Adventures in Bennionland

One of the few feature length movies that we have seen in the theater is The Bee Movie. We actually ended up seeing it quite a few times in the theater with different people. Will and Walker appreciated the different take on bees that the movie gave them – especially the notion that bees don’t like to sting. Mostly because it’s bee suicide. Will and Walker have been less nervous when a bee comes in the room or when they run into one outside….until now.

Walker informed me at a trip to the Arboretum that ‘Barry the bee is MEAN!’. Don’t let this little face fool you:

Walker said this all while looking like this:

Because of this:

We were rolling down a hill at the Arboretum and he unfortunately got in the way of a pollenating bee. It would seem as though the bee won (given Walker’s face and our immediate departure from the Arboretum) but then again, we know what happens to the bee!

And don’t worry. We stopped by the Arboretum gift shop and got a piece of candy, and that cheered Walker right on up!

We had such a good time at the Chinese New Year Parade! I had no idea what to expect and it was better than I could imagine! The boys were so excited all week that the kept asking when we were going to Chinatown.

One of the best parts was watching Walker ride the train. He is in a phase where trains are his sun, moon and stars. My Dad took some great shots of him on the train, as well as the parade, so I’ll have to post those when I can get a hold of them!!

Here are some of ours:

Walker’s not sure about the dancing dragons:

Will was most enthused by
the confetti and spent the majority of his time
watching it get thrown and then picking it off the ground
to throw it again:

One of the best parts of the parade, as is always the case, was the people watching. This cute man was standing near us with his wife. He was thrilled to greet anyone and everyone on the floats as they came by…but it was a special delight when any of the Chinese New Year royalty came by on their floats. You’ll have to turn your head sideways to watch it, but this is what he’d do:

The parade website said that the parade would go from 2:00pm – 5:oopm. I thought there was no way it would go that long, or that they were marking time from the start at one place and the finish…boy was I wrong! At about 4:00pm we decided to walk around Chinatown. It was fun to see ALL of the people out for a good time.

We decided to forgo trying to get Chinese food IN Chinatown given the crowds. In the end we trekked back to the train station and rode back towards G-town.

In what seemed to be a strange move we decided to celebrate the Chinese New Year at a Mexican restaurant! (Chinese food is hard to find gluten-free!)

The boys were famished and exhausted….a great day was had by all! I’m still hoping that next year we can celebrate the real deal

For those of you unfamiliar with the awesomeness that is Bob Ross, you might want to go here to learn more about him. I (Shelly) have a t-shirt with him on it that I wear a lot around the house and the boys love it. They usually ask me questions about Bob Ross and sometimes even tell him hi. One night this week we showed them a video of Bob Ross online and they, Will in particular, were mesmerized.

So the other night I broke out our possibility box and decided we could do Bob Ross painting. Unfortunately I failed to take pictures of their artwork before putting them in an envelope to send to Pop (Eric’s grandpa) who also is a Bob Ross fan. However, once Walker lost interest in painting (about five minutes into it) Will and I turned to each other as canvasses.

(he told me I had to hold still and not smile)

We did try to paint Walker’s face – but he wasn’t as fond of it. I got 1/2 way through a balloon and he was out of his chair. He came back for a minute and I was able to get a red ‘T’ (for trouble) in Scarlet Letter form. That was about it for him though!