Colorado Part 3: Heritage Festival and the Stanley Hotel

One morning we checked out the Heritage Festival that was taking place at the fair grounds, which included a combination of old west exhibits and a horse show (and a few kid-geared activities like face painting and a petting zoo).  

Checking out the antlers and tepees.  

Petting the pelts.

Scarlett's arrowhead.

Face painting.

Watching the horse show and staying dry during a rain shower.

Building a log cabin (note the work gloves).

Max lends a hand.

Posing with the bear at Mountain Munchies after lunch.

One afternoon we headed over to the historic Stanley Hotel built in 1909.  The hotel served as the inspiration for Stephen King's novel The Shining, which was later turned into the horror flick starring Jack Nicholson.  The adults were interested in checking out the hotel, and we figured the kids would have fun at a monarch butterfly release that they do once a week in the summer.  (They raise the butterflies on site and you can see them at their various stages of development.)  Little did we know that the butterfly release would turn into a bit of a horror show itself ...

Front of the hotel with a storm brewing in the background.

Hanging out on the front porch.

Waiting for the butterflies and throwing rocks into the pond with BB.

Scarlett got to unzip one of several butterfly cages.

I was expecting hundreds of beautiful butterflies to flutter delicately up into the air and head off to begin their lives as glorious Rocky Mountain butterflies.  Instead, they were sort of dumped unceremoniously onto the sidewalk while hoards of kids stomped around trying to pick them up, pet them, and in a few unfortunate cases, smash them.  It was basically a butterfly massacre.  Stephen King may have arranged the whole thing, now that I think about it.

Max wanted no part of it, and put his finely-honed clinging skills to the test once again.  Perhaps he was imagining the butterfly with a tiny little axe and a maniacal grin running through a hedge-maze.  (That happened in The Shining, right?  Except obviously not with butterflies.  I think.)

Post-butterfly release, with (mostly) smiles all around.  Probably the happiest of the bunch were the handful of butterflies who actually managed to survive and escape from the Stanley Hotel.  Sort of like in The Shining.  But not really.

The End.  (Look out Stephen King, there's a new master storyteller in town.)

Colorado Part 2: Rocky Mountain High

We went up the Estes Park aerial tram with two objectives:  (1)  to check out the cool views of the town below, and (2) to hang out with the fat chipmunks who live up top and wait for tourists to feed them peanuts.  Mission accomplished.

Heading up the tram.  If you think Max looks less than thrilled to be in a red cage dangling from a cable being dragged up a mountainside, you should have seen his Grandma (who does not like heights but nevertheless sucked it up and braved the ride).

Once we arrived up top, we grabbed a bag of peanuts, and headed out in search of the chipmunks.

There they are!

Note Max clinging desperately to Chris.  Bless his heart, you would have thought they were zombie chipmunks the way he was acting (Max, not Chris, just to be clear).

Scarlett and BB.

More clinging.  Oh, the horror!

In addition to discovering that Max is terrified of chipmunks, we learned that Scarlett loves to rock climb.  All week long she scrambled up any rocks she could find, big or small.

More hungry chipmunks.

The gang watches Scarlett and the chipmunks from a safe distance (maybe Max was onto something after all ...).

Picnic lunch.

Cutie.

Dark clouds started to move in after lunch (it rained every afternoon while we were in Colorado, which conveniently coincided with nap time), and we had to dash back down for fear of getting stuck up on top of the mountain in a rainstorm.  There was quite a lightening show on the tram ride down, which made the ride down even dicier than the ride up.

"Maxwell Schwegmann"

Here's a video of 21-month-old Max eating like a big boy and saying his name (including Schwegmann, which plenty of adults can't pronounce, so he gets bonus points for that;  I also think it's really cute that even though we call him Max 95% of the time, he calls himself Maxwell).  Scarlett was in the ladies room around the corner while I was filming listening to me talk to Max.  In her typical nosey/bossy fashion, she chimes in at the end of the video to critique/correct his pronunciation.  At first I thought she was calling for me to help her, but when I realized what she was saying and asked her why she was hollering Schwegmann at the top of her lungs, she explained it was "because he's not saying it right!"

First Day of School

Yesterday was Scarlett's first day of Pre-K 3 and Max's first day of toddler "school."  They previously went to Parents' Day Out at the church down the street, but Scarlett aged out, and I wanted them to be at the same place, so we've moved on to a church school in Uptown (one-year-olds through Kindergarten), where they'll attend three days a week.  Max's day is pretty much all playtime, but Scarlett's class has Spanish, Kinderfit, Music, and Science, among more basic lessons like handwriting and math.  Her classroom has a guinea pig, a turtle, and two lizards!

Eating breakfast before the big day.  (Note that Max is eating by himself with a spoon and no bib and is sitting in a big chair; he started doing this several months ago because he wants to do whatever Scarlett does.  We had a messy start, but he's doing great now.)  

The Pre-K 3, 4, and Kindergarten classes wear uniforms, which I managed to get Scarlett pretty excited about over the summer (she explained to Max apologetically that babies don't get to wear uniforms, so he'll have to wait until he's big like her before he's lucky enough to get to wear one).

Silly goose.

"No more pictures, Mommy!"

This is the look I got when I asked him to smile.  At this point, he has no idea what's about to go down, so the forced smile really was a bit premature, Max ...

I went back inside to get my purse and this is what I saw when I came back out -- totally unstaged. Those are the kids' nap mats on the ground (they're like small sleeping bags with built-in pillows).

So sweet.

Scarlett did great at drop off (although in fairness, she attended camp at the new school this summer, so she was familiar with the building).  Max didn't know what hit him.   When we got to his classroom, the teachers were loading up the kids into a giant stroller to take all of them for a spin, and every single one of those kids was crying.  Once Max figured out what was happening, he joined the symphony of tears.  The director called later to say all was well and that Max was happily playing on the playground, and he was all smiles when we picked him up that afternoon.

So, despite a bit of a bumpy start, Max had a good day.  Scarlett had a great day, and proudly showed me her art when we got home, announced that she got to be the teacher's helper, and that all of her friends wore uniforms too (what a coincidence!).

Colorado Part 1: The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Screeching

We headed up to Estes Park, Colorado, for a week in August to escape the brutal Texas heat.  One of the best decisions we've made in a long time!  Check out the magnificent views from the back porch of our cabin.  Just sitting on the porch was a real treat.

Grandma, Paw, and BB came along, too.

"Helloooo Coloradoooo!"  (This would be the screeching I referred to in the title ... she went on for a good five minutes.  Screeching is also taking place in the photo above.)

Watching some critters playing below our deck.

Yep, you guessed it.  More screeching (or this may have been squealing; hard to tell).

Max was a bit more relaxed about the whole "welcome to Colorado" thing.  (At least until he encountered certain terrors of the wild otherwise known as chipmunks and butterflies.  To be continued ...)