The Valley is on Fire...

Okay, maybe not on fire, but the rocks are awfully red!

The Valley of Fire is a state park about 50 miles outside of Las Vegas. It gets its name because of the incredibly vibrant red sandstone formations. We took a drive out that way over Thanksgiving weekend with Cari's parents who are visiting from Wisconsin...



It's hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the valley or the redness of the stone, so here's the same pose taken from afar...



These sandstone formations are 150 million years old and have been weathered by water and wind over the centuries. This makes for the most unusual cracks, crevices and hollowed out tunnels.

The kids had an absolute blast climbing in and out of them...



There even was a great cavern that you entered by crawling through a small hole in the sandstone from below...



Needless to say, I didn't quite fit through the hole!

And backing up the camera a bit, you can see what a crawl it really is...



The kids and their Grandpa climbed all over the place...



With David demonstrating his climbing ability...



Of course, our littlest one, Malia, is too fearless to be left behind by her brother David...



And if Malia was brave enough, her older sister Nalani was going to join her...



The red sandstone formations are really quite incredible...



Of course, sandstone is just sand that was compressed into stone over millions of years. With enough wind and rain, that stone can easily turn back into sand...



It was like a beach out there! Everyone came home with their shoes filled with sand.

There are also some terrific white sandstone formations, some of which create deep crevices and valleys of their own...



If you look closely at the middle of the picture above, you'll see Cari, her Dad and five of our six kids halfway down the trail to the bottom of this little valley.

Here they are zoomed in...



It may not look like a climb from the pictures, but it really is a bit of a trek. Here we are at the bottom...



While the trail is quite steep, thankfully it's very easy and steps have been carved in to much of the sandstone. And of course Malia just had to climb it herself...



Well, at least halfway up.

Guess who had to pick her up and carry her the rest of the way up this very steep trail?

My back is still sore!

Masks & Malia's Birthday

Nalani is the fifth of our six children. She has three tough older brothers who love playing with lightsabers and jumping on top of each other.

She has an older sister who last wore a dress during the Clinton administration.

And yet somehow, some way, Nalani has become the girliest girl you'll ever meet.

When everyone in her class dressed up for Halloween, most kids dressed as witches, superheroes or other kinds of scary creatures.

Well, as you can see in the picture below, almost everyone...



You can always count on Nalani to dress up as a princess or an angel.

What a wonderfully girly girl!

Of course, Halloween means Happy Birthday to Malia...



Our littlest girl is another year older and had a grand old time opening her presents...



But when we looked closely at the pictures we took from that day, we noticed an unusual commonality to Malia's expressions...



Look a bit more closely...



Yes, for some strange reason, Malia thinks she's Michael Jordan...



She just kept sticking her tongue out!



There's probably some deeply rooted psychological reason why, but after six kids we've stopped trying to figure those things out.

Our five younger children had a great time walking through the neighborhood collecting candy...



But the sweetest treat of all for David was a Red Sox championship...



Neither Cari nor I are particularly big fans of baseball, but David became fascinated when he was sitting in the waiting area of a barbershop a few years ago. The Red Sox were on the TV and he was hooked - he quickly became a loyal citizen of Red Sox nation.

I went to college in the Boston area and lived through the Bill "You-Mean-We're-Supposed-To-Pick-Up-Ground-Balls?" Buckner affair. I saw first hand the birthright of every Red Sox fan to approach the brink of greatness only to be disappointed time and again.

The strange thing is that David only knows the Red Sox as champions. First 2004, then 2007. In the four years he's been old enough to understand the game and be a fan, his team has two World Series victories.

I can almost hear David now. Curse? What curse? And what's a Bambino?

Vegas Loves a Party...

...and it's wearing us out.

As parents of six kids, we rarely venture out for an evening on the town, and it's even more infrequent that we head down to the famous Las Vegas Strip.

Normally when you live in Las Vegas, you really never venture near the Strip except for one of three reasons: (a) friends or family members are visiting and have a strong desire to pay our taxes for us (aka losing money at the tables), (b) because someone has given you tickets to a show (although my wife prefers that we only go to the ones in which everyone is fully clothed), or (c) to attend a charity dinner.

Lately, all three of those things have been dragging us down to the Strip.

Given the nature of my work, we are invited to attend a lot of charity dinners by friends and colleagues who buy tables for these events and have a few seats leftover. The summer's scorching heat is gone and wealthy families are back in town - so now is the season for fundraising events.

And this being Las Vegas, there really are an awful lot of fundraising dinners and auctions. Here's an event last night at the Bellagio...



While most events are simply business attire, I've had to wear a tuxedo for three of the last 4 weekends. But as a guy, at least there's nothing unusual about wearing the same penguin suit to each black tie event. My wife, like all the ladies who attend these things, has to find something new to wear.

Of course, Cari makes everything she wears look lovely...



So we had two dinners to attend this week on the Strip.

I also made a trek to the Strip this week was to see an old friend from Tufts who was staying at Paris Las Vegas...



That's me with John Reblando, an old college buddy. He's having his first child in a few months while I have six kids.

That must be the reason I've lost my figure while he still has his.

And we made yet another visit to the Strip this week because we were given a pair of tickets to see a show...



"Spamalot" at Wynn Las Vegas. Or as it's described, Eric Idle's and John Cleese's "new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail.'"

If you enjoy Monty Python humor, you'll love the stuff like this which is all around the theatre's lobby...



The story is basically King Arthur's absurd search for the holy grail. And no, despite the fact that this is Sin City, there were no references to the grail of the DaVinci Code. Arthur was looking for the more traditional version of the grail.

Of course, it was right there in plain sight. All Arthur had to do was check with Cari. She had it all along filled with a strawberry daiquiri...



Of course, Cari's grail was an overpriced souvenir, but at least Spamalot thanked her in blinking lights...



That's a week in Las Vegas.