Two weeks ago Ann, Athena and I drove up to Medford, Oregon to meet Athena’s new baby cousin, Alia. Ann may write a bit more about the trip later but I wanted to post some pictures while I had some time. The past few weeks have been very busy for both of us at work so blog posts have fallen behind a bit.

We left after work on Friday and drove up through the night so that Athena would be able to sleep through the drive. For the most part she did – she only woke up when I stopped for gas, talked to us for a bit, and then fell back asleep. Shortly after that we passed Redding and started driving into the mountains and some rainy, foggy weather. It’s the first time I’ve driven in California and really worried about the weather conditions… but still not as bad as snow storms in Cleveland.

Ann was pretty happy to get there:

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

Ahan with Alia – Ahan is actually changing diapers. Apparently doctors don’t learn how to change diapers in med school, not even pediatricians, but he was able to get up to speed.

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

It was interesting for me to hold such a tiny baby again. Alia is growing fast, but she feels so light after carrying Athena.

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

Medford is an interesting place, it’s actually a lot more like California than how you usually think about Oregon. We went to nearby Ashland to eat and check out Lithia Park. That was just fine with Athena. She ran to see the ducks, played on the slide and swing set, interrupted a game of frisbee, and took a short hike with her dad.

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

I’ll let Ann add more about the trip and post more photos – you can see the whole set in Picasa.

Ahan and Julie live on the edge of the suburban part of Medford, with farms and open land on three sides. In addition to all the fun baby pictures, I took a short walk and took some photos of the landscape. We’re going to have to come back when the weather is nicer and do some hiking.

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

They have cows and horses for neighbors:

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

I saw a lot of these small-scale wind turbines around. Turbines this small aren’t really cost effective for grid power, I wonder if they’re used for irrigation or pumping?

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

Athena was very sweet with Alia – we were a little worried since Athena can be a bit rambunctious.

From Visit with Ahan, Julie, and Alia

We weren’t in a hurry to leave, but both of us had to work on Tuesday. The drive back was amazing – the Siskiyou Mountains are very scenic and you can see Mount Shasta for much of the drive until we hit the Central Valley at dusk.

I’m getting some fun video clips of Athena with my phone, so here’s another video-heavy post.

The weather never gets really bad in our part of California so despite the extra rain we’ve had lately we’ve been able to head to the park on weekends. Here’s more swinging, and a few escape attempts:

From Jan and Feb 2010

This is a video I’ve been meaning to get for a while – Athena is an extremely good climber (a bit more on that later, too). At the playground she regularly finds her way up on things that older kids don’t dare to attempt. Here you can watch her make it all the way to the top of the slides with Ann just spotting:

With one of us at top to keep her from jumping off and one at the bottom to prevent tumbles, Athena can even go down the slide by herself:

Here’s Athena playing with her toy laptop. She used to just mash the keys, but now she’s much more particular about what she presses. The lcd screen has a really poor viewing angle so she’s picking it up so she can see. I tried to show her how to change the angle but according to her it must be opened all the way.

Her favorites are the letter D, which elicits an excited “Duck!”, and the letter M, which shows a mouse for Athena to “squeak” at.

The weekend before last we went to Cupertino Square Mall and I let Ann do some shopping while I chased Athena around. Her first obsession was the escalators, so we rode them up and down about 10 times before I was able to carry her far enough away that she forgot how to get back to them. It was at that point she found the coin-op rides, obsession number 2. Her favorite was the bulldozer, clearly superior in her eyes to the pony, corvette, and spaceship. Personally I thought the spaceship was pretty cool. I plunked down the $0.50 for the ride but She really seemed to enjoy it more when it wasn’t running:

Later we ran up and down a big ramp to JC Penny until the little decathlete was exhausted. She was pretty well-behaved in the store when we went to meet back up with Ann, even handing me some fallen clothes hangers to hang back up.

The other new thing in our little girl’s life is class at The Little Gym. She and the other “birdies”, the youngest group, meet every Saturday morning for activities to build their coordination, listening, physical confidence, and independence. She has no problem with the latter two – she can always be found pushing on the door to get into the gym before class starts and spends most of the class running around the space and climbing on things. Ann and I were a little worried about it in the first class, but the teacher made a point of saying that any kids wandering around exploring on their own should be encouraged and that she would start participating more as she saw us doing the activities. She does love two of the activities, the big parachute and the bubble machine.

I don’t have any video from the gym uploaded yet, I’ll have to get some. Athena absolutely loves it. Last week she scaled a climbing wall, again with Ann just spotting. It was inclined, and only maybe five feet of climbing, but still – she’s only 14 months.

One more story I have to share, apologies if you’ve already heard this one in person but it really is remarkable. Periodically in her feats of daring-do Athena will fall off of something and get hurt before Ann or I can get to her. At that point (after making sure she’s alright and whatnot) we generally take the attractive nuisance away so she won’t be tempted to make another attempt.

Athena has figured this out. So now, when she falls off of something, the first thing she does is check to see if Ann and I are watching. If we are, she wills herself not to cry, pacing around the room with this “I’m okay, nothings wrong!!” look on her face. She’s not suppressing crocodile tears – I saw her take a face plant off one of the small stools and it must have really hurt. Since I had run over to try to catch her she gritted her teeth and just refused to cry about it.

What kind of 14-month-old kid does this? Athena is extremely strong-willed, in everything, whether it’s scaling furniture or refusing to eat. It’s fantastic but also terrifying, especially when she decides she doesn’t want milk for days on end. We’ve been very consistent in ignoring tempter tantrums so she hasn’t started throwing a lot of them, thank goodness, but I’m a little afraid my kid is already tougher than me.

One thing I know for sure, is this kid has quite a life ahead of her. No one’s going to stop her.

One last fun picture:

From Jan and Feb 2010

Ever since I got my Nexus One I’ve been taking a lot more little video clips of Athena. Although I’ve uploaded some of them to YouTube and Ann and I have shared some on Facebook, I haven’t been very good at posting them here.

This post will catch everyone up with Athena’s latest video hits. I tend to like photography better than video but it’s hard to show Athena’s new fascination with her own shadow with a still frame:

It’s also much harder to see how our little girl has developed such advanced etiquette and table manners for a 1-year-old without a video like this one:

In all seriousness, Athena is very quick to pick up cause and effect. If she sees Ann and I do something a few times she’s usually ready to give it a go herself – she knows how to turn the TV on and off, always wants to press elevator buttons, and she knows how keys work (even if she’s still not tall enough to use them):

You might remember how much Athena enjoys the swings at the playground. Although she’s still very thin, Athena is growing taller quickly, and she’s finally tall enough to ride in the toddler swing all by herself:

She’s also constantly escalating her feats of acrobatism. It’s hard to believe that we’ve had her play yard disassembled since July last year, when she climbed over the top of it. At this point every object in the house must be knocked over and scaled:

That one is actually pretty mild compared to some of her climbs, I’m afraid to put video of it on the web. I’m also saving a few recent videos for the next update because this one is already getting long.

As for what we’ve been up to lately, last week we went to the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium with Sandy and her cousin Nivi. I wanted to go to the Sausalito Cetacean Institute instead but this was a good second choice.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

We were excited to see Athena’s reaction to all the big fish and bright colors, and she really had a ball. It’s very hard to get photos inside the aquarium because of the low light – you notice the few I managed to get are very grainy from the high ISO setting I had to use.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

Here’s Athena standing inside a concave part of a multi-story tank – it almost looks like she’s in the tank.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

Here’s Athena showing me the river exhibit. We can add the word “fish” to her vocab list, and this time I know I’m not selectively hearing it because another dad there heard it too.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

The aquarium has a lot of interactive, touchable exhibits for kids. Here’s Athena playing in the touchpool, before she started trying to drink the water and Ann had to put her back down.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

A fun photo under a crashing artificial tide:

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

Athena also had some fun running around outside on the deck chasing pigeons:

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

We didn’t manage to make it through the trip without another public display of Athena’s eating issues, but overall it was very fun. I’ll end with a photo of Sandy and Athena watching the jellyfish. I took some more photos of the sea life that you can see in the Picasa album. A few of them turned out okay but I started to feel bad taking them – I have a nice camera but I really don’t have the equipment for this kind of photography. I wouldn’t feel bad taking an extra moment here and there to focus and whatnot except everywhere I went there were dozens of people with digital cameras and camera phones. It was like no one could just look at anything to enjoy it. Weird.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

My brother Ahan and sister-in-law Julie finally welcomed Alia into the world on January 7.  I’m super excited to meet my new baby niece.  It will be very interesting to see how Athena plays with her.  We’ll have to keep a close eye on her since she tends to play on the rough side.

They seem to be doing well and taking parenthood in stride.  Now the circle is complete with the Newman kids having their own kids.  I can’t wait to see first hand how my brother, the pediatrician, is doing with fatherhood.  He’s the  same guy that said, “Oh, I don’t change diapers.  That’s what the nurses do.”  I’m sure they’re both great at being new parents, though.  I’m so happy for them.

Here are some much awaited pictures, as promised.

We were very excited to see how Athena would interact with Jadyn, Caleb and Cory. They were excited to see their cousin, and Athena is now a year old and ready for anything. Athena was quickly the center of attention, marching around the condo with three older cousins following her every move:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

It’s getting harder to get good pictures of Athena now that she’s so fast and feels the need to get into everything, immediately. You can tell from this attempt at a cute group photo – I’m going to have to get a better flash so I can squeeze in more frames and catch the 1/60th or a second when she’s not trying to escape.

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Athena was pretty enamored with Caleb’s football – I like this photo because it looks like she’s calling a play and getting ready to throw a pass:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Here’s everyone playing on the bed. Ann assures me that this sort of behavior didn’t fly when she was a kid, but I guess it’s tradition that the rules change for the grandkids :)

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Athena with her Uncle:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Athena with her Nonny:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Athena with Grandpa:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Christmas morning was a lot of chaotic fun. Here Caleb and Cory sort out the presents:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Athena showing Jadyn her present:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

For some reason, Athena takes a lot of coaxing to tear open giftwrap. Her she finally tears into a present:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

…only to show her true motive:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Listening to her new toy – it’s magnetic so it sticks to the refrigerator, and it plays a song for each letter of the alphabet.

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Dancing with Nonny:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Cory and Athena checking out one of Ann’s presents. I don’t know why they both look so guilty in this photo.

From Christmas 2009 in DC

We somehow managed to get some family photos shot as well. All the kids:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

The Newman family and Athena:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Nonny, Grandpa, and all the grandchildren:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Taking a little break:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Ann with her brother (and a very tired Athena):

From Christmas 2009 in DC

A bit of history: every time we’ve visited the Newman family I’ve somehow ended up with the job of wearing out the kids through marathon play sessions. I’m not sure how I always get nominated (thought it’s probably because I enjoy it so much). This trip, I thought “I’ve got my own kid now, I can’t be the one running every race and organizing every game.” I thought wrong. We did a lot of racing in the hallways, which was just about the most fun Athena has ever had based on her constant laughing. I don’t have any photos of the races (since I was in them all) but here’s proof that Athena played with dolls and not just footballs:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Cory was fascinated by Athena and was pretty proud to not be the youngest anymore. Before they left Athena ran up and gave him a hug:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Jadyn was very helpful with Athena the whole time we were there. She had to hold Athena one last time:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Not the best photo below, but I had to include it so I could tell the story. The whole weekend we had been telling Athena not to pull on or tip over this plant (among many other things). She figured out pretty quickly that she wasn’t supposed to touch it, so she started getting really sly. She would slowly walk backwards toward the plant, and then nonchalantly reach back over her shoulder to get a hold of a leaf, watching us the whole time. We knew what she was up to but man was it a slick move. I didn’t know if I should yell at her for going back to the plant or praise her for being so clever.

From Christmas 2009 in DC

Getting pictures of Athena in her Christmas outfit was pretty tough. This is probably the best shot I got, with some family photos below:

From Christmas 2009 in DC

From Christmas 2009 in DC

From Christmas 2009 in DC

You may have noticed something a little different about the photos – I’m trying out Picasa for family photos. One plus is that it works really well with my new Nexus One phone – you can read more about My Nexus One at my blog. Here’s the whole album, with more photos:

Christmas 2009 in DC

This post is way overdue, but things have been pretty busy lately in the CA Morrison household with all of the traveling and doctor’s appointments and all.  I will start from the middle and then the beginning since many of you had some questions on facebook and such about Athena.  A day before we left for DC to go see my parents, Athena had an EGD (esophagogastroduodenoscopy).  The date was poorly planned, but it was the best date that was first available.  She had to have mild anesthesia (which she woke up from way earlier than the doctors and nurses expected, but not during the procedure).  The reason we had this done is because Athena is still having trouble swallowing foods with any kinds of chunks or bulk to it.  I have been fortifying her food with pureed avocado and butter with baby food since August. A few weeks ago, we started fortifying her whole milk with half and half, which she is not the biggest fan of, but we still have to truck on.   With this, we are not working so hard to keep her weight up, but she is still not gaining as fast as she should.  The preliminary results of the EGD showed that there was no narrowing of her esophagus; however they did do some biopsies of her esophagus to rule out eosinophilic esophagitis.  This is basically a form of food allergy that causes severe heartburn symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and weight loss.  So we are just waiting for those test results.  If the biopsy comes back negative, then we’re just going to have to work harder with the occupational therapist in order to get her to decrease the dysfunctional swallowing that she has.

Okay.  Now let’s talk about Thanksgiving.  We arrived very late the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, but that really didn’t stop Miss Athena from staying up until 2am discovering her new surroundings at her Great Grammy and Aunt Linda’s house.  She also did a little terrorizing of poor Taffy (their dog) throughout our stay.

Thanksgiving day was filled with lots of family, food, and good times. Athena got to play with her cousin Luke.  It was great seeing how they interacted with each other.

The next morning we woke up to snow on the ground.  So, naturally, Athena, Jason, and her Uncle Ryan decided to go play in the snow.  Athena loved it.  We’re really glad we got to use her snow boots at least once.

After warming up inside after playing in the snow, Athena had to make a quick phone call on Uncle Ryan’s phone.

Later that evening we visited JJ and The Glows at JJ’s wonderful baby-proofed house.  JJ is a new auntie and she has her house totally ready for babysitting and such.  Jason and I were thoroughly impressed.  She even has a high chair and crib.  Athena got to play with (beat on) little Asher.  I was told that he secretly liked having a playmate a little more his age, though.

Later that evening, the grandparents and Auntie Linda volunteered to babysit Asher and Athena while we all went out to Tommy’s.  This was excellent for Jason and I since this was our first night out since July.  It was much appreciated.

The next day was Athena’s small birthday party.  She just loved all of the attention.  When we got back to CA, she was a little uncharacteristically whiny and clingy for a short period of time.  She probably got used to all of the people around her at all times.

Although she did not like her birthday cake (she does not like sweet things), we did find out that she loves pizza.  She was gumming on that for quite some time.

If you’re wondering how we come up with such good pictures for Athena, this is our formula: one part taking a bunch of photos in a few seconds and two parts this:

The next day we flew back to CA.  But before we did, we hung out with the Delly’s and Jimmy before our flight home.  It was pretty cute seeing Athena and Jack play together.  Jack was kind of teaching her the ropes.

We’re sorry to everyone that we missed during Thanksgiving.  There’s never enough time to visit everyone.  There are definitely more pictures on Jason’s Flickr Page if you want to take a look.  We haven’t uploaded pictures from our DC trip, but when we do, we’ll do our Christmas post.  Athena had a blast playing with her cousins, though.  Now we’re just waiting for the newest Newman to make his/her debut any day now so Athena can show him/her the ropes.

We hope everyone had a very happy holiday and will have great things to come in the new year!

We still owe everyone a post about our trip to Cleveland for Thanksgiving, but we’ve been busy. In my case, busy doing interviews with lots of reporters.

Google is a very interesting place to work because (among many other things) if some random engineer knows about a topic and is willing to do interviews, they’ll put the engineer out there rather than a PR guy or spokesperson. At most companies, the notion of putting a programmer in front of a TV camera would probably get the PR team fired. Heck, even Intel hired an actor to play one of their “rock star” engineers.

I’ve been working for months to fight the “work for Google” scams that have been promising people money in order to get at their credit cards. You might have seen me on Good Morning America a few months ago talking about it. Since Google is suing some companies, another post for the Official Google Blogjust went out and I’ve been doing a ton of interviews since.

And, if you’re not interested in hearing me talk about scams, I’ve included a cute Athena video at the bottom of the post.

Here’s a story from CBS News (I’m featured near the end):

Another story from a local NBC affiliate in Utah:

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

And here’s a story from KQED radio news – this is pretty exciting for me, since I listen to NPR on my way to and from work every day:

I did a bunch of radio interviews, but they’re a bit harder to find on the web. Here’s one from WBZ Radio. I even did a few live interviews, which I think went really well – but so far I haven’t found a link to share.

Finally, here are a couple print and online stories where I was quoted:

CNET – Google sues over alleged work-at-home scams

The New York Times (from an AP story) – How Fake Sites Trick Search Engines to Hit the Top

And now, without further ado, that cute Athena video I promised:

Sunday was Athena’s birthday, so it’s time to post cute birthday photos and take stock of her progress thus far. I feel a little bad because I haven’t had time to put together a spreadsheet or anything, but this completely random list of accomplishments will have to do.

In one year, Athena has:

• Learned to walk and run;
• Walked five blocks straight without a break;
• Figured out how to turn on the dishwasher;
• Figured out how to turn on the stove;
• Figured out how to open the baby locks that we put on the stove;
• Climbed over the play yard fence;
• Learned at least five words, including “Hi,” “Bye,” “Mama,” “Dada,” and “No” (pronounced “nuh-nuh-nuh”);
• Printed out an essay she wrote on mama’s iBook;
• Recognized incoming Skype webcam calls;
• Muted the webcam about 100 times;
• Discovered that she can drag large items around the house and use them to climb up to reach things she’s not allowed to play with;
• Started singing, though she can’t really carry a tune.

Now for some photos.

Because I spent a lot of money on a fancy DSLR camera, I feel that I should be able to do all the portrait photos of Athena myself. This is almost always a fiasco, because Athena doesn’t like to stay in place for any amount of time, but I’ve come up with a few rules for success in child photography:

• You have to have more than one chance to take photos. Setting aside one day to take the official N month photo is setting yourself up for disaster.
• Limiting the photo session to a certain time period is unrealistic and will just lead to frustration.
• Putting a dress on a baby raises the cuteness factor but lowers the chance of actually getting a good photo by 50 percent.
• You need more light.
• The fewer photographers, the better. Everyone wants to take their own photos, but this leads to family pictures where everyone’s eyes are looking in different directions.
• Put the shutter on continuous. Pick the one frame out of 5 that isn’t blurry.

We went to Google for our first attempt at 1-year photos Saturday morning. I figured it would be a good spot because of the ample light and primary color walls, and it worked out fairly well. The hardest part was getting Athena to keep from running off.

Here you can see Athena deciding to rearrange the studio:

Ann and Athena:

The family photos didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. This is always the hardest for me to do, since I have to run back and forth between the camera and the scene.

We got some of the best photos of the day when we put Athena on the piano. She loved it.

Ann picked out a really nice dress for Athena:

We tried to get some photos outside in the sun but Athena has discovered how fun it is to run away from dad when he has the camera.

On Saturday we went to Ahan and Julie’s house for a combination baby shower and going away party. They are moving to Oregon. We stayed the night so we could hang out on Athena’s birthday.

Athena was a lot less enthusiastic about unwrapping presents than we expected. She was very precise:

Ann and I got her a toy laptop since she’s always trying to type on our computers. Here you can see her demonstrating it to everyone:

It’s for ages 3 to 5, so it’s not surprising that she hasn’t figured out all the features yet. She really likes the startup music so she spends most of her time opening and closing the laptop.

No first birthday is complete without a messy cake:

Between her normal easting issues and her dislike of sweet, sugary foods, we didn’t think she would be too excited about the cupcake.

Do they make salty, non-sweet birthday cake?

She did give it a try:

But soon decided that it should be backhanded to the floor:

Why so serious, Athena?

The other big news is the emergence of not one, not two, but three teeth almost simultaneously! If you look really closely you can see them in the photo:

This is a really cute photo:

Saying goodbye to Uncle Ahan and Aunt Julie:

Next up: Thanksgiving trip to Cleveland.

Halloween is kind of a big deal at Google. Almost everyone dresses up, with geek points awarded for elaborate costumes, internet in-jokes, and shameless puns. This was a particularly important Halloween, being Athena’s first. So we faced a challenge: to come up with clever costumes for the three of us without doing anything offensive enough to get me fired.

Given all the work I’ve been doing lately to warn people about internet scams, we decided to be a whole scam family:

Ann is the deposed Nigerian prince looking for a trustworthy American friend with a bank account number, Athena is Falcon the Balloon Boy, and I am the make-money-at-home Google money tree.

Here’s a better picture of Athena’s costume:

We ended up ditching the cardboard box portion of the costume while at Google, since she spent most of the time either eating it or trying to take it off. It turns out that all you really need to do is tie a silver ufo-style balloon to a little kid and just about everybody recognizes the balloon boy. She was a big hit. Athena loved the crowds and all the attention – she ran around in the grass, balloon trailing, as everyone doted on her.

I’m posting this photo only to note that you can see Larry wandering by in an airplane costume in the background. Athena’s first celebrity sighting.

Here’s a photo of some of my coworkers on the search quality team, with Shane, Nelson, Wysz, myself, Rowyn, Sandy, Alissa, Koklynn, in the back row and Reid, Sophia, Tom and Rahul in front. Both Nelson and Reid were dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are. The giant banana in Nelson’s arms is actually his dog, Henry. Wysz is dressed as a chef in one of our cafes, though he had a hard time coming up with a costume this year.

Here’s a photo of our vocational-gender-stereotype-busting support engineering team, including Merry (as a 1-up mushroom), Rowyn, Sandy and myself.

Halloween was fun. We didn’t do any trick-or-treating with Athena, our apartment building wasn’t doing it and we don’t really know anyone in the neighborhood to show her off to. Next year I’m sure we will – because by next year, she’ll have a child’s all-consuming desire to acquire candy.

As always, I’ve got more photos in Flickr.

Some other happenings we’ve missed in our blogging tardiness:

1. Rachel, one of my high-school era friends, came to the Bay Area for work and spent a couple days hanging out with us and playing with Athena.

2. Athena is walking incredibly long distances. She can now easily handle several blocks at a time – the only reason we have to hold her hand to to keep her from running into traffic. Here’s proof, taken on Castro Street in Mountain View:

3. We hung out with Ahan and Julie, who are moving to Oregon and having a baby soon. Here’s a pic of Athena helping to take apart Julie’s lego building:

4. Andy flew in for a Google Summer of Code mentor conference and we got to hang out a bit. He regaled us with tales of what happens when you collect a bunch of super nerdy computer scientists together. Let’s just say that if anyone ever starts a conversation with, “did I ever tell you about the programming language I invented…” you should run.

This photo didn’t turn out very well but I’m including it as proof that Andy was near a baby and neither burst into flame:

It’s hard to believe Andy and Michelle’s wedding was over a year ago, or that Athena is almost a year old. We’ll have more posts coming soon… I think Ann wants to write a bit about what we’re doing to get Athena to eat better, all the talking she’s doing, and we have a Thanksgiving trip coming up soon as well.

Picking up from last post, the last night my parents were in town my brother flew in from Boston. It was nice having everyone together, if just for a little while. Athena is pretty attached to her Uncle Ryan, no doubt anticipating all the shenanigans he will let her get into in the future.

We took Athena to the park again and had some fun on the swings and jungle gym.

I love this shot on the slide, the motion blur makes it look like they were really moving:

Athena exhibiting unusual strength:

She really is strikingly strong, especially since she is so skinny. She’s also very clever, and likes to get into things. Her favorite tricks at the time were turning on the dishwasher and turning on the burners of the stove. Along with some fun toys, Ryan picked up knob covers so our kid wouldn’t burn our house down. He’s very helpful:

I love this picture on the slide:

Other than playing with Athena, my brother’s other objective while visiting California was to eat at In-N-Out Burger as much as possible. If you haven’t been out the west coast, In-N-Out is probably the best fast food burger chain in the area. I think he managed to have it two or three times, which is pretty impressive for a long weekend.

Because he was only here for a little while, we didn’t have any ambitious travel plans, but we did go to see San Andreas Lake. Fun fact: San Andreas Lake is a reservoir built right on top of the San Andreas Fault. There’s an earthen dam built right across the fault. No kidding:

We took a nice walk down to the dam and through the surrounding park:

And then we jumped up and down as hard as we could to see if we could cause an earthquake.

No luck. I’d like to think that somewhere there’s an freshman geology major monitoring the seismometers for his work-study who was mildly startled.

Unfortunately that was our only trip, since Ryan and I both caught Athena’s cold the next day. The virus limited itself to a runny nose in Athena’s system but hit the two of us like a pandemic, all we wanted to do was sleep. Luckily Ryan did get some more quality time in with Athena before he had to head out.

The weather was actually pretty crummy the whole weekend, and Ryan had the misfortune of trying to fly out during “The Storm.” His flight was delayed by hours.

We’ve got one more post to catch up on and then we’ll write about Athena’s first Halloween.