Another year older......

William had a birthday. And according to Mitchell he is OLD! So happy birthday old man! But really this post is another attempt to rectify my poor journaling efforts over the years and really record the happenings of our little family. So, again, Happy Birthday old man and because old age is setting in and you might forget the great things we did for this birthday here is the play-by-play.

We let William sleep in. At least as long as we could allow because we had an agenda and as any good Anderson knows agendas are key to enjoying quality, scheduled, organized and properly planned activities. This, of course, was instilled in us by our loving father who would print, bind and send in the mail (even if you lived in the same house as him) the agenda for family events. While I didn't print and bind the agenda for William's birthday I had made specific arrangements based on a certain time table and it was definitely time to wake William at a little past 8. Quite decadent really, to sleep past 8am.

So as a good Anderson, I was beginning to feel a little nervous because William felt he needed a shower and food and time to wake up properly but this was not in the agenda and he was slowing us down. So we tried to hurry him along without being too overbearing and finally he made his way to the kitchen for his gifts which consisted of a number of things the kids had picked up from the Dollar store. He was really quite good-natured about the lack of anything fancy and in fact thought he had figured out we were taking him on a great adventure, which in fact we were, but not the kind he suspected. He actually though he found a theme in our Dollar store finds and assumed we were taking him for a water adventure when in reality we had thought nothing of that sort of theme and we were just grabbing items we thought were funny or odd. Maybe he was really hoping his birthday wasn't going to be filled with cheap plastic water guns and he was hanging on to the hope we had done something else for him. Which we had as evidenced by the next package produced by Jane. He was going on a scavenger hunt, or rather he was undertaking the Silly Billy Quest of 2009 and Jane had just presented him with the first clue.

In all there were only six clues but each one took bit of time because most of them required some sort of physical activity before he got the next clue. For instance, the first clue:

Stand up.
Sit down.
Spin yourself all around.
Do a little Irish jig.
And go and find the biking rig.

Ok, so this didn't really require too much physically except for his Irish jig which was actually a bit lacking, but we let him move on anyway which was a good thing because it took him a while before he figured out that the next clue was in Luke's bike trailer. This clue, however, took a little longer to accomplish, although not as long as William initially thought when he assumed we would be riding our bikes to Provo which is not a distance I want to undertake with our kids this year. At any rate, clue number 2 put us on our bikes on our way to visit our true-blue friends, the Chandlers:

You might think there are easier forms of transportation.
But this is a task of my own creation.
So use your legs and pedal away
To the place where we saw the Cougars play.

They were gracious enough to give William his next clue without making him dance but he did have to mount his bike again, this time heading to the kids school.

Morning breaks and the day takes you here
A place where there is someone dear
Who smiles and jumps and runs away
But returns again at the end of day

Run, Jane, run. And run she did! She ran half-way around the school before she stopped to give William his next clue which required an interesting ride home before a rummage through any spot in the house he could think of that might have had "creativity" associated with it. But the place he should have thought of first was finally the last: the lego box. After all it is where the kids spend hour upon hour creating "creations" which they then line up on their dressers and count how many they've made.

Home again, home again jiggedy jog
On the way back play a little leap frog
But don’t forget when you dismount
Find the place where creativity counts

The lego box yeilded this:

Rocking is a form of expression
And in this place we faced a little regression
So go there again and repeat your previous action
And you might find a clue if you don’t get caught by the distraction.

From here we had a bit of a drive ahead of us to visit our youthful friends who like to help us old foggies relive our younger years by playing Rock Band. So thanks to the Powells, we played. And although Lisa talked about making William play on the expert level and not giving him his clue until he passed, she really didn't have to worry. We failed on the easy level. But perseverance finally paid off.

Since we live in the tundra where the weather is fierce
And the cold, through your clothes, simply does pierce
You should look for the thing that brings warmth to your soul
And makes you complete when you’re ready to roll

After thoroughly disecting the clue on the way home and a search through the house, William finally finished his quest.


We'll see if we can top it next year.

Chapter Five: Redo

Well, we had to do it. We had to go back to Sea World. We simply could not leave this trip without thoroughly checking out the place that has left Luke slightly maimed even three weeks after the accident. And this time we left without needing to find a hospital so that in itself was a success. But really we had a great time. Except that Luke absolutely freaked out when he heard the announcer at the Shamu show say that we were in the splash zone and we should plan on getting wet. So he screamed and screamed and screamed and covered his ears which seems to be his latest response to any uncomfortable situation until he and I moved up a few rows. As it turns out, William was our only family member to get a little wet, okay more than a little wet, in the splash zone and Luke thought that was pretty funny. I guess he thought he had a hand in his dad's dry demise because he still runs around the house chanting "Shamu, Shamu," the call for Shamu to splash the audience.

We had been told that the very best time to visit the polar bears was first thing in the morning. So we prepped and planned the night before so we would arrive at Sea World promptly at opening at 10am. And we did. Showered, packed, checked out of our hotel and arriving at Sea World three minutes prior to 10.....an hour after it really opened. Apparently the internet isn't always right! But the polar bears were slightly active (they were moving, that's something!) and it was definitely worth the effort to arrive early in the day. Particularly because the later in the day, the more, I don't know, "ghetto" the park started to feel. But we loved the shows and we loved the animals and Jane and Mitch loved the Shipwreck Rapids and Wild Arctic rides. Journey to Atlantis, however, was a little much for Jane and when Mitch saw just how wet we were and listened to how drama Jane described the ups and downs he wouldn't even consider it.


All in all, we had a great trip to San Diego and the kids are still talking about the adventure and they've been wondering why we don't live there (why don't we live there?) and we are ready to go back!

Chapter Four: Legoland and the Greatest Day Ever!

Ahh Legoland! We finally made it! The pinnacle of the trip in the children's eyes. And it lived up to the expectation. Our day at Legoland was nothing short of fantastic.





















































































On a quick sidenote, despite the pain in his mouth, Luke had a great time and refused to eat any soft foods past 11 am. For lunch we tried to convince him that it would be great to get an ice cream cone, but he insisted that he had to have pizza at Legoland. So he nibbled his pizza and didn't chew on his wound and didn't complain....as long as he was loaded up with motrin.

But back to main thought. We arrived just as the park opened and stayed until it closed and I think the kids could have played even longer. It was great. So what follows are snapshots of the day, and because this is the only scrapbooking I accomplish, it's a lot of snapshots.

Chapter Three: Day of the Disaster!

The day started out like any other day. A dip in the pool, a lounge in the hot tub, and heading off to Sea World. And at Sea World we were just getting into the groove. We headed over to the sea lions and seals and learned all about the differences in the animals and about their habitats and then we decided to feed them. So Mitchell threw in a couple of fish and Jane held out her hand to feed a sea lion when disaster struck. A seagull flew in and snatched that fish right out of her hand! Ouch! That gull bit her. It might have been more shocking than it was painful but her finger was bleeding nonetheless so we had her patched up with a band-aid and headed off sure that was to be the worst accident of the day.


Were we ever wrong about that.

Luke was a little tired from late nights and walking the entire day at the zoo the previous day and since he never stops bouncing I guess I should have been prepared for some sort of mishap. But I wasn't and we headed off to see the sharks. No, he didn't fall into a shark tank. In fact, we had a great time seeing the sharks but the meltdown started as we left the shark cave and we knew it was time for a treat. So we sat down in a quiet area to look out over the ocean inlet and drink our smoothies. And then Luke fell. He slipped off a bench and hit his mouth on the concrete table before falling back and hitting his head on the ground. And the blood started pouring from his mouth. I thought at first he might be hemorrhaging but I realized he was screaming too hard for that. So I picked him up and we sped off to find the nearest first aid station which wasn't very close particularly when park workers kept leading us slightly astray. But we finally made it with many scathing looks along the way. Yes, people, go ahead and think it, I'm abusing my kid in front of hundreds of others. That's really smart. At any rate, the mostly untrained EMT was a little over his head with anything other than a blister so he sent us to the children's hospital and with his fabulous directions we only took about five wrong turns before we ended up at a hospital, but not the children's hospital which the triage nurse was sure to tell us was quite close because some parents don't want their children in an adult hospital but we were free to choose. So we choose to stay. And I think quite wisely because they took us back within a couple of minutes probably because they, as well as the other patients waiting, were very worried about this small child screaming bloody murder. And other than the fact that they didn't really have equipment for small children and that they had to call the children's hospital to make sure they were right on the medication dosage, they did a great job.

What happened was this: when Luke fell his teeth cut almost completely through the inside of his lip and he severed an artery in his mouth in the process. As a result he needed to be stitched up, which also meant they had to knock him out, or rather they gave him a dissociative medication which essentially was like watching Mitchell have one of his complex partial seizures. It was awful and he didn't really recover the full use of his body for the rest of the day. But he was stitched up nicely and he cooperated with eating soft foods for about twelve hours and other than the entire right side of his face being swollen and painful he was remarkably normal the following day.

And with that we made it through another great vacation day!

Luke the day after the accident, swollen but smiling.

Chapter Two: A Day at the Zoo

Our second day in San Diego found the kids and me heading to the famous San Diego Zoo. This destination was tops on Jane's list of things to do because she loves panda bears and all she could do for days before the trip was remind us of her obsession and how it was so important that we make the pandas at the zoo a priority. I don't think she was thrilled with the fact that we didn't see the pandas until after our lunch excursion with William to find the SoCal treat In N' Out Burger, but she managed to control her anxieties and we did finally make it to the very quiet panda sanctuary where the two pampered pandas on display hardly displayed themselves.
But the zoo held an abundance of fabulous adventures for the kids and we walked and walked and walked through the zoo and I was amazed at how little complaining there was from my three troopers; there were so enthralled with this zoo because, as they pointed out repeatedly, this zoo was so much bigger than our little local zoo and it was so much better than the Hogle zoo. Apparently we have to categorize these things.
We did have one mishap, however. Luke was simply traumatized because he had waited all day to see his favorite animal: the elephant. But the elephant was not on display. He was being moved into a new habitat which will be wonderful for everyone visiting the zoo after Memorial Day, but for those of us visiting just prior it was a missed opportunity. And for Luke it was tragedy. He wanted to see the elephants more than anything in the zoo. You might think he had never seen one before and frankly, I'm not really sure where his obsession came from except that I think he felt the need to choose an animal to obsess over because Jane's example would necessarily lead a three year-old to believe that this was proper zoo etiquette. So we were somewhat able to soothe his soul when we saw the giraffes, but really it took an ice cream cone before life was alright again.

And at this point I would be quite remiss if I didn't mention the other favorites from the zoo:

The very futuristic people-movers up the hill through the "jungles" of the zoo;

The adorable koalas;
Mitchell's namesake: Mitchell's Lorikeet;
Luke's amazement at the tigers;
and an ape named Janey. Day two, our excursion to the zoo, certainly lived up to all our expectations!

Chapter One: Life is a Beach

We escaped. Even if it was only for five days, we still escaped. Last week we left the 60 mph winds of the tundra for the wonders of San Diego, albeit a somewhat chilly San Diego. What is it with us, really? Are we destined to live with cold forever more? It seems that since we moved to the tundra we tend to bring the cold weather with us, like when we visited Utah for Spring Break. The weather had been beautiful the week before and then we show up and what do you think happened? It snowed. So now we went to San Diego, the land of the perfect temperature according to my sister Dana who spent a few years living there, and we were hard pressed to find a day that wasn't a bit on the nippy side. But don't think for a minute that that deterred us from any fun. In fact, due to the thickened skin we seemed to have grown (at least William and the kids have thick skin, I, on the other hand, still suffer from temperature distress disorder which means that if the temperature is off just one degree from perfect it is seriously uncomfortable) we had a super vacation filled to the brim with fantastic adventures! Of course it was a very full schedule; we had an itnerary we had to keep to, although I did neglet to type it up using military time as my dad would have done.

This particular vacation was in connection with a conference William attended at the Hotel Del Coronado, or rather, as it is lovingly referred to time and again on the documentary played over and over on one of the hotel channels, "The Del." So thanks to William's company, we spent three fabulous nights in San Diego's most famous historic hotel. Day one was spent exploring the fabulous "Del" which included a wonderful garden exhibit of Dr. Suess sculptures and playing on one of San Diego finest stretches of land, otherwise known as a beach. And because we live in a land-locked tundra this was a particularly great activity. I found myself keeping a particularly close eye on Mitchell because the water seems to bring out the dare-devil in that child. It reminded me a bit of last summer when he decided that the high dive was the place for him and he would run as fast as he could from the water to the diving board and then to the water over and over and over again. Luke, however dug the sand. And Jane, well she loved it all.

So while William schmoozed and ate good food with other attorneys, we hardly ate anything but the sun. It was great but not so great that we didn't want to make a lunchtime excursion to La Jolla to see the seals at the Children's pool. I might add that on the day we visited the city still had the rope in place encouraging people to stay away from the seals, but the rope came down the very next day due to litigation brought by concerned citizens who wanted to swim in the poop infested waters with the seals. Those dang attorneys!



Keeping to our itenerary, we returned to the beach for scheduled relaxation. And we did relax. Well, Jane and Mitchell relaxed, Luke bounced because he thinks he's Tigger and that's all he does at times, and I actually found myself feeling quite hawkish until William was able to join us and he could run constantly in and out of the water that was off a degree or two with the older kids. So other than leaving the hotel to find a less expensive dinner that ended up costing as much as it would have at "The Del" but tasting far inferior, we had a wonderful first day.

A Favorite Memory

On this day, the day that marks one year since the passing of a great man, my dad, David Dean Anderson, I thought that instead of writing my own poem I would jot down one of his favorites. My dad loved the poems of the great American Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley. If I close my eyes I can still hear his voice reading "W'y, wunst they wuz a Little Boy went out in the woods to shoot a bear......" His favorite poem, "The Bear Story: That Alex 'ist maked up his-own-se'f.'" But my favorite, the one I loved to listen to him read, actually I think recite would be the better term for his telling of the poems, was:

                    LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE

INSCRIBED WITH ALL FAITH AND AFFECTION
To all the little children: - The happy ones; and sad ones;
The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;
The good ones - Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely
bad ones.

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,
An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,
An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an'
sweep,
An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an-
keep;
An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun,
A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,
An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you
           Ef you
                Don't
                    Watch
                        Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn't say his prayers, -
An' when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an' his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An' when they turn't the kivvers down, he wuzn't there at
all!
An' they seeked him in the rafter-room, an' cubby-hole, an'
press,
An seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an' ever'-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an' roundabout: -
An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you
           Ef you
                Don't
                    Watch
                        Out!

An' one time a little girl 'ud allus laugh an' grin,
An' make fun of ever' one, an' all her blood-an'-kin;
An' wunst, when they was "company," an' ole folks wuz there,
She mocked 'em an' shocked 'em, an' said she didn't care!
An' thist as she kicked her heels, an' turn't to run an'
hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin' by her side,
An' they snatched her through the ceilin' 'for she knowed
what she's about!
An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you
           Ef you
                Don't
                    Watch
                        Out!

An' little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An' the lamp-wick sputters, an' the wind goes woo-oo!
An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray,
An' the lightnin'bugs in dew is all squenched away, -
You better mind yer parunts, an' yer teachurs fond an' dear,
An' cherish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear,
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns 'll git you
           Ef you
                Don't
                    Watch
                        Out!

I love you Dad. Miss you.