Brownsville Zoo

When we were on acation in South Padre, we took a short trip over to Brownsville to go to the zoo. We'd taken Noah to the zoo one other time when he was an infant, so this was his first trip where he knew what was going on. He was excited to go and talked for several days in advance about all the animals he would see. We'd ask what he thought he'd see at the zoo and he'd say "Little bit of monkeys, little bit of lions, little bit of giraffes...(changing animal names to whatever he was thinking about at that moment)".

We didn't know what to expect from the zoo. It was actually pretty good. Some parts had a good amount of shade which was nice. We were disappointed that we didn't get to see any elephants and they only had a female lion that we could barely see. But there were plenty of other animals.

Noah liked it, but got more impatient that we'd expected. I think a lot had to do with the heat. We tried stopping for an icee but that ended up giving him a brain freeze so that didn't help with the crankiness. I was fully expecting him to crash in the car on the way back thinking he was cranky because it was close to naptime. But once we got in the car and he was in the a/c for a while he was a completely different kid.

We still talk about the different animals we saw so I know he did enjoy some of it and he likes looking at our pictures too.

Trying to kiss like the hippos were

South Padre Vacation

We went to South Padre Island for our family vacation again this year. We went in early June for week and thankfully had great weather! It's the perfect mix of fun and relaxation when you have a toddler in tow. Noah loves the beach and had a blast. He had absolutely no fear with the sand or waves. There was lots of digging and burying of Noah. And one of his favorite things was to turn his sand buckets upside down and bang on them and sing like he is playing the drums (he's way into drums and music right now!).

We had some good food and good beer too. The Padre Island Brewing Co. was within walking distance of our condo so we ate there once and took a growler (large jug) of beer to go that we refilled a few times. We also had excellent seafood on the bay one evening. We went to Port Isabel and ran along the pier by Pirates Landing and also went to the Sea Life Center and looked at some sea creatures. We took one half day trip to Brownsville to go to the zoo (I'll write more about the zoo in a separate post).

Pirate's Landing

Padre Island Brewing Co.

Dinner on the bay

Noah decided he wanted to poop on the potty while we were there. He just randomly told us "poop on the toilet" one day while we were eating lunch. We put him on it and sure enough he went! We had a few more successes after that but will be waiting just a little while longer to start the hard core potty training. We're going to be leaving Noah with my parents for a week later in July when Mike and I both go on the church youth trip and I want to wait to do any major changes in life until after that. We happened to have so big boy underwear with us so we let him wear them for a bit.

Enjoy these videos of Noah on the beach. He spent most of his time running, spinning, digging and playing "drums" as you can see from these videos. The first one is our first few minutes on the beach the first night we got there. It was great seeing his reaction to the water.

Random silliness

This is a random mix of pictures I've been meaning to post...

Mr. Fix It working on Aunt Nessa's bike

Like father, like son. Need I say more?

Silly Boy. He actually posed himself this way.

Ouch!

A week or so ago we had a group of college kids over to our house for dinner. There were probably 10 or so people, so not a ton but enough to make Noah a little crazy. He was running around like a crazy man and then hiding his face in Mike's legs (this is what he does when new people are around-the hiding, not the running). All of a sudden he apparently decided to chomp down on Mike's leg while he had his face buried there. Ouch! It left a quarter sized red, purple spot right away. He must have really bitten down pretty hard.

I was pretty horrified when I realized what had happened. This is our first biting incident with Noah. He was immediately sent to time out. It hasn't happened since but we are both now paranoid anytime he comes up and buries his head in our legs.

The funny part of this story was what Noah said afterwards. When Mike went to get Noah out of time out, they had this conversation:
Mike: "Noah, why did you have to go to time out?"
Noah: (in a very sad, pitiful tone) "Ate Daddy's leg"

Yep, Noah is now our little leg eater. Hopefully that was the first and last time.