Christmas Morning and Thank You's

Here's Jackson when he 1st comes out of his room and sees what Santa has brought him.

We'll keep uploading "thank you's" to this post, so keep checking back.

1st up - Thank you to Uncle Andrew and Aunt Hazel!  We hope you guys like the pajamas we gave your kids as much as we like the pajamas you gave our kids! 

Jackson and Lilly just gave me (Jason) the best present they could give me - they both LOVE lox! 

Thanks, Bob, for the awesome radio-controled cement truck!

Opening a present from Nanna and Pop-pop.

Thank you for the awesome turtle star projector, Nanna and Pop-pop.

Thanks for the book.  Lilly loves it.

Thank you Aunt Nicole and Larry for the beautiful ornaments.  We love them.

And now, for the grand finale.  1 thing Jackson has been consistent about for months - he wanted Santa to bring him a guitar.

It took him a while to get the hang of holding it, but then he was a pro!

Merry Christmas to Uncle Bart and Family

Merry Christmas to the Schein uncles and Mumfies

That's it for now, though we may add more later if something else comes up. Thanks to everyone for the wonderful gifts.  Merry Christmas!

A Visit From Santa

Our good friend Bob agreed to dress up as Santa to give Jackson a nice Christmas Eve surprise. 

Santa at Bass Pro Shops

A couple of weeks ago we drove to Bass Pro Shops in Harrisburg - I'd seen advertisements for Santa, pictures, free arts and crafts, and other fun activities for kids there. Plus, I wanted to check it out to see how it compares to Cabela's (I'll save you the suspense - it doesn't.  Don't get me wrong - it's cool, but it isn't nearly as cool as Cabela's). 

We get there and I stood in line for an hour with Jackson while Sarah and Lilly mostly walked around.  I didn't mind because I knew Jackson really wanted to see Santa.  he was so excited, and we kept practicing what he was going to tell Santa he wanted for Christmas.  "Choo-Choo Train, Guitar, Truck".  We finally get up there, and Jackson would not sit on his lap.  He was perfectly fine standing a few feet in front of him and telling him from there, but he wouldn't get any closer.  As usual, Lilly was perfectly fine going to anyone. 

While we waited in line, Jackson got to play on the 4-wheelers and tractors.




This is on Jackson's Christmas list.



This tractor is on Jason's Christmas list.



Jackson and Lilly on the Bear stool.





Jackson driving the radio controled trucks.  He was pretty good at it.



Jackson and Santa

Christmas has been so fun this year because this is the first time Jakcson has really gotten "Santa".  He gets so excited any time he sees a Santa on tv. The other night we were watching The Polar Express, and at the end when he saw Santa, he was getting very upset and reaching out for Santa.  He wanted to hug him.

Sarah found this awesome thing on line.

He was so excited!  Below is a video we took of him watching the video above.  This was the 2nd time he watched it, so he wasn't quite as animated.

If you remember, I went to Montana and Wyoming this past summer to help lead a field camp/research project.  A good friend of mine, who is also an amazing writer (just published his 1st book (he's 25!)) came along, partly with the purpose of writing an article about the expedition for Inside Jersey magazine.
 You can read the article by clicking HERE. You can also check out a lot of extra great photographs from the expedition.

We're planning to return the to same area in the summer of 2011 to recover a dinosaur that was found at the end of the 2010 season, and to discover new sites. If you'd like to join us, or if you know someone that might be interested, let me know and I'll send you some information.  We offer this trip to anyone 14 years old and above. We also offer undergraduate and graduate credits for students.

Our trip to Alabamy

Jackson and I spent the 1st 2 weeks of November in Alabama.  He and I drove down to B'ham to meet Josh and Jon David, and then we were supposed to drive to Cape Canaveral to see what was supposed to be the 2nd to last shuttle launch before the shuttle program is supposed to be canceled.  Seeing a space shuttle launch has been on my life goal list since I was in college, and this was basically my last chance. 

We drove over night, and even though he was awake much of the night, he was really, realy good.  It still took 18 hours because I had to stop twice to sleep. 

To make a long story short, the launch kept getting delayed 1 day at a time.  Finally, the problem appeared to be solved and the weather forecas was clear.  So, we load up the car and leave the lake at about 2am, pick up Jon David in Auburn, then head for Florida.  We got as far as the Florida line (5 hours of driving) when Josh got a text that the launch was delayed again - this time for weeks at least.  Really dissapointing.  Not only that I now wouldn't get to see it, but that we will now have spent 10 more hours in the car, for nothing.

Sarah and Lilly flew down to Alabama on Thursday night.  The end of that week and the weekend we had the entire normal Thanksgiving crew - Sarah's parents, sister and her family from Mobile, brother and his family from south Florida, and my family of course.  We were all down there for a family friend wedding at the lake.  That was the day bamma lost to LSU - YEAHHHH!!!  They all left on Sunday after the wedding, but Sarah and Lilly stayed with us mostly at the lake the whole next week.

Sarah's dad and Lilly.

We all spent that week mostly at the lake visiting.  My grandmother Max was there for the visit, and it was great to get to see her again.  At the end of the week we were planning to go to the Georgia game.  Unfortunately, though, for the first time ever, mom couldn't find tickets for us.  Without tickets, I stayed at the lake to take care of the kids, while Sarah and Josh went down to tailgate.  Many of Sarah's friends from college were going to be there.  They had a good time, but when the game started they came back and watched the game with us at the lake. 

All in all parts of the trip were a bust - no shuttle launch and not getting to go to the game.  We still had a fine time, though.

All of Sarah's family at the wedding on Lake Martin.

The Schein's at the wedding at Lake Martin.

Lilly with Uncle Joshy.

Jackson gets to see his Uncle Otto much more often than his Uncle Joshy, so about half the time we were in Alabama he called Josh "Uncle Otto".  Most of the rest of the time he called him "Uncle Bus" because Josh has a Volkswagen bus that is very similar to one of Jackson's favorite toys - a Volkswagen bus.

Jackson by the water throwing rocks.  He thinks that's the greatest thing in the world.

Lilly with Sarah's dad.

Jackson and Lilly having a picnic.

Jackson loves to sing, and this is his favorite song.  It's my favorite song, too.

Lilly on the boat wearing the same life preserver that I wore when I was 2 months old.

Jackson and Lincoln, the best dog in the world. 

Lilly and Sarah.

Lilly, my grandmother Max, and Jackson with me.

Thanksgiving

Ok, it's become clear that there just isn't enough time for me to keep this blog up as often as I would like.  There's just too much to do.  There are a ton of things I should be doing that are a lot more important that the blog, and I haven't had time for those either.  So, my suggestion is that you subscribe to this blog and then when when I do get a chance to post something, you'll receive it automatically.  That way you won't have to keep checking back every so often.

Jackson was saying "Happy Gobble Gobble Day" all day.

Anyway, here are a few pictures from our Thanksgiving.  This was out 1st Thanksgiving alone and in PA.  It was nice and quiet (as quiet as it gets with 2 small kids in a tiny condo).  The best part was that it snowed in the morning, then sleeted, then rained most of the rest of the day.  Nice and cold, the way T-giving is supposed to be.

I was also excitied to have a 100% original menu - all new dishes we've never had before.  I'm so tired of the exact same menu every single year. All good dishes, but my god, how many times can we have the same thing??

Appetizer: Pumpkin soup baked in the pumpkin.   Very good, but next time I'd put less butter and not make it so thick. 

Main Course:  Turkey roasted in normal spices and aromatics, but wrapped in bacon and resting on a bed of carrots, rutabegas, and celery.  I poured some apple cider and wine over the top at the start of the cooking process.  The turkey juices cooked those veggies and made them delicious.  Plus, now those vegied made an extra side dish.  The turkey was delicious - one of the best I've ever made (that wasn't smoked or brined).

Veggie: Mashed potatos mixed with some leftover mashed butternut squash.  Great.

Veggie: Bacon-braised green beens  -  good, but I'd alter the recipe next time to make it a little less heavy.

Side: Cranberry sauce - I usually make this but I added a couple of new things.  It was good, but I wouldn't add those things again next time. 

Side: Gravy - ok, but I made it with the turkey drippings, and since much of those drippings started as wine, it didn't have the right taste. 

Not everything was perfect, but all in all, it was a very successful dinner and everyone seemed to like it.  Jackson ate his weight in green beens.



This is what happens when Jason puts Jackson to bed....

1. Notice he is NOT wearing any PJ's...???

2. He gave is a PEN

Halloween Parade

Here are a few pictures and video from Jackson and Lilly's Halloween parades today.  No great pictures.

The other parents were so annoying - swarming the kids like a school of sharks attacking fresh meat, jumping in front of the kids and other parents, getting in front of cameras.  Parent are the worst.  You can catch Jackson at the end here.  He has a habit of putting his fingers in his mouth when he's nervous.  He's a Park Ranger for Halloween.  We wanted to get him a hat but couldn't find one.

Sarah made Lilly's costume.  She's a gnome.  Originally she was going to make them both gnomes, but that fell through when Sarah waited until 9pm last night to start making them.  She's wearing a skirt, but it was pretty chilly so they left her pants on. 

Here she is looking completely uniterested and apathetic.  She was the only kid in that giant stroller not freaking out.

This was from this morning.  This is her new trick, saying "I'm soooo big".



Alabamy

We'll be coming down to Alabama soon.  Jackson and I are going to drive down to Cape Canaveral this weekend to see a space shuttle launch - something I've always wanted to see.  This is basically my last chance sine the shuttle program is ending.  This is the 2nd to last launch.  From there we'll drive to Alabama.  Sarah and Lilly will fly down that Friday night.  We have a family friend wedding to go to that weekend down at the lake, and then we'll hang out at the lake until the GEORGIA GAME!!!  Can't wait.  Mom's working on tickets for us.  Then its a marathon drive back here to get back to work.

Sorry no posts for so long.  We're so busy I don't know how I'm going to find the time to keep it going.  Thanks for reading!
   Jason

Trouble

Sorry no posts for a while.  We're so busy.  We hope to have big news soon and hell no - no more babies, so don't even ask.

Jackson is always getting me in trouble by ratting me out.  This was from tonight.

Rats!

Just a quick note:  I am creating a small display at the Museum about invasive species.  So, I was doing some basic research on the few species that we're going to put on display.  One of those is the Norway, or Brown Rat.  If it is something I don't know much about, I often start the research with Wikipedia, just to get a baseline of info.  I was reading the wikipedia article last night when I came across this in the "Diet" section:

"Martin Schein, founder of the Animal Behavior Society in 1964, studied the diet of brown rats and came to the conclusion that the most-liked foods of brown rats were (in order) scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, and cooked corn kernels. According to Schein, the least-liked foods were raw beets, peaches, and raw celery.^[20]"     Sounds pretty good to me!

You can see it for yourself here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway_rat

That was my grandfather (father's father) , who was a famous and very well respected animal behaviorist.  What an unexpected thrill it is to be reading something rather random and stumble upon something like that. 

This reminded that he was actually a short subject in a book that came out several years ago: Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

I'm ashamed to admit that I have yet to read this book, though it's been on my list for years. 

Within that same exhibit area, I created a short educational activity sheet that deals with science-related etymology (the study of the derivation of words) that partially relates to the names of several sciences that fall within natural history that are displayed on a nearby wall.  Most of those displayed names are relatively common sciences - astronomy, paleontology, mammology - but a few are rather obscure.  These include oology (the study of eggs, mostly birds), malacology (the study of shells - mostly molluscs), and ethology - the study of animal behavior.  I did the latter as a subtle homage to him.  You can download a copy of this worksheet by clicking here (you don't really need to be there to complete most of the sheet). 

http://www.amazon.com/Rats-Observations-History-Unwanted-Inhabitants/dp/1582344779/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284512498&sr=8-1

Field Work! - Red Lodge & Base Camp

I don't have much time - I actually got both rugrats to nap at the same time - so I'm only going to do a little today.  I don't have many pictures for these subjects anyway.

Our field camp is the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association (YBRA) about a mile south of Red Lodge, MT literally on the side of a mountain.  It is a camp started in the early 20th century for geological and paleontological research in the area, principally by Princeton University scientists.  It is still used for those purposes primarily.  It's a fantastic site, with primitive cabins for most guests, but faculty  cabins have electricity with a mini-fridge and bathrooms with showers.  The dining lodge is very nice and the food is fantastic.  3 good home cooked meals/day - what more could you want?

Here's Dave (my boss) leaning on the back of my truck.  The cabin he and I shared is the one on the hill on the right. 

This is the view from our cabin's porch.  The dining lodge is in the foreground.  This is kind of a perfect view to sum up all of Montana.  You're looking almost directly North.  This is the exact point where the mountains start - literally from this point and toward the left, the rest of the state is very mountainous.  From this view and to the right, it's all rolling plains.  Down in the valley slightly toward the right is the little town of Red Lodge, which you can see better at night.  It's about 1,300 ft lower in elevation.  Yes, the road getting up to camp is very steep - about 1,300' in a mile is very steep.  It's dirt, too, so I'm just glad it was dry every time I drove it. 

As I said, it's on the side of a mountain, and at ~6800 ft elevation, you get out of breath pretty easily.  The 1st day you get there and have to lug your gear up the hill to you cabin isn't easy. 

Here's the view from the back porch of the dining lodge.

 Here's the inside of my cabin right before I left.  My bed is on the right.

 Pretty nice - everything you could need.

Red Lodge is a wonderful little.  It was originally a mining town for the local coal mines (which I'll talk more about later), but successfully made the conversion to a tourist town after the mines closed.  There's a ski slope on the mountain above town and there are events here all the time - the Sunday night I arrived was the end of a biker rally, the next weekend was a Mountain Man Rendezvous and the State Fiddling Competition.  The thing that really save the town, though, was the building of the Beartooth Highway from Billings, through Red Lodge, over some unbelievable mountains (which I'll also get to later) and into the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park.  Yellowstone is only about 60 miles away on this road, but since it's slow driving, it will take you 2 hours to get there.  But when you see the views, you'll want to take longer. 

This is one of the few pictures I took in town (usually my town trips were hurried).  This is the town's taxi.  It's free, but tips accepted. 

I usually could not care less about cars, but lots of people out west love to refurbish old cars or build hot rods.  Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night they bring them into town.  If you're sitting at a restaurant on the sidewalk, it's like a parade going by.  There were some pretty cool ones, but I think this one was my favorite.

Field Work! - 1st few days

Although leaving Sarah and the rugrats was hard, I was very excited to get to do some field work this summer for the 1st time in quite a while.  My 1st 2 weeks (last 2 weeks of July) were based in Red Lodge, Montana, which is right in the middle of the state on the southern border, just a couple of miles from Wyoming.

1st, the drive - I always forget how much farther east Philly is than Birmingham.  In my mind it's just a straight shot north, but it isn't at all.  I left Thursday night thinking that would be plenty of time to get there by Sunday afternoon.  After sleeping only 2 hours the 1st morning at dawn in Ohio, and then about 6 hours the next night in eastern South Dakota, I just made it into camp at about 7pm local time Sunday night - 48 hours!  I'll be leaving earlier next year.

Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were god awful, mind-numbing, coma-inducing, B-O-R-I-N-G!  God, I'm not looking forward to that leg of the trip every year.  It's a long way, too.  Once I got into Wisconsin, it was a little better, but mostly because I had never driven up there before.  I went across southern Wisconsin, then southern Minnesota, and that's when things finally started to change from typical eastern forests to more open plains with fewer trees.  Of course that's mostly because it was all just farm fields, but there was a definite change in the landscape. 

I tried to take pictures with my phone at every state line to send to Sarah to keep her updated on my progress.  It's pretty sad that Ohio is so awful that you're actually glad that you made it to Indiana.  There's no wonder these states are losing population.

Sitting in Saturday morning traffic in Chicago for no apparent reason.  Weekday mornings must be miserable. 

The 1st huge wind farms I drvoe through in southern Minnesota.  This was by far the largest wind farm I've ever seen.  There were turbines all the way to the horizon on both sides of the road.  Amazing.  Pretty good pictures for taking them with 1 hand on my phone while driving 70 mph, while texting and eating, huh?  Just kidding - about the texting and eating.    This was Friday afternoon.

By that evening, I started running into some great plains thunderstorms in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota.  I pulled off the interstate onto a deserted farm road to get close to one.  This one was amazing - it went from a small, non-threatening storm into a huge, intimidating, nearly constant lightning show in just a few minutes.  With all the lightning and the storm being so close, it was actually earily quiet.  Just distant rumbling of the thunder and the wind gently rustling through the endless rows of corn.  It was really amazing.

There were some amazing colors behind the storm toward the sunset, too.

 100 miles further to the west and I was still watching this storm in my rearview mirror.  Amazing.

The next morning I finally felt like I was out west.  The land opened up, became drier, flatter, then rolling prairies.  This awesome sculture is along the interstate in western South Dakota just outside some cool tourist trap called 1880 Town.  They filmed parts of Dances with Wolves in this part of SD.

By that afternoon I was in Wyoming.

Again I drove by what appeared to be a small storm, or really just a spit of rain coming down from a cloud, but by the time it intersected with me on my path it turned out to be a hellacious wind and rain storm!

I'm going to try to not go on and on about how much I love everything about the west.  As much as I love snow - I love the west infinitely more.

I'll continue with the trip in a few days.

Picture Day

We took Jackson and Lilly to get their pictures taken today.  Lilly was great, but Jackson was suprisingly uncooperative.  He's rarely shy around people and even more rarely misses a chance to be a ham in front of the camera, so we were surprised and a little dissapointed.  Anyway, here's a slide show of all of the pictures that were taken today - the good and the bad. 

July

Here are some pictures from July.  I was gone the 2nd 1/2 of the month, but I'll post pictures from my field work later. 

 Turning the other cheek.

Here we're at our local park before the July 4th fireworks display. We call this overalls/no shirt look "Alabama style". 

Here' s "Nanna" (Sarah's mom) in the background with Jackson on his 1st big boy swing.

Jackson is practically obsessed with trucks, and was so excited that he told me all about this one on the phone while I was in Montana. 

Sarah dressed them up like this to take pictures to send me for my birthday while I was in Montana. 

Jackson likes to scare and surprise people.  He's a total ham.

Lilly trying "solid" food for the 1st time.

Everyone went to our good friend Bob's house for dinner one evening.  Jackson loved playing the piano with him  He loves Bob.  Bob gave him a toy truck, which Jackson has since named "Bob".  Not just "Bob the Truck", but more like "Where's Bob?", and "I want Bob", and we know that means the truck.

Have you ever seen 2 prettier ladies?