adventure

Gallery

Museum of Flight

Photos from New Orleans are still a few weeks away, so here’s a mini post of our visit to the Museum of Flight. It’s like a smaller Air & Space Museum that charges to get in and is located at (heavily branded with) Boeing. Melissa and I went when we first got to Seattle, but never really needed to go back. Fast forward to having a kid who is absolutely obsessed with planes and it was time to go again.

The kid could barely contain himself when we pulled into the lot because of the planes on display outside. Inside wasn’t much different, with him running from one display to another and pointing to the sky with agreeable grunts. I’ve always loved aviation, but this kid takes it too another level. People ask if he’s going to be a pilot or aeronautics engineer (because Seattle). It’s pretty awesome, if I’m honest.

Anyway, here are a few pictures. Highlights include a model show under the Blackbird, walking through a Concorde, and walking through an old Air Force One (Boeing 707). Oh, and doing laps the length of the NASA Full Fuselage Trainer. Lastly, we forgot part of the exhibits were outside. It snowed today. Not pictured: chili dog lunch.

Gallery

Napa

Three months ago*, we took our first family trip/vacation to Napa. We wanted to get Dom on a plane early and we like to travel, so we picked a place that was the same time zone and only a few hours away to minimize the chance of making a horrible mistake. The good news is Dom did about as well as we could have hoped; we also learned that he’s entirely too big to be a lap infant.

Napa itself was a nice break from a pretty crappy spring in Seattle. It was in the 70s and 80s over the course of our stay and we got to soak up the sunshine to recharge our batteries. I think it’s a nice place to visit, but I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’d have to go again. I don’t know if we’d have a different opinion if we didn’t have an infant with us, although I will say we did get time away from him thanks to our fantastic nanny riding along for a few days. We even managed to treat ourselves to a private winery tour sans Dom, which made the most of a few hours of grown up time. The rest of the week, we relaxed in our apartment and at various locations around the valley. There’s really only so much you can do when you’re limited to three hours between naps. Mostly it was just a way for us to spend time together as a family. In that sense, we were very successful. We learned about traveling with a kid, we got to spend an uninterrupted week together, and we have these pictures where Dom already looks so young compared to how he looks today.

I’m not sure Dom will remember any of it, but we will. Oh, we went to Morimoto’s restaurant – it was awesome.

*It took us a year to do Vietnam, so we’re improving… right?

Gallery

The Aquarium

In a continuing effort to spend money on experiences and not things, we recently purchased a membership to the Seattle Aquarium. Dom’s getting to be the age where everything is interesting, so we wanted to start getting him interested in nature. It doesn’t hurt that we can always fall back it in the event of failed plans, bad weather, or just a plain ole need to get out of the house. The aquarium is a 10 minute drive or 30 minute trip on public transportation away, so we can even use it as a “free” way to kill a few hours.

As far as our first experience – it went well. We met up with another family that has a one year old and we spent… I don’t know… an hour or a bit more walking around. Dom did really well and he seemed to love it. I was initially worried it would be boring and time again, but I’ll leave you with a quote from my discussion about the topic on social media. That, and pictures… everyone loves baby pictures, right?

Without trying, I became engrossed in how Dom was interpreting the world around him. I swear if I couldn’t picture those little synapses forming in his brain. I saw literal wonder in his dark brown eyes – everything was new and amazing to him, and therefore… new and amazing to me.