A few weeks before Joey's birthday rolled around we sat down and asked him how he wanted to celebrate. A big party with friends? A day at the Zoo? A trip to the movies? He said he just wanted to go to the Science Center. How could we deprive him? So, the morning of Joey's birthday, we headed off to the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center to play! Wendy came along with us, too. The more the merrier!
Even Simon had a great time checking out all the fun stuff at the Science Center. His favorite thing, though, was playing at the Gravity Well with Aunt Wendy. The Gravity Well is basically a big circular funnel and you can roll marbles down inside. The marbles, if you roll them the right way, will circle around and around, like they're doing down a drain. Simon wasn't concerned with illustrating any scientific principles. He just liked throwing the marbles down the hole. Wendy was wonderful and patient with him, collecting the marbles for him by the handful.
In this photo Joey is playing with a display where there was a giant rotating disc. You could spin smaller discs on top of it. I forget what this exhibit was demonstrating, but I guess it doesn't matter. The important part was that Joey had a blast. (Even if he doesn't look excited in this particular photo!)
At one point we realized we hadn't seen Matt for a while. We found him in the main hall, working with these little wooden planks. They had thousands of them in big bins, available for folks to construct various things. Most of the people playing with the blocks were kids. And I guess Matt's just a big kid at heart. He spent almost an hour building his tower!
Here's the final product. Quite the feat of engineering, no?
Joey got lots of great presents. I think the big hit was this digital camera from Aunt Wendy and Uncle Sean. The look on his face in this photo says it all. He was SO excited!
When we'd asked Joey what kind of cake he wanted, he was very specific. He even drew us a picture with a cross-section diagram. He wanted and ice cream cake with chocolate cake with chocolate chip ice cream. And he wanted the icing to look like a map of the world. It was a tall order, but I think he was pleased with the results:
We normally don't let Simon have sweets, but since it was a special occasion, we have him a tiny sliver of cake. Simon devoured it, smeared icing all over the place, and eventually not only licked his plate clean, but then tried to eat the plate! Let this next photo be a warning to you: a sugar buzz isn't always pretty.
