La-La, Gran, and Muz!!!

La-La flew in from Maine this weekend, as you will see in the pictures that follow. In addition, Gail's mom, "Gran", celebrated her birthday on Saturday; and My mother, "Muz", celebrates her birthday today. Both birthday girls are at the top of their games, and getting good press to prove it...

Janet (Gran)is finishing a run in a play at the Community Little Theater, and has been recently lauded in the Sun Journal...

Jill (Muz) has just successfully finished organizing and running the Women Deliver Conference in London, and had a profile in this month's edition of The Lancet...





La-La and Ben played Friday afternoon away, including Ben dressing in his Halloween costume for a while...




One of Ben's stuffed dinosaurs got out of his room, and freaked Cedar out a bit...Cedar kept being surprised by the T-rex throughout the afternoon, as it kept moving around the house...




Due to a big week or the excitement of La-La's visit...Ben asked to be excused from supper early, and fell asleep at 6:30...






The next day, Mommy had to present to the PSC Board, so we showed Ben's school off to La-La, and then went over to PSC to meet Mommy after the meeting...here are La-La and Ben outside of the new-ish library...




We had to wait a bit for the board meeting to break, so Ben hopped onto the internet, accessed his iGoogle page, and played some games at some of the great kids' websites we've found over the years...




After we picked up Mommy, we went to the Wild Center, a great and somewhat new natural history museum in Tupper Lake...here you can see Ben playing with/in a fog machine that is a part of an exhibit teaching visitors about the unique environment in the High Peaks...



Ben took a look at a praying mantis laying eggs, something none of us had ever seen (or even thought about...I had previously never looked at anything behind their creepy head and hands combo)...





After looking around inside for awhile, we went for a short nature hike on the grounds, and Ben really got into the interpretive signage for the first time...




I saw this rock in the woods about 35 feet off of the trail, and just knew that there was something weird/wrong with it, so while Gail and Ben and La-La looked on with curious stares, I went over and was proven right...it is a fake rock hiding a geocache...I didn't know it was there before the visit, geocaching has simply trained me to pay more attention to the environment that I am moving through, and this rock seemed weird...





Ben sitting in front of the Wild Center's bank of solar cells towards the end of our walk...goofy looks are par for the course when his La-La is around...



Case in point (see above re: goofy looks)...it was a pretty nice picture except for "Pirate Ben" YARRGGHH-ing for the camera...




La-La and Ben put together a very tough puzzle made up of cubes with different pictures on each side in a hands-on room for kids and school-groups...




We were lucky to be just in time for a animal-rehabilitation presentation, and got to see, and learn about, this great little screech owl that had had its wing damaged...




Unlike the last time we were here, this bird was tiny...7 ounces of fluff and claws and big searching eyes...neat to see, and great to learn about in this manner...





Ben and La-La can be (sorta) seen in the foreground of this picture that I took during the movie, "Ride of the Mergansers", a short film about baby mergansers leaping from their nests (shot to the classical piece, "The Flight of the Valkyries"...which always makes me think of "Apocalypse Now")...



This morning was clear and blue, so we decided to take a hike, and to bring Cedar along...because it is the first day of big-game hunting season in our part of the world, we all wore our safety vests...even Cedar...




It was a gorgeous walk along an abandoned rail-bed, we saw and heard lots of wildlife, but no deer or hunters...





There were lots of creeks and rills and rivers all around us, and we stopped at this great bridge to enjoy the open space, the great noises from the busy river (we got over an inch of rain on Friday night), and the smells of water and woods and rotting logs...





Ben loved this plant enough to ask me to take a picture of it...the one he liked is the simple club moss (also called "running ground pine") that is green with candelabra-things poking up...you can also see reindeer lichen and wintergreen in the picture...





Ben found 2 railroad spikes during our walk, one with a wedge-like point, and this one, which had a 4-faced point, like the pyramids...leftovers from the days when there were railroad tracks here...




We also found a bunch of interesting poop...lots of carnivore poop laden with hair and fur...this great sample also had bone and tooth fragments in it...we took it apart with a stick to see what was inside it...




When we got home from our walk, we picked one of our pumpkins to carve...Ben was excited...




He drew out the plan on our newsprint table-cover...a novel design with one eye square and the other triangular...2 teeth up and 2 down in a happy (yet very scary) smile/grimace...




He and Mommy drew the face on the pumpkin and I did the surgery...I'm a big fan of flexible and serrated knives...we have a set of IKEA knives that meet our needs perfectly...



Ben and Mommy had lots of (too much?) fun scooping the goo out of the skull of "Mr. No-Brains-Scary-Face"...





Ben and La-La (pictured here in a borrowed t-shirt so that she wouldn't have to travel wearing pumpkin guts) went through the innards separating the goo from the seeds, so that we could roast and eat them later...




After we were done with the evisceration and facial reconstruction, La-La and Ben worked on some of his homework before La-La had to leave...

It was a great weekend and visit, we're now watching some football and playing with gazillions of stuffed animals on the floor downstairs, and Mommy is about to head upstairs to start work on her never-the-same-twice-but-always-super mac 'n' cheese...

YAY WEEKENDS!