Real live - and dead - sea critters

Warmer! And sunny! And so we headed out for some much-needed beach time. The Gulf was smooth, and there was very little wind. And there were lots of creatures to find...

Emilyn immediately started wrangling sand crabs. She has a real affinity for locating them. And then Allen kept finding coquinas, pretty-colored little clams.

I waded out into the surf with my net, looking for shells, and wound up grabbing a baby flounder, about the size of a quarter! Who'd a'thunk it? AND we saw the requisite big dead jellyfish washed up on the sand bar.




Lunch at Wintzell's Oyster House, a new-ish place where the old Ruby Tuesday was. Who goes to Ruby Tuesday at the beach? Apparently, no one. Wintzell's is a local chain place, apparently famous for all the quaint sayings that are posted on the walls. Even funnier when your deadpan 4-year-old insists on reading them all.



After lunch, it was back in the water... Let's face it, we were desperate for some real beach time!! And we got our first good pictures of Allen in the waves. Plus an actually good self-portrait of Mommy and Daddy!



To see the rest of the pictures from Thursday, click here.

ONE more too chilly day

Each morning, about 10 degrees colder than is normal for this time of year. The heat on in the beach house instead of the air conditioning. The locals were really feeling it, too. A rainy and cold St. Patrick's Day parade and pub crawl, to be sure! But we still saw some hardy souls drinking bloody marys at 9:30 a.m.

But the ferry runs even on a cloudy and cool day, so we headed out to Fort Morgan for the ride to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Estuarium.

There was plenty to learn about, so that kept Allen happy... We saw little alligators, turtles of all sizes, and some really big fish. And jellyfish! And got to touch horseshoe crabs in the touch tank.


For more pictures from Wednesday, click here.

Another bad beach day . . .

Windy and cold, so it was off to the National Museum of Naval Aviation, in beautiful Pensacola, Fla. So nice to take the Perdido Key route and see some of the new buildings going up, as well as many of the lots still left empty in the wake of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Which means we can still buy that piece of Gulf front sand. If we can come up with $5 million...

As Daddy went to look at all his favorite airplanes, I took the kiddos around to climb in the old trainers.

The trip to the museum is almost always followed by a trip to Lillian's, the pizza joint that moved across the road after the hurricane. At their big, new concrete outpost, they still have some pretty darn good pizza. And Allen loves the carbonara. And the pizza clock.

Around sunset, though it was still chilly and windy, we went to check out the new Gulf Shores fishing pier. The old one was destroyed by... guess what! You got it. Ivan again. But the new pier is really nice, even though the state park charges you just to walk out on it. It's big with fishermen, so Allen got his first real close-up look at fishing. Pretty cool, actually. And the seagulls really like the fish guts that go over the side at the cleaning tables!


Warm baths all around when we got back to the beach house! Brrrr! For more photos from Tuesday at the beach, click here.

Best beach day, right out of the gate

Warm! Sun! We deserve it after the winter we had. As I was hugging Steve on the beach, he said: "We survived another winter!"

And we didn't have to wait long for Allen to get the swing of the surf.


Second beach lunch: Original Oyster House, as is tradition... It's where we got Grammy Shark, aka Swimmy. And Allen even knows that now, so he's always very excited to go there. And look! More goofy photo ops!!


To see all the photos from Monday, click here.

What a windy day to arrive !

Pretty warm, but *much* too windy to get to the beach... First beach meal at the Crab Trap, as is traditional! Steve found a menu on the ground outside the patio seating area! Score! While he took care of the theft, I handled the vandalism:

The beach house was as awesome as ever... maybe bigger than our actual house, and a whole lot cleaner. And look! Someone's taking towel origami lessons!

Good day in the car, but . . .

Allen and Emilyn were very good yesterday in the car! And we had simply the most delightful Greek food in Blytheville, Ark.! No, really!

And Que Sera Sera still has the best red beans and rice with andouille of all time!!

Things went downhill rapidly at bedtime, though. Allen is not using a playpen, so he was very restless... Emilyn couldn't sleep either. Finally, near midnight, I sent Emilyn to bed with Daddy and I took the pullout with Allen. I got him to sleep right away... for 5 minutes. And again. For 3 minutes. And again. For 2 minutes. And so on. And so on. And so on. The kid woke up every 5 minutes from midnight to 5:30. And since 5:30 was really 6:30, I just said the hell with it and gave up.

There's no telling how a totally sleepless boy (and one cranky Mommy) will behave today! But there's beach at the end of the tunnel, so we soldier on.

Fifth grade All District Choir

Congratulations to Emilyn and all the Sorrento Springs fifth-graders who sang Saturday night with a couple hundred fifth-graders from throughout the Parkway School District!

A big treat for the younger kids was a special guest appearance by the high school a capella groups, boys and girls. They were fresh back from a competition where they scored really well. And they sang beautifully! I think the fifth-graders got a big charge seeing what they could achieve if they keep practicing... (The boys were cute, so that didn't hurt either!)

We sat alllll the way across the gym at the tippy-top of the bleachers, so it was a great test of the zoom on my camera! Also, probably the most stable video I've ever shot, because I sat the camera on the bench next to me. Check out the stirring, patriotic finale! Click here for the rest of the videos.

Look who's in a big boy seat !

Allen has been pretty cranky lately... I'm trying to reward him when I can for his (rare) good behavior. So, when I heard the other day that he'd had a good day at school, I told him it was time to get rid of the baby car seats. Look at the happy big boy in his booster! (And his new ensemble for the beach!)

Indoor beach party !

Look who's under the sea with Swimmy! It's Allen, at the Parents as Teachers Beach Fun Party!

What a great time we had. (After some serious initial reluctance. Allen wouldn't even budge off the end table in the Commons area until Miss Julie came over and sweet-talked him into it. By showing him that he and Swimmy could go under the tables, covered with boo-been streamers, and pretend they were under the sea!)

The whole Early Childhood Center was packed with beachy fun. Sand tables, water tables, Build Your Own Beach in a Bottle, kiddie pools filled with confetti instead of water, and beach balls hanging from a clothesline that you could whack with a paddle. We even ran into Abby, one of Allen's friends from preschool! And it was easy for Emilyn to get in on the fun.


Mommy took waaaay to many pictures (and some video) to post here. Click here to see them all!

Project Runway, Girl Scout style !

Emilyn's latest project for Scouts was creating an ensemble for a troop fashion show... We went to the resale shop and found a really pretty butterfly T. That inspired her to change a plain white overshirt and pair of black pants into works of art. Some jewels and patches, and voila!

To see some close-ups of her beautiful work, click here.

Cookin' up some love

Valentine's weekend was tons of fun. Steve and the kiddos got me some yummy chocolate-covered strawberries. I got Steve some freaky beers (chocolate stout, sorghum pilsner, hard cider) and some chocolate treats. I then proceeded to eat half his chocolate treats... (Three days later, with Mini Egg season now upon us, I have decided I must STOP!) Emilyn got a book light and some truffles. Allen got Raging Reptiles, a book, figures and game. (Ask him how big a dwarf chameleon is, and what an anaconda eats.)

For Sunday breakfast, Steve said he wanted to make heart-shaped pancakes. Being the Critchlow that I am, I had to build him a jig to work with, out of tin foil... The foolish boy was just going to fake it and try to pour the shape of a heart?!? Bah!

Anyway, they were pretty thick, but they came out cool and, of course, were yummy.


Hope your Valentine's Day was filled with love and happiness. And hey, at least its passing brings us a little closer to the beach!!

Fossils, worms . . . it's Science Night !

The best thing they've come up with at Sorrento Springs in the past few years is Science Night. Table after table of experiments, projects and generally cool science-y fun.

Allen aced the "sniff test" -- guessing what smell was inside each baby food jar...

A lady mixed sulfuric acid and powdered sugar to make carbon snakes... a guy made a chemical volcano... there were balloons full of dry ice vapor and fossils made of plaster and earthworms doing wormy things...

And Emilyn got to hold a for-real live scorpion!!


Allen, for his part, was totally into everything he could get his hands on. I think he's not happy unless he's learning every minute. To see the rest of the fun, click here.

More icicles for Allen

Snow melt from the roof has covered a lot of our bushy-rose-whatever tree at the corner of the house. Since Allen loves icicles, he's naturally drawn to it. And, darn it, it looks cool. So I took a bunch of pictures.

He tried his hardest to break some of them off... Tough task when there's real, live, strong branches inside each one.

For more icicle photos (and a dinosaur track!), click here.

Allen's Valentine party

Bonus party for the preschoolers... between winter and spring comes: the Valentine party!

Allen, of course, got dinosaur Valentines for his class... (one other boy.) They are the super-cool kind that show a different picture when you tilt them. These have the skeletons of the dinosaurs as the second image! He signed (almost) every one. He's just not as into writing as he was when school first started...

Each kid made an awesome Valentine's mailbox. Allen delivered all of his when we first got to school.

Then it was time for Mommy to come back for the party... I don't have pictures, but I had a cool heart-shaped box craft for each of the kiddos to make. Again, I dropped a bundle on a preschool project. But they had fun!

There were also cool games and a yummy, heart-shaped snack. (Allen said he wanted pink.)


Thanks to all the kids, moms and Ms. Kim and Ms. Marlene for a fun day!

Unmasked

Time for that much-beloved fatherly duty... Girl Scouts Daddy-Daughter Dance! Emilyn and Steve volunteered to escort Grace (not pictured) because her dad lives in Florida. Awwww! What a nice gesture!

This year, a masquerade ball theme... don't they look wonderful! (Lucky for Steve, Emilyn only made one mask...)

And look who's getting so big... Eye shadow!?!?