Thursday, October 29, 2009

Twin Cities Adventures

While Cari and our oldest daugther Alyssa are off at a Monsters of Folk concert in downtown Minneapolis, I have some time this evening to post a few pictures of our ongoing visit to the Twin Cities.

Aren't you just drooling over the prospect of reading all this nonsense?

Earlier today we paid a visit to the Science Museum of Minnesota, complete with their collection of dinosaurs...



Cari and Malia did their own newscast live from downtown St. Paul...



While Bretty and David piloted a tugboat down the river...



The Science Museum has a huge exhibit on all the different parts of the body, including a very large hand for Nalani...



I must admit that I liked the section on nutrition and the digestive track the best.

When talking about proper nutrition and what our bodies need to thrive, they had an example of what I can only assume to be the best source of nutrients for the human body...



Pizza = Nutrients.

The Science Museum of Minnesota says so!


Hey, that's considered good nutrition when you live in a place where it's 12 degrees outside 9 months out of the year.

There was also a neat exhibit that allowed you to use an optician's tool to closely examine the eye of a friend.

Nalani got all set up to look at her little sister's eye, but apparently Malia didn't quite get the concept that it's your eye that's supposed to be put against the eyepiece...



Eye. Tongue. Malia must figure what's the difference?

Then there was our little boy David who sat there while his big sister read to him from a dinosaur book...



The kids had a grand ol' time...



But of course it still was a museum. There's nothing quite the spectacle that is the Mall of America.

We were there yesteday, and again today. At the center of this monstrosity is an Nickelodeon-themed amusement park.

And with Nick, you have to start with the guy who lives in a pineapple under the sea...




That's Spongebob Squarepants, of course!

There is also a wonderful Lego playground...



And just look at what the kids built from Lego...



Okay, maybe the kids didn't build it. But the boys knew who it was. I was convinced it was Boba Fett, but they said it was Jango Fett because Jango wore a blue uniform.

I looked it up later and they're right. Geez, my kids know more about Star Wars than me!

We were back at the Mall of America today. But this time as the women in the family went shopping, we men decided to begin a noble quest.

A magical quest, to be specific.

MagiQuest is an interactive game in which you use a magic wand to explore a magical kingdom, find enchanted stones, and use them to become powerful enough to destroy the dragon.

Here are the boy's using their wands on a suit of armor...



You flick your wand, and the suit of armor talks to you.

Or you flick the wand at a chest...



And it opens to show you treasure or an item for which you are searching.

We spent way too much time running around that place!

Here's the great wizard talking to us when becoming a "Master Magi..."



It's basically a Harry Potter-like experience, without the creator having to pay Harry Potter royalties.

As noted at the start of this post, later this evening Cari and Alyssa heading off to their concert. Thus I was left to feed our five younger kids. And though our Marriott hotel rooms came with fully-equipped kitchens, there was no way I was going to cook anything.


It was off to Chili's to dinner!



In the picture below, if you look closely behind Malia's head in the dark background, you'll see the shadow of a man eating...



This older gentleman and his wife (not pictured) kept looking over at the kids during the entire meal.

Generally, that sort of staring freaks me out, but at least this couple was smiling. Then again, maybe that's even freakier.

Anyway, after the couple finished their dinner they came over to our table and asked me if all these kids were mine.

At first I thought of denying it, but I figured my kids already have reason enough for therapy when the grow up so I admitted to fathering them all.

The older woman then complimented me on having such wonderfully polite and well-behaved children.

I thanked her and said that keeping the kids locked up in the garage most of the time can work wonders.

It's a true story, but I told Cari about later and she doesn't think it was very funny.

However, the kids liked it. Or at least they're saying so after I bribed them with a stop for ice cream before returning to the hotel...



Well, that's another day in Minnesota.

We did discover one more place we really wanted to go. Unfortunately, it's about 90 minutes away and that's just a bit too far.

But if you're ever in Southern Minnesota, please be sure to stop at perhaps the greatest food museum of them all...



You just have to go to a museum which promotes itself by saying, "Get a taste of interactive meat."

Spam musubi. Spam on saimin. Fried spam in a Zip Pac.

I'm from Hawaii. We all must genuflect before the almighty Spam.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

The Mad Hatter!

I'll admit it. I love hats.

I love shopping for them. I love trying them on. I love buying them.

I'm not particularly fond of baseball caps, mind you, but almost every other kind of hat.

Somewhat oddly, however, I don't wear them that often.

But my children most certainly do.

In their mind, there is no place where it is inappropriate to wear one of their wonderful hats.

Consider my son Bret Jr., who recently wore his red fedora to the groundbreaking of his
cousin's memorial garden...



In the picture above, that's United States Congressman Steve Kagan giving my son Bret a fist bump because even he thought that hat was so very cool.

But of all my kids, the true hatmaster is David.

He has more hats than all my other children combined (and that's saying something).

Here David is in his top hat...



David wears a different hat from his collection every day.

So you can imagine his excitement when we visited Fish Creek not too long ago and stopped at their wonderful hat store...



It seemed like David tried on every hat in the store.

Ultimately, it came down to whether he wanted to be Gilligan...



Or Sherlock Holmes...



He picked Sherlock in case you were wondering.

The other kids just had fun trying them on. There's Nalani as a Arabian princess...



Inspector Alyssa...



I'm not sure what this thing is on Nalani's head...



And Alyssa trying on what in college we used to call a granola hat...



While Alyssa didn't buy the hat, she did demostrate her true tree-hugging credentials by picking out a granola pullover...



At least there's purple in it.

That's my daughter the vegetarian.

Of course, when it comes to such things I cannot help but wonder. If God intended us to be vegetarians, why did he make animals out of meat?

On the way back from Fish Creek, we also took some time to go through a giant corn maze...



If you look carefully in the center-left of the picture below, you can see the heads of a couple of my kids as they make their way through the maze...



And once we were home, the younger kids still found things to do...



Another goofy weekend in the Bicoy house.