Birthday Boy (er, Man)

Today was my 37th birthday. We originally had grand plans of hitting apple picking super-early, getting home for Teia's morning nap, then letting me scoot out for a long mtn bike ride/cafe stop. Unfortunately, as the below picture illustrates, our kidlets weren't feeling super-chipper, even for their old man's birthday:

Nevertheless, we did our best to turn lemons into lemonade and hit the apple farm almost 2 hours after we planned - which coincided with the rest of Metro Boston deciding to hit the exact same apple farm at the exact same time. It wasn't super bad, actually... or maybe we're just used to the crowds these days. Teia, who had refused to anything other than scream for her life when we tried an earlier nap, snoozed on the car trip out so Louise & Kai got the required dose of apple-cider donuts while I played with Louise's new camera (which provided today's pictures)

Apple picking was a hit - Kai & Teia seemed to forget their colds while we were out getting our peck filled. (not too often in our society one can say "get your peck filled" without questionign glances or stink eyes so enjoy it while you can!) Both enjoyed their apple treats and Kai did good work before deciding to practice for his Kids race next weekend w/ wind sprints up & down the tree path, while Teia held court in the pumpkin patch.

After a quiet drive home, Kai & Teia remembered they were sick and let us know it something fierce. We got Kai down for his rest w/o too much incident, but Teia was having none of it. I was finally able to squeeze out for a short, sweet mtn bike ride at some nearby trails then we had take-out Chinese and a very fancy cake to fill everyone up. Deeeelish!

Most photo's are courtesy of Louise. After nearly throwing our pocket camera off a cliff a couple times due to its time delay during unspeakably cute but ridiculously short-lived

scenes w/ the younglin's, we got a Nikon D3000, an entry-level SLR (which is a fancy name for "a nicer camera than a pocket camera"). Its pretty cool and makes a very satisfying, realistic "ka-cheww" sound when you take a picture (as opposed to the sterile 'bip' or 'beep' that accompanies most pocket cams)