I’ve been a little more quiet on the blog than usual lately because we’ve been hanging out with my fam down in MD. I brought the kiddos down here on Sunday (enjoy the silence at home, Mark, while you still have it!), and we’ve been doing fun stuff around here for a few days. Here are some highlights (I’m leaving out the picture of my parents’ new ginormous tv though we have several pictures that the kids insisted on taking…maybe those pics are worthy of their own post really).

Lydia and cousin Audrey seriously working out hydro-engineering issues in the water play area at the MD Science Center today.

That’s my mom. She can’t see her hand in an optical illusion. She found this much more interesting than my kids did who tend to have some serious attention issues at places like this, just racing around to the next thing.

My dad, cousins Bohdan and Maddie, and Drew floating in space. Wonder how many strange people wore these suits before they did. Ick. Oh well, gotta let that go a little in the name of fun….right? Please affirm me before I wake Drew up right now and make him wash himself one last time just to make sure he’s totally clean.

Evan here totally digging the tornado simulator. He’s smiling, but he’s thinking, “There’s no place like home.” Actually, that’s probably not at all what he was thinking since he is a total museum lover.

Drew and cousin Bohdan standing in a model of a dinosaur nest being dinosaurs. Two 4 year olds, dinosaurs or not, could be pretty scary if you ask me.

Granddaddy and Lydia. Just a sweet moment together caught at the computer simulating the movement of the Earth’s platelets…or something like that.

Evan admiring a pirate ship riding around the harbor. Right after this picture was taken, the woman on board in full pirate character yelled, “Ahoy, Landlovers!” while the kids on board tried to shoot us with water canons. Scallywags.

Even after a long day at the Science Center and walking around outside, I’ve got the cutest kiddos ever. Unfortunately, Lydia had succumbed to sleep in the stroller by the time I took these pictures. Boo. I would have loved pics of all 4 of them like this. They are seriously adorable.

By the way, anyone close enough to the Science Center in Baltimore who reads this and has a Chinese child (or will soon!), I recommend the Sesame Street planetarium show. It had a Chinese Sesame Street puppet in it who taught some simple Chinese words (including Yue– the word for moon and part of Lydia’s name!) and sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Chinese–which totally captured Lydia’s attention. As soon as the puppet was done, she started clapping! Not something that might sound impressive, but she didn’t care one bit about the English version. No applause at all. But, the Chinese version made her pretty happy. I wonder if she had heard it before?