while we're waiting....

...for people to share their Boulder pictures with me, I thought we'd start catching up on baby pictures.
Fashion show!
We've discovered the couch and how much fun it is to sit and kick kick kick.

...or lay down and watch the fan go round and round.
I love this picture of Lisa reading to Katy.
So as winter has fallen upon us...so do the cute outfits. We're finding creative ways of dressing the girls up for the cold weather. So far, they don't seem to mind. And it's pretty darned cute!

This was back in early October...one of our first snowfalls of the season.
Katy being cute.
Here, we see what happens when Alyssa tries to take off her sweater on her own.

Remind you of anything? Here's a picture of Katy that I took very early one morning when I couldn't get her shirt over her head. Not much has changed. Lisa got creative and started giving them snacks in muffin tins. The girls LOVE it! And this is to prove to Sam that I stacked all of their blocks on one green one. Sadly, I wasted a lot of time doing this. Pretty ingenious construction though, right?

I'm BAAAACK

Where did I go, you ask? BOULDER, COLORADO!!! Curious as to why I've been in Boulder the last 2 weeks?

Well about 2 months ago one of my supervisors tells me off the cuff that I've been nominated/selected to go to a once a year training course in Boulder. I was honored of course but my first thought was with Lisa and the girls. How can I just leave them for 2 weeks on their own? Lisa recognized how important it would be for me to go so she assured me that it would be okay and I should go for it. We thought about taking the whole family down there but financially and logistically...we just couldn't do it. So at the last second, Lisa's Mom volunteered to come stay with Lisa and help out with the girls while I was being educated in gorgeous Boulder.

SO many stories to share...

First, as you may or may not know our good friends Ben and Lisa moved to Boulder a couple months ago. What a great opportunity to have someone close to me show me around and entertain me after 8 hours of lecture every day. What was unexpected was meeting so many cool people at the workshop. It's a workshop that's put on by the Canadians so it was mostly Canadian meteorologists, a few from Europe, and 5 from the U.S. It is truly an honor to go since this is only the 9th workshop...meaning less than 50 NWS employees have attended ever!! A real honor indeed to attend! Or as my Canadian friends say..."a real honour, eh?"

So I've been debating about how much I should share. I imagine most of you are not interested in the details of my wild 2 weeks in Boulder and are wondering how the girls are. The girls are fine. Lisa and her mom had their hands full and took plenty of pictures to prove it. I'll get back to those.

ME, on the other hand did NOT have a camera...at least one that worked. I took our old (and by old I mean 10 month old) camera and it froze up on me. I had to rely on everyone else to take pictures for me which was hard since I like to take SO many pictures. I haven't received any pics from my classmates but Lisa and Ben were nice enough to send me home with a cd from our weekend of hiking. Saturday we tackled a local hike near Boulder called Flatiron #2 via the Chautauqua Trail which was about 3 miles roundtrip. What I wasn't ready for was the elevation. As most of you may know, Boulder sits at about 5200 feet above sea level. The climb took us up to about 7100 ft. That's not enough air!!! I was breathing pretty hard the whole time but as you'll see, it was well worth it. It was a gorgeous day and an awesome hike.

I had to take lots of breaks because of the altitude. Really hard on the lungs.

View of Boulder from the top. The red buildings are the University of Colorado.
The TOP!! Lisa showing off her bouldering skills.
Me and Lisa with downtown Denver way in the background.
I didn't want to leave. It was so nice up there.
Cubby and Kiana were great off their leashes.
I like this picture of me.
Again...I stayed up there for a while. I was really content up there and didn't want to leave.

After a fun day of hiking and some relaxing at a local watering hole, it was back to the hotel to lick my wounds and get ready for Sunday. Sunday Ben and I tackled the Rocky Mountain National Park. Lisa was working the night shift so Ben and I went in the morning to do a little exploring in Estes Park and then do one of my favorite hikes up to Emerald Lake. It was again an amazing day! This hike starts at 9475 feet and goes up to 10160 feet. It wasn't nearly as strenuous as Saturday's hike but it was so beautiful. Unfortunately, Ben's camera battery died so we didn't have any pictures from the morning hike. Lisa joined us around 3pm with a backup battery. We decided to hit another relatively easy hike up to the Alberta Falls toward the Glacier Gorge. Another amazing (and relatively easy) hike. Surprisingly, my legs got more and more spring in them as the day went on. The pictures, which I won't share ALL of them, were pretty funny. Ben got a little picture-happy and took dozens of pretty hilarious snapshots of Lisa and I...only one of which I'm not quite ready to share. Alberta Falls.





AWESOME day!

Afterward, we went back to Boulder and had another fantastic evening at....I think that night was the tequila bar. It was like an upscale Mexican restaurant with an insane selection of tequilas. I'm pretty sure that was the night I headed back to the hotel a little early to do laundry and get ready for the next week of lectures.

So this doesn't even come CLOSE to sharing with you how much fun and how much I did during the last 2 weeks. Like I said before, I met some AMAZING people at the class that I will hopefully remain in contact with for a long time. I'm so sad I didn't have my camera to take more photos but hopefully people will email me soon -hint hint!. To any of you that may read this...you are AWESOME!! Thank you for hanging out with me and making me apart of your family away from home.

Thank you Ben and Lisa for sharing your life with me in your new home. WOW did I have a great time!

Baby pictures will come tomorrow.

Sick baby.....

It breaks our heart when these girls aren't feeling 100%. You can just tell they don't feel right and don't know why. It usually involves lots of additional whining. The last couple of days Katy has been fighting a fever. Last night was the worst night we've had in months trying to get them to sleep. Katy couldn't calm down so we went in to make sure she didn't need a diaper change. Of course that woke up Alyssa and it was ON. Alyssa seemed very confused as to what was going on so it took quite a while to get her calm and to stay asleep. She's definitely entered the toddler phase with her voice...that girl can SCREAM!!

So tonight, Katy had a bit of a fever after dinner. We were going to do baths so while we were waiting for our dinner to finish up, we mentioned "bath" to the girls and started getting them ready. They both got SO excited. It was good enough that I had to take a video and share it tonight. Enjoy.

After the bath, bedtime went much better tonight. They went back to their normal fuss (not cry) for 5 minutes or so and have stayed asleep since. I'm hoping we've turned the corner and we'll get rid of that fever tomorrow.

All the new camera pictures are on the other computer so I'll just share a couple screen shots my friend took of me tonight while we were chatting. I thought it was pretty funny. We were talking about who-knows-what and he captured these images without me knowing and then shared later. It's definitely good for a laugh.

October 12, 2008....a really fun day

We had our 3rd measurable snowfall of the year. This one is a little more substantial. It snowed all day today but only managed just over an inch. Then when the girls woke up from their afternoon nap, we decided to go out for a walk. By the time we got outside, it was REALLY snowing. It probably snowed an inch and a half while we were out. Here are a couple pictures from the walk. We had to stop a lot to wipe off the cover so they could see.




Well since I didn't have any good close up pictures of the girls, I figured I'd download some videos. First is a couple videos of Katy's new way of talking. We have no idea where she picked this up but the more she did it, the more we laughed, which means the more she does it.


The girls have been dancing for a while which was just shaking their shoulders but lately they've been grabbing our hands for stability and moving their legs. Well today they decided they didn't need us and started DANCING!!! It was a fun day of NAH NAH and dancing.


Every picture and video was taken today.

MOOSE!

...and snow! This evening, we had our first measurable snow. I was working as the forecast went out and was there through the onset of Anchorage's first snow event of the season. side...if you don't know what I do, take a look at the profile. In addition to all that excitement, a couple of moose visited the office. So my friend and colleague, Sam, went out to launch the balloon...oh, you can read the whole story on his blog.

At any rate, he took some AWESOME pictures of the moose about 100 yards away from where I work. Since I didn't have my camera with me , I had to steal a couple of pictures from his blog to share on mine.

To clarify, the first picture is not of a moose. It is a rare photo of another indigenous hairy mammal in his *natural habitat*.



*natural habitat* - besides being a natural husband and father, this hairy mammal is most comfortable sitting in front of multiple computer screens monitoring and forecasting weather. In this photo, you can see the subject is observing radar echo returns of the first measurable snowfall in Anchorage proper...a rare and fascinating photo.

Okay...a few more pics from the old camera

We took a couple videos on the old camera last night that I wanted to share. One great feature of the D90 is it takes 720p quality video. I don't know why but we haven't used it yet. So last night when I wanted to take a couple videos, I reached for the old digital camera and took these gems.

I was taking videos of the girls dancing. I had taken a couple videos and had just shown Alyssa the video. I hit record to make another video and she started walking around me in circles. You can hear Lisa half way through when she realized that Allysa was trying to walk behind me to see the back of the camera. So when I realized this, I started showing her the screen and then showing her to get her reaction. I couldn't have scripted this better. It was all pretty funny.


Plus I found some more photos that we hadn't downloaded. I think it was last weekend, we took a couple bike rides with the girls. We are getting way too close to winter so we're trying to get outside as often as possible before it gets too cold or too much snow on the ground. We actually had some big snowflakes today...nothing stuck but another reminder that winter is very very close.

First, Alyssa for some reason really wanted to wear her sunglasses in the bathtub. I guess she's getting ready for Hawaii. Lisa snapped this while me and the girls were watching some football last Sunday morning.
Here's the 10.4 mile bike ride a couple weeks ago. The girls napped most of the way. What made the ride especially difficult is the hill at the end. I managed to make it all the way up without stopping, even though I was hauling an extra 75 pounds behind me.
We thought this tree was beautiful. It was very close to this area where Madison saw her first moose. The thought had crossed our mind to spread her ashed under this tree.
The girls seem pretty content at the end of the ride.

Last weekend we took another bike ride that was about 5.5 miles long. Half way through we had this view of Mt. McKinley and Mt. Foraker. Amazing!!

The second video. After we realized what was going on, we thought we'd try it one more time to see what would happen...another funn video!

Some more random D90 pics

I was going through the first set of pictures resizing some of them to put on my ipod and thought I would go ahead and share a few more. No interesting stories or videos today...just more cute pictures.







The answer key is: K, A, K, A, AK, K, KA, K