Massachusetts 2012 - Part 4 (Six Flags)

Hello again! The bad news is that, yes, I obviously didn't upload any new pictures this weekend. The good news, however, is that I have spent the last couple of hours uploading the rest of the Massachusetts vacation photos, and I have created 4 new posts. Rather than deluge you with so many photos all at once, I'll add the remaining three entries every other day so they should all be up by next week.

In current Lucas news, our tiny terror has had some issues at school as of late. A couple of weeks ago, he and 7-8 of his other school chums got in trouble for having their own little fight club during recess. I guess they were all playfighting, but that's a no-no nowadays. (Unlike when I was a kid, and you could come back to class with bruises and the teacher wouldn't lift an eyebrow.) Digression aside, after we talked to him and gave him some random punishment (no videogames for an entire weekend, I think?), he's been doing well. In fact, his teacher even gave him some a couple of stickers yesterday for his good behavior.

However! On the way home yesterday, he got in trouble on the school bus for throwing a rock. It doesn't sound like it was malicious--he mentioned he was throwing it as part of a make believe game of hopscotch--but still, you don't throw a rock on a bus. He seems to get in trouble whenever he is with his friend Ryan, and we've asked that they not be seated together. For whatever reason, the bus driver doesn't seem to exercise her authority as apparently they sit across from each other in the same aisle. We, along with our daycare provider, think she needs to pull her head out of her ass and do a better job separating them, but what can you do if she just doesn't get it? Apparently, he is being written up for this incident and two write ups can mean he won't be able to take the bus anymore. We acknowledge that he is in the wrong this time, but if something happens again, and it's a result of them not being separated, then we\ll likely have words with the driver's supervisor.

That's enough of current news for now. During our last week in Massachusetts, we took a mini-vacation with my dad over to Springfield. On the first day, we visited Six Flags New England. If you have a really good memory, you may remember our previous visit in 2010, which you can see here.

We started off in the kiddie area, and that was probably a good idea. After Lucas rode some of the bigger rides, he didn't think much of the "baby" ones, as you'll see in later pictures. Here, though, you can see he is having a good time.

He also enjoyed the roller coaster, riding it twice: once with me and once with Marilu. For obvious reasons, it's hard to get a good photo of a roller coaster in motion so I cheated a bit and took a video. Marilu and Lucas are in the first car here.



You can see he's starting to get a little tired of this type of ride as he does his best to smile.

Here's a couple more pictures of Lucas on the "baby" rides, but he had a good time since he had company!

One of the themes at Six Flags involves the DC superheroes, and as you can imagine, Lucas was all over that. This is the entrance to that section of the park. Note that Lucas is doing his best hero stance.

Throughout the day, they have different superheroes show up that you can take your picture with. We got lucky and were there when Green Lantern, Robin, and Batman made appearances. Robin is Lucas's favorite superhero (for some reason), and he was besides himself when Robin talked to him and took the picture. I don't think I've ever seen his smile as big as it was for those few moments.

Lucas and I try out one of the "adult" rides, the teacups. If you look back at our 2010 adventure, we tried them out then as well. Although I don't have a picture from it, we also went on a mid-size roller coaster, which is probably the most adult ride Lucas has been on. He really liked that one. Unfortunately, the height restrictions on the other roller coasters were still too much for him to try them out,

Not quite as good as Robin, but Lucas still liked meeting Scooby and Scrappy-Doo.

I think this was the last ride Lucas went on. After going on the teacups, the Scrambler, and the aforementioned roller coaster, this slow kiddie ride was not very exciting as you can see by his body language.

In fact, he rated it a thumbs down!

Pictures from the zoo in the next installment!

Damn Internet

Quick update. A couple of days ago, we hit our limit on uploading and downloading for the month. Rogers only gives us a paltry 60 GB so unfortunately, I have to wait until our next billing cycle to upload more photos. Otherwise, it's gonna cost us. The good news is that our new cycle starts on the 28th so I should be able to get some more pictures up this weekend. Keep an eye out!

Rory Update

We received some odd news last week. Marilu had gone in for a followup appointment with her OB/GYN. I believe it was the first time she's seen him since everything happened back in May. According to the pathology report, it turns out Rory was, in fact, a girl. Because of everything that happened, we never got confirmation of the sex when we were at the ultrasound, and I guess they never thought to bring it up when Marilu gave birth.

When Marilu told me, I'll admit I was stunned. I wasn't sure how to take this news, and to be honest, I'm still not sure how I feel. To a much lesser extent, this must be what it's like when someone finds out they were adopted. In the sense that something you took for granted is proven otherwise.

I suppose it's good that Rory is a name that can be used for both boys and girls, although the middle name Gerard doesn't really work.

We haven't told Lucas yet, and we're probably not going to for at least a few years. He still mentions his little brother from time to time, and I'm not sure what he would think about this. That said, I don't want to wait too long since I don't want it to be a major shock when he is a teenager or something.

Anyway, that's the news for the week. I thought writing about it might help me make a little more sense of it, but it's still weird. Guess it will be for a while.

Massachusetts 2012 - Part 3 (Aquarium and Golf)

One other thing I did with Lucas before Marilu arrived was to bring him miniature golfing. My mom came along to assist, in case he got out of control. I'm not sure if I mentioned it on this blog, but the last time we went mini golfing him was on the cruise in March, and he ended up flinging his golf club around the 9th hole. I guess that's practice for when he's older and slices it. We also went to the same place (Crystal Caves in Auburn, for those of you from central Mass) last year, and he lost patience with mini golf within a couple of holes. So I was happy to see he made it through the whole course this time. He got a little antsy toward the end and wanted to crawl around the cave, but for the most part, it was a successful outing. Lest I forget, he got a hole in one on the very first hole without any help from my mom or me!

The next day, Marilu flew into Boston. Since we were there, we decided to make the most of the trip and went to the New England Aquarium. We were going to stay over and do some more stuff in Boston, but hotel rooms were around $300 a night. Yeah, I don't think so.

I wanted to comment on some of these photos, but Blogger decided to upload them out of order, and I can't easily fix it (this blog can be a pain in the ass when it comes to managing pictures). As such, enjoy our day at the aquarium.

Massachusetts 2012 - Part 2 (The Dinosaur Place)

Quick update before I get to the meat of the post. Lucas had his first week of senior kindergarten last week, and for the most part, it went well. The only issue that cropped up was that he got in trouble on the school bus. When he and his friend Ryan get together, they get a little "energetic," and I guess he was getting up on the bus, which is a big no-no. We've told him to sit in a different seat from Ryan, and so far, it seems to be working. Other than that, everything is great as he is happy to be back at school. Tomorrow night is a pizza party and "meet the teacher," so we'll get to see his classroom again (since he's in the same one as last year).

So, back to Massachusetts. As you may or may not know, Lucas and I drove down a week ahead of Marilu, who then flew down. During that week, I had to come up with stuff to do to keep Lucas busy and to prevent me from going crazy. One of those things was a trip down to south Connecticut to The Dinosaur Place. It's a neat little place that has a walking trail with plenty of lifesize dinosaur models, and it culminates in a good-sized splash pad and playground. We ended up killing a good 4-5 hours there. Below you'll see the highlights.

This gives you an idea of the scale of the dinosaurs. They were really well crafted. I have to admit I was impressed.

I told Lucas to stand under this dinosaur and try and look scared. It didn't work out so well...

...so I joined in.

This next photo is probably my favorite one from the entire trip. It came out exactly as I hoped. (that is, Lucas fleeing from a charging Styracosaurus)

If you look closely, Lucas is pretending to steal the dino eggs. My direction, once again.

"Are you ready to rumble?!"

Some photos from the splash pad.

I'm not sure what it is about upward-shooting streams of water, but both boys and girls love them.

And we wrap up with some photos from the playground. They had a very unique spiderweb-like structure that Lucas loved climbing on. I've never seen something like this anywhere else so it was nice to see him play on something less common that swings and slides.

A better shot of the entire structure. It goes up pretty high, and I was a little nervous about Lucas from time to time, but we made it through the experience concussion free.

Another milestone

I wanted to take a quick detour from the Massachusetts photos to announce Lucas's latest milestone: he's riding a bike without training wheels!

Marilu noticed a few weeks ago that when he was on training wheels, oftentimes he would have the bike balanced so that the training wheels weren't even being used. We asked him if a few times if he wanted to try  riding without them, but he kept saying no. However, while we were playing in the front yard on Saturday, he saw our newest neighbor go by, helping his son (who is a year younger than Lucas) ride without training wheels. I guess this was the catalyst Lucas needed since he immediately asked to try it himself. A couple of minutes later, and I had the wheels off.

Even though we knew he was probably ready for it, Lucas surprised us by achieving success so quickly. After one or two unsuccessful tries, he made it about 30 feet, and from that point, he just kept doing better and better. Marilu got this video of his second "long" ride.



This picture is from a little later, when he was more comfortable and we were riding up and down the street.

On his first day, he was able to ride well but he was having a lot of problems getting started. He needed us to give him a little push about 95% of the time. That number plummeted on Sunday, and by evening, he didn't need any assistance at all. Here he is, hotdogging it at a block party we went to.



I should note that about 10 seconds after this video ended, he tried to turn too sharply and crashed, smacking his head into the ground. The helmet did its job though, and he was back up and riding within a minute or two.

So that's my interlude for the night. Back to Massachusetts tomorrow!

Massachusetts 2012 - Part 1A

As promised the videos of us frolicking in the water.  The first one is blurry at first, but it clears up about halfway through. Check out who is driving the boat.



In this next one, I do my best to make the water around the dock kiver free.



Finally, some snorkeling fun with Lucas and me.

Massachusetts 2012 - Part 1 (Water, Water Everywhere!)

I'll come clean with you. I've been putting off posting about the Massachusetts vacation. When I first organized all the photos--from our camera, my mom's camera, and my iPhone--into one folder, there were a whopping 538 photos. Trying to comb through that and summarize the trip through 10-20 photos seemed a bit overwhelming. Earlier tonight, I went through and was able to delete just over 100 of those, the vast majority being ones Lucas took while manning the camera during a zoo visit. While he did take some decent photos, most were not so good.

So, we're down to 432 photos. Still a daunting task, but not quite as bad, and short of deleting all of them, I'd eventually have to get around to this. I expect there will be several entries devoted to Massachusetts, and I'm going to try to base each one around specific events and then maybe put the random ones in a final catch-all post. Whatever the case, expect to see lots of photos from the New England region over the next week or two. After this, I'll tackle the Newfoundland trip, which only has a paltry 280 photos to sift through.

Since one of the highlights of our trips to Massachusetts is staying at my mom's place on Webster Lake (or Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug to the locals), this first entry is devoted to our time in and around the water. The ability to spontaneously decide to jump in the water is one of the things I've missed most from that trip. There were at least a couple of days where I went down to the dock, intending to spend 15-20 minutes in the water, and then 3 hours later, I was finally toweling off. Good times.

For the first time since I started visiting, the boat my mom and Kevin own actually worked while I was there. We took it out a few times but didn't think to take many photos. Although the one below is a bit blurry, I kind of liked the look of it as we came back into the dock. For what it's worth, that thing was so much fun to drive. It's by Seadoo, and it's a cross between an actual boat and a jetski. Someone out there might know the name for this type of vehicle, but all I know is that I had a blast.

Our little Jacques Coustaeu prepares for his aquatic adventure.

Although all the photos you'll see here show Lucas wearing floaties, he did brave the water without them from time to time. He's made remarkable progress over the last few months, between swim lessons and this trip, and I expect he'll ditch the floaties long before next summer.

I love the fact that it looks as if I am trying to catch Lucas in this photo. In reality, I was hunting kivers (bluegill/sunfish). They are a very stupid fish, and I managed to catch 30-40 of them by net alone during the trip.

Kevin and Lucas having water wars. Lucas is winning.

Great shot of Lucas with his Grampy Kevin.

While selecting photos to use for this entry, I noticed several good videos from our time playing in the water. Since videos take forever and a day to upload, I'll post those in a follow-up to this entry, probably tomorrow. Hope you've enjoyed. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

In Memoriam

Before I get back to the business of posting photos, I want to take a moment to summarize what happened back in May that led to the hiatus. I think most of the people who read this blog know the whole story, but in case there are a couple of people still in the dark, I'm going to give you the Cliffs Notes version.

Basically, we found out from early tests that there was something wrong with our baby. When we came in for a follow-up ultrasound, the doctor confirmed that things were bad, and it was very unlikely our baby would survive until the pregnancy, let alone afterwards. As such, we made the choice--not that there was much of one, given that news--to terminate the pregnancy.

Unfortunately, because of how far along Marilu was, we had to go through what was essentially a full birth. I'm not going to go into it, but suffice to say, May 28 was the worst day and night of my life. I think Marilu would agree.

For what it's worth, we had a boy. Although there is no official documentation, we named him Rory Gerard Deal. Gerard was a nod to Marilu's dad, and we came up with Rory in much the same we settled on Lucas. It was a boy's name that neither of us hated!

So that's the story in a nutshell. It's a lot easier to talk about it now, almost 3 months later, but there will always be a special place in my heart for our little boy who was taken from us far too soon.

Rest in Peace, Rory. Your daddy, mommy, and big brother Lucas will never forget you.

New Beginning

We're back from Massachusetts and Newfoundland and all points in between. As you can see, I've finally renamed and restyled the blog. I think the new name is appropriate.

I have to transfer the Massachusetts pictures from the camera, but once I get that done, I'll start updating with new photos. Talk to you again soon!

Oh Captain, My Captain!

Lucas and I are in Massachusetts this week, with Marilu flying down next Thursday. Earlier tonight, he took a ride in the boat my mom and Kevin own. And by "take a ride," I mean he was actually driving it. You'll have to look closely in the following video, but that's him at the wheel.



I know I've been gone a while, in light of everything that happened back in May, but I'm going to try and get back on track while on vacation here in Massachusetts. Please bear with me!

Another Lucas Birthday

Believe it or not, Lucas turned 5 today!

I'll post more pictures from his special day later this week.