By Jason
Picking up from last post, the last night my parents were in town my brother flew in from Boston. It was nice having everyone together, if just for a little while. Athena is pretty attached to her Uncle Ryan, no doubt anticipating all the shenanigans he will let her get into in the future.
We took Athena to the park again and had some fun on the swings and jungle gym.
I love this shot on the slide, the motion blur makes it look like they were really moving:
Athena exhibiting unusual strength:
She really is strikingly strong, especially since she is so skinny. She’s also very clever, and likes to get into things. Her favorite tricks at the time were turning on the dishwasher and turning on the burners of the stove. Along with some fun toys, Ryan picked up knob covers so our kid wouldn’t burn our house down. He’s very helpful:
I love this picture on the slide:
Other than playing with Athena, my brother’s other objective while visiting California was to eat at In-N-Out Burger as much as possible. If you haven’t been out the west coast, In-N-Out is probably the best fast food burger chain in the area. I think he managed to have it two or three times, which is pretty impressive for a long weekend.
Because he was only here for a little while, we didn’t have any ambitious travel plans, but we did go to see San Andreas Lake. Fun fact: San Andreas Lake is a reservoir built right on top of the San Andreas Fault. There’s an earthen dam built right across the fault. No kidding:
We took a nice walk down to the dam and through the surrounding park:
And then we jumped up and down as hard as we could to see if we could cause an earthquake.
No luck. I’d like to think that somewhere there’s an freshman geology major monitoring the seismometers for his work-study who was mildly startled.
Unfortunately that was our only trip, since Ryan and I both caught Athena’s cold the next day. The virus limited itself to a runny nose in Athena’s system but hit the two of us like a pandemic, all we wanted to do was sleep. Luckily Ryan did get some more quality time in with Athena before he had to head out.
The weather was actually pretty crummy the whole weekend, and Ryan had the misfortune of trying to fly out during “The Storm.” His flight was delayed by hours.
We’ve got one more post to catch up on and then we’ll write about Athena’s first Halloween.