Circus Monkey

Last week we went to the circus. I thought Elizabeth would love it. She was fairly interested during the performance, I expected more out of her, but she enjoyed it. However, it's been obvious in the past week that she really enjoyed it. Every morning she wakes up and the first word out of her mouth is "circus!" She talks about all the animals we saw, elephants, zebras, horses, and tigers. I originally told her there would be a lion and that the lion tamer would put his head in its mouth (they don't have lions anymore). I tried to convey the idea by putting my hand in my mouth. For a while afterwords she would mention all of the animals and then put her hand in her mouth, it was funny. Of course, the PETA protestors would say I was a terrible person for supporting animal slavery and cruelty.

She is definitely growing up. Tonight we were going to go for a walk and all of the sudden she points outside and says, "monkey...trees." The thing is that we don't have any books that talk about monkeys in trees. Just before we were talking about her favorite book, "Spooky Old Tree," and the circus, and I think she just was thinking about animals and trees and put the two together. She's starting to get an imagination and putting her own ideas together. It probably didn't help that on the way to the park I pointed to a tree and said, "do you see the monkey?" Hahaha...that was a good one.

I think Rachel has officially hit the cute stage. Whenever she's in a half-way decent mood she will give me a big smile just because I smile at her. Her whole face changes when she smiles, it's so cute.

I went to a beginning backpacking course put on by our local park district. Our park district is awesome, they are more than just parks. Most of their parks are huge, they have their own police force, and we frequently camp at their parks for free. Their campsites are only available for small, conservation oriented groups like scouts, but they are pretty nice. That means we're all alone, which I really like. They also have lot's of trails. I'm trying to convince the boys to hike in to one of the sites to try our hand at backpacking, but they aren't too incredibly keen on the idea. I want to get some more interesting things going on. I talked to a guy at work whose troop goes climbing, canoeing, caving, etc. I will try to do some of those things, but our scouts aren't the most excited about some of the ideas. Plus, our boys are all 12-13, which limits us a bit. For instance, you can't go in non-commercial caves when you're under 14 according to the scout rules. Oh well, we'll see what happens.

In other news, I finally finished my paper for the conference in Boston. It's been accepted, I just had to put the finishing touches on it. The bad news is that it's a conference and I have to prepare a poster (or multiple posters, to be precise). I have a 4 foot by 8 foot area. It kind of stinks since it should be a graphically appealing presentation, I feel like Bones, "#$%@*# Jim, I'm an engineer, not a graphic designer!" Hopefully my friend Hansen will give me some pointers.