Week 4

1/21 - 1/27

 Study buddies....

 Beautiful day at basketball

 Procrastination in progress....

 But it was finished in time!

  Gym meet at Stanford, read about it here

 More Bay area fun, read here

 Saw the current US Men's Gymnastics Champion. 

 Learned about birds.

 This guy was my favorite. 

 We received our first Chatterbox by Houseparty pack, new flavors for our Soda Stream to try. 

Stanford Weekend Fun

While down in the bay area for Ty's meet, we packed in a lot of fun.  

After his session was finished on Saturday morning, we took a quick tour around the campus with Stuart.  The Stanford campus is huge and beautiful, Ty was impressed with the huge bookstore.  

Then we headed north to Alameda to the Pacific Pinball Museum.  

With your admission price, you are able to play unlimited pinball on machines from the 50's-today.  It was really awesome and very interesting to see the old machines.  

 After playing for a little over an hour it was time to head back to Stanford for the NCAA session.  Stanford hosted Michigan, CAL and U of WA.  

It was beyond awesome to see elite gymnastics in person, Ty and I were both stoked.  Michigan has two national team members on their team right now, including Sam Mikulak who is the current US Men's champion. 

 CAL and Stanford had a good showing at the meet as well.  

Here are a few highlights we saw.

(Oh and I'm acknowledging the know video comment.  They weren't enforcing it from what we could see, but watch quickly before I have to take it down!)

After a lazy morning and breakfast with Uncle Stu, we headed toward home.  We took a break in Walnut Creek at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum.  It started out as on of the nations first wild animal hospitals and turned into a rehab sanctuary.  They have many animals that are on the mend and have many that won't be able to return to the wild but are now there for shows. 

 They also had a lot of great interactive exhibits.

 Some of the hawks and owls sit on top of the enclosures and take in the scenery. 

 The hospital displays were very well done. Lots of x-rays of all kinds of animals.

It was a great, long weekend. 

1/25 Stanford Open

We traveled down to Stanford University for Tyler's meet this past weekend.  He had a great meet, besting a lot of his scores and getting back on track from the last meet.  

His big accomplishment for the meet was finally hitting a 1 1/2 on the mushroom and not having a fall deduction.  Awesome! 

Marching in....

 166 Level 4's, our guys are on the other side with their hands up.

 With so many competitors, they had two flights for our session.  The boys would compete two events, then march around the edge and go to the warm up gym to get ready for the next two.  

Rinse and repeat 3 times....

 Each meet decides how they are going to do awards.  Trying to keep the level 4's an introductory level they didn't present any individual awards or post any scores during the meet.  They did present the top 3 teams with banners for their gyms and each judge gave away an award for sportsmanship and hard work. 

Video....

His next meet is this Sunday in Elk Grove, back to back!  

Week 3

1/14 - 1/20

Talking on his phone (aka: calculator thingy)

"Yeah, she's letting pull out ALL the toys!"

 Another week of clinics....

 The boys had enrichment classes in Rescue this week.  They are both in different LEGO engineering classes, this time with Star Wars themes.  Cody built a racer similar to the one below during his class.  

He also took an art class that travels around the globe, this week it was Asia.  Tyler is still in the earth science class, this month talking about eco systems and global warming.  They both ended their day in the same Mad Science class.  Can't wait to see what they do next month. 

 Like many households around the world, we have loom band fever.  

Here are a few of our latest creations, all created without the fancy loom.

Top to Bottom: turtle shell, triple loop, open oval and serpentine

Rainbow ladder, bon bon, rainbow dragon's tail and rainbow fish tail

We get this look quite a bit.  Usually because I won't let him play in the trash, or drink my coffee, or play with scissors, or type on the computer.  So mean.

 We do like to have wrestling breaks in our school days though...

 Cody's turn....

 Tyler working his back lever with a band exercise he picked up at practice on Thursday. 

We had a soccer filled Saturday with clinic in the morning and a double header for Futsal in the afternoon.  The boys had some shining moments, but not enough for any wins.  3 games to go....