Row B: 101 102

Jenna and I took a whirlwind trip to New York last weekend. We were supposed to leave Thursday night, but a radar went down in Chicago -- so we left at 5 AM on Friday morning.




After the taxi ride, we went bowling with people I work with in New York. I am big enough to admit that she actually had a higher score than I did the first game. And for her 3rd game, she bowled a 100 which is really good (she bowled two strikes in that game).




On Friday evening, I surprised her with tickets to The Lion King Broadway musical and imagine my surprise when our seats turned out to be front row, right on the aisle! The play opens with the title song, and you have all of these "animals" that come walking down the aisle and up on the stage right past you. When the song ended, Jenna closed her mouth (her jaw had hit the floor when the song started) and said "This is AWESOME!"

After getting back to the hotel after midnight (she was hungry, so we walked from 40th street to 60th to find an open McDonald's at midnight) we crashed.

Saturday started at 10 AM with Jenna putting down 3 bowls of cereal and 6 strips of bacon + a donut. Then we headed off to "the Museum" -- the American Museum of Natural History (or as most kids know it -- Night at the Museum from the movie).

Of course we had to find her favorite characters -- "Rex" the T-rex who chases his own rib, and the talking head who wants "gum gum".

After finding all the neat stuff in the museum, we headed off across Central Park to find the Balto statue. On our way we stopped at the Carousel -- this thing is fast! I had troubles taking a non-blurry picture of Jenna flying past.

After a couple of wrong turns, a water, and a popsicle we found the statue.

Now it was time to go to Toys R US to check out all the fun things. Jenna was most excited by the Barbie store as you can imagine. We finally decided to call it a night and head back to the hotel to get ready for the 6 AM flight back to Iowa.



Still, that 6 AM flight gave Jenna enough time to have yet another bowl of cereal to snack on.

All aboard the Crazy Train

To say that Levi is "crazy" about trains isn't even the half-of it. He has a number of favorite train videos he likes:

Numa numa train
Brio Train
Union Pacific "Big Boy"
Amtrak Milwaukee Trains

And his favorite: Trollet paa Tur (because it has a bus, and a train and a car ...)

Anyone notice it is the Scandinavians who post the most toy train videos?

Modern Art

The girls love to decorate their rooms with many different looks -- here are their latest efforts using nothing more than what they could get their hands on + masking tape:






This reminds me of a building in San Francisco where the artist attached a bunch of furniture to the outside (I guess it has a name).

Family Traditions

Ah, July 4th, a time of family traditions.

Denise and I have been cognizant this year of many of the family traditions that we have had either growing up and that we incorporated, or ones that we have created over the last 21 years of our marriage. Family traditions are ways of distinguishing between families ("They must be Christiansens...") or different lines of the same family ("They must belong to those Fairchilds...") or even within the same family ("They are definately HIS kids!")

This last Memorial Day, Denise and I did what I called the "Fairchild Memorial Day" tradition -- we went and visited a number of graveyards in Illinois of Fairchild ancestors. Afterwards, we went to a park and played on a number of old, 50s era park toys (they are made out of what appears to be lead pipes, and they have uncovered screws and other sharp corners available for the horde to get all bunged up on. Reference picture with Denise and Anders), and we had a traditional family feast -- courtesy of Culvers. Todd is going to say "Wait, you missed the one BIG important tradition!" and he was right. So I saved it for July 4th.

July 4th dawned with nice blue skies, warm, not too hot and thankfully not too humid either. It was going to be a different July 4th for us since downtown Cedar Rapids was wiped out in a flood 3 weeks ago. I have spent much of the last weeks working 20 hour days salvaging the old office, preparing the new office and trying to keep production moving at OmniLingua Worldwide. So our plans were simple -- stay home, do a little grilling, and light the great assortment of fireworks that you can legally light in Iowa -- snakes and sparklers. Little did Denise know that there would be two new traditions added to the horde this year: water fight (there you go Todd!) and Greek barbecue.

I awoke early and made my plans:

Water fight check list

1. Hose that dad controls - done

Okay, so the water fight was prepared for. Now the Greek barbecue:

Greek barbecue check list:

1. New grill to grill with (no gas!)
2. "British sugar"
3. Pork
4. Lamb
5. Pork
6. Souvlaki
7. Feta cheese
8. Pork
9. Saganaki
10. Pork

This being Iowa (Pork: The Other White Meat(c)) lamb is hard to find, but after some diligent searching, I was able to procure some lamb chops for an exhorbitant price! Feta -- took the only two packages available that was "fresh feta" cheese (comes from sheep's milk, shhhh, don't tell the kids). Saganaki -- couldn't find anything appropriate to combust the cheese, so scratch that. And for other Greek substitutes, instead of these nice cured pork strips you can get in Greece, I had to make do with thick sliced Amana Bacon, and I used Italian Sausages (somehow I am going to have to figure out how to sneak in the appropriate meat!).

So armed with all the ingredients, and after putting the legs on the new grill wrong not once, but TWICE, we were ready to start the festivities. Enjoy the slide show.

Oh, and the water fight -- let's just say it somehow started when Denise "accidently" fell into the little kids pool, uhm, head first. Three broken truces and a little "rub-raw" from sliding around on the trampoline later, the water fight was ended ... for now ...