it, but Anders's Korean side (his soccer ball head) meant that we had to get a helmet for a 5+ year old, and big boys apparently don't go for things like dump trucks on their bike helmets. We customized Anders's helmet with some dino stickers.
Everyone (except the dogs).
The next generation.
The next generation, if they were all tyrannosaurus rexes.
Soren's first composition is shorter than Anders's was. I think this is because Soren was overtaken with emotion and couldn't continue.
Looks like we can leave Soren at home with Anders now when Sigrid and I want to go out on a date night.
Anders and I tried a science project.
It was potentially messy, so Anders put on a smock.
Making dough.
Kneading.
The bottle will be our lava reservoir.
The dough (with some food coloring added) forms the volcano's cone.
Add some dish soap, warm water, red food coloring and baking soda. Then, pour some vinegar into the cone. We tried this about five times. Here's our best effort.
Our annual pilgrimage to Skyline Chestnuts. Soren's first.
The orchard's parking lot was very crowded—the most crowded we've ever seen it. I'd say it was about half Koreans (we do like our chestnuts).
We picked our chestnuts a bit further in than we have in the past. At first, I thought everything had been picked bare, but once we moved down the hillside, we found our usual seven pounds.
Sigrid kept Soren out of the way. Chestnut burrs are supremely prickly—not good stuff for a crawling baby.
Bedtime.
Asleep in the way home, enjoying the view of the inside of his fireman helmet.
Here's Anders, in the same outfit, just shy of eight months. (Soren the bunny, above, is a bit over nine months.)
Drill your children regularly, and they too can be awarded honorary BA degrees from Cal before they even enter kindergarten.
Or, in Soren's case, before he even learns to speak.
We took a weekend trip to Columbia, California. More specifically, to the Columbia State Historic Park, which is a restoration of a Gold Rush era town.
Sarsaparilla was sold everywhere. I trust sarsaparilla was popular during the 1850s. The "wonderful wines, micro brews, marinated tri-tip" and "ATM" probably were less common in Columbia during the Gold Rush.
This out house was nailed shut. That's ok, we weren't planning on using it.
The old fire station. (We also visited the actual fire station, which was a few blocks away.)
The back room at the Columbia museum.
Carriages.
The blacksmith—the fire in the forge made everything smokey.
Mitch considers a saloon.
We found these chickens early on. There was a sign saying we were welcome to feed them food scraps, or scratch, which was for sale at the museum.
We bought a couple of small bags of scratch later on.
There were a couple of slots in the chicken wire where you could stick a hand through to let the chickens feed straight from your hand, but Anders didn't want to try that. Soren (back and to the right) didn't participate at all.
Dorian and Anders really liked the big rocks that were just beyond the chicken coop. These big chunks of limestone are remnants of the hydraulic mining that was used for large-scale gold mining.
Here's a waterway near the big rocks.
I didn't realize it at the time, but suspect this sort of sluice was used for gold mining during the Gold Rush.
