Lexi's Christmas

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Posted with LifeCast

Children's Museum

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Posted with LifeCast

Tired out

Shopping is hard work.

$550 Tree

Here's a picture of one of my two recently moved trees. The trees (Tulip poplurs) had volunteered up in a couple of our flowerbeds, so rather than just killing them I decided to let them grow a whole and then move them.

Unfortunately I got an unexpected surprise when I dug out the pictured tree. Moving the tree went fine, but when I went back to fill in the hole I found it had partially filled with water. It turned out our well had a leak. So that turned into an excavation by a plumber on a backhoe, and a $550 charge. Lots of fun.

On the bright side, if I had not dug up the tree, and therefore had not discovered the leak, I would have wasted lots of energy and money by continuing to have the pump running to pour water down into the ground, which may have eventually eroded away enough dirt to cause a giant sinkhole which could have swallowed the house.

Old but fun video

This is a video from back before Halloween, but I never got around to posting it back then, so here it is now.

Not dainty!!

Lexi loves pumpkins!!!

EXTREME CLOSEUP!!! WOAH!!

70 degrees + in November? Let's go hiking!

Took advantage of the great weather by going for a nice hike at Fort Harrison State Park today.

For those of you who don't already know, I recently got myself an iPhone, so I've been playing around with it constantly lately. I used our hike today to try out a new app on my iPhone. It's called EveryTrail, and it basically allows you to track your route, and take pictures along the way and have those pics located on the map of your path. So here is the result:

Fort harrison

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

The joy of voting!

We early voted today, trying to beat the crowds...

That didn't exactly work out. We ended up waiting in line for almost 3 hours. Lexi was a trooper but she did get a little grumpy at times about having to wait so long.

The imortant thing is that we got our votes in. Now all that's left is volunteering on Tuesday and then waiting for the results.

Lexi is a goof

Video of Lexi telling her Dad "Happy Birthday!".


Video of Lexi picking up and carrying her giant dinosaur. This requires much grunting because "T" (T. Rex" is almost as big as her.

Stream Clean-up

I helped out with a large clean-up project on the White River in central Indiana a couple weeks ago. I was there as part of a Smallmouth Bass conservation group that I'm involved with, The Indiana Smallmouth Alliance. In total the cleanup effort covered somewhere around 70 miles of the river.

I was on a stretch somewhere around 3 miles long with two other guys from the group. We had two kayaks and a one-man canoe. We managed to pick up quite a bit of garbage considering the storage space we had.

Here is a picture of my kayak and one of the other guy's canoe right before we offloaded everything at a guy's house along the river. We saw the guy standing up the hill by his house watching us, so one of the guys with me went up and spoke to him, and convinced him to help us out by taking the garbage we had collected. Later on somebody else from our group came and picked the stuff up from his house. Worked out great because it allowed us to collect twice as much garbage since we were pretty much totally full at that point and still had about half way to go.


Here is a shot of my kayak at the end of our stretch. Keep in mind, this is all entirely new garbage from what was in the first picture.



It was a fun day, and we felt good about having helped out the stream in some small way.

Lots of New Lexi Photos

This video is of Lexi running on the bouncy suspension bridge to the Rhino area at the Indy Zoo. Listen for when she says "Daddy, more." at the end. She was saying that because she was turning to run back across the bridge. She probably ran back and forth across that bridge about a dozen times. She likes that it is so bouncy.


Indiana State Fair:












At the Childrens Museum pretending to be a dinosaur.


Picking veggies at Grandpa Ray's house

Lexi continues to be highly advanced!

Lexi is continuing to show off her amazing talents. She can sort of count to ten (sometimes she needs a little help, and she tends to forget 7 sometimes and go straight to 8, but lets not be overly picky). She's also very excited about trying to use the potty, and she's gone pee-pee on the potty about 5 times now! She thinks using the potty is so much fun that after she goes pee on the potty she says "more!" because she wants to go potty some more.

She's also been working on her dance moves. The music of the carousel at the Childrens Museum always gets her boogy on!

Video of the dancing queen:


She's also got a special talent for picking up change with her feet.
Video:


She also knows her colors halfway decent, and she knows her animals really well. Here's a video where she shows some of her skills in those areas as well as her artistic streak. (turn up the sound to hear her saying colors and animals)


She's not all business though. She still enjoys kid stuff, like splashing around in the sprinkler, and making her dad do goofy stuff on video.



Photos!!

Lexi keeps her cool (and stays hydrated)

It was a hot one today, so Lexi and Monica decided to break out Lexi's new sprinkler. Lexi had a great time playing in the water, and also discovered that it was a handy place to get a drink.





And here's a video:


We also went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art last Sun. We didn't actually go in the museum, but just walked around the grounds and gardens. Here are a few pictures from that trip.





And her are a couple other random pics. Lexi really likes her hello kitty purse, but she feels the need to keep her arm raised straight up so that it doesn't fall off her shoulder.

Lexi's Summer of Fun

Lexi's been having a good time so far this summer. With Monica off work for the summer, they've been able to get in lots of trips to fun places, like Indy Zoo and the Indy Childrens Museum. This Tues. I took the day off of work so I could get in on some of the fun. We went to the Fort Wayne Childrens Zoo. This was a new zoo for us (we're zoo afficianados and have been to most of the zoo's and aquariums within a day's drive of Indy). It was surprisingly nice for a smaller city's zoo. We had a good time. Lexi particularly liked being able to get in with the baby goats and pet and brush them. She seems to have a natural love for goats. I guess it's genetic. She really seemed to connect with them, and her grandma will be proud to see how she was taking good care of them. Here's a video:


And here are some pics with the goats:





And some other zoo pics:

Under the rain forest waterfall.


Pretending to be a joey.


Petting a Komodo Dragon. (It may have been fake, or it may have just been holding very still. Not quite sure.)


On the Australian river boat ride.


Waving to the kangaroos.

Lexi is a big fan of carousels, so she was happy to see they had one at the Fort Wayne Zoo too. Here is a video of her waving to Dad while riding. Unfortunately the carousel was a super fast spinner, so the cameraman didn't do so well.


We've also been slowly continuing work on her playset. It is almost finished now. Just have to finish the tunnel. Here is Lexi trying out her newly filled sandbox.


The top picture of this post, as well as the one below, are from Lexi and Monica's trip to the Childrens Museum earlier this week. The one below is Lexi standing under part of the Chihuly blown glass sculpture.



Here is one last video. This is Lexi riding the train at the Indy Zoo. She had to make sure her blanky was comfy on the ride.