Good Thinking, Us

Josh's cousin's kid is doing the Flat Stanley project. When they got our Christmas card from Alaska, they wrote us and asked if they could send Stanley to us so he could do some "Alaska-y" things. We said, "Of course!" and so Flat Stanley came over. Unfortunately for Stanley, the day he arrived marked the day the temperature around here dropped into the negatives and stayed there.

Notice how that says negative 15, at 9 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. Here's a little rabbit trail: on Saturday when I took Zeke to speech, it was -9 when I left and a whopping -14 two hours later when we got home. When we got to church on Sunday, Finn started gasping when I took him out of the car on account of the cold. Also, our garage door takes a few tries to get open when it's this cold. You push the button and raises about a foot, then goes back down. And repeat. Push the button, watch it go up a foot, then watch it go back down. And repeat a good 4-7 times until finally, it opens all the way. And that was really 3 closely placed rabbit trails. Forgive me.

So Stanley got here, the weather got severly cold and so poor Stanley only made it to work with Josh. Which is cool since he works on a military base, right? On Thursday or Friday I got an email from the zoo (because I'm a member, and because I'm cool like that). The email said they were having a birthday party for the polar bears on Saturday. Sweet! I figured that would be a great day to brave the cold and get Stanley to see something else. Only Josh reminded me that Zeke has speech at the time of the party and so went that plan.

I then determined Stanley had to do something besides sit around our house, so we figured we'd take him (and the kids) to the Imaginarium at the museum in Anchorage. On Monday. You know, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I'm sure you can see where this is going, and where the title of this post is really going to come into play.

We bundled up the kids, grabbed Stanley, and drove to the museum. We walked the 2 short block (as opposed to 2 long block) walk from the parking garage to the museum, in the -4 degree weather, took our picture outside by the sign:

then walked to the door, only to find it locked. Because it's a holiday. Why we didn't think about the museum being closed on a federal holiday is beyond me. So we walked as fast as our frozen legs could take us back to the car. Poor Finn was not a happy baby by this point. He was cold, he was getting hungry, and I pulled his hat down over his face to try and keep as much of the cold off of his face as I could, so he couldn't see anything. On our way back to the car though Josh suggested we take the kids bowling, so off we went to base, to the bowling alley, hoping that it would be open.

And it was! I think this is the first time we've taken the boys bowling that they can remember, and it was so much fun. They had a blast throwing the ball, kicking the ball, pushing the ball. At one point Zeke asked about the bumpers and I explained how they help keep his ball from going on the gutter, so he can knock down more pins. My next turn I wound up throwing a gutter ball and Zeke said, "Mom, you need the bumper." Thank you son.

We bowled one game, then went home. Once we got home I put Finn down for a little rest time as he was one pooped out baby:

while the rest of us had dinner. Then it was video and bed time for the boys, followed by veg-time for us. All in all, a pretty good MLK day. Plus, I'm happy we actually took Stanley out to do something while he was with us. Farewell Stanley. I hope you had a nice visit.

If you click on the pictures of Zeke and Deacon at the bowling alley, they'll take you to little videos of each of them bowling. Oh, and Deacon won. Towards the end of the game he kept getting spares, pushing ahead of Josh and me. Although I can't prove it, I'm fairly certain Josh threw his last ball in the gutter on purpose so that Deacon could keep his lead and win. He claims he didn't but I'm not buying it.