Baby Sabrina is a week old today! She gave her mom a rough night last night. Not rough by Edgar-standards, just by new-baby-I-wanna-be-awake-right-now standards.
Everybody slept in... except me. That's a bit weird. I was up at 8 AM (yes, I know,,,) and playing Wii and waiting for the rest of the house to wake. Edgar finally stirred at 9:30, and I fed him breakfast and fended off a few telemarketers.
After saying good morning to his mother, we were out the door for a short visit to my folks'. Grandma and Grandpa took Edgar when Sabrina was born, and while I imagine it was a hard time, I can tell he melted a few hearts as well.
Typically, I didn't take the camera along. I was more interested in adventures than documenting the adventures.
Anyway, with an afternoon with Grandma and Grandpa, we did an activity that I fondly remember from growing up. We visited the fish hatchery.
For those of you not from the northwest, this is a pretty typical day-activity for kids. When I was a kid, it was the old Vancouver Trout Hatchery on the old Evergreen Highway. Apparently, in the years since I was a kid, the hatchery closed, and then was bought by the city as an education center. Now, it's renamed the Columbia Springs Education Center and Hatchery.
With some sprucing up, and some very mid-90s environmentally-themed architecture and landscaping, it's still very much preserved as I remember it. One difference is that the old parking lot is now some weird interpretive plaza with inscriptions on the lifecycle of a salmon, so we had to walk farther to get to the ponds. We visited the hatchery ponds and looked at the fish. We fed tortilla chips to the ducks in the pond downstream from the hatchery. I didn't see any fish in the pond--they used to come up and nibble my toes when I dangled them in the water while feeding the fish, but it could be the wrong season.
There are more fences and barriers up, so Edgar couldn't go running on the catwalks that overhang the fish ponds, but as a parent, that's a bit scary anyway. I sure loved it as a kid, though. I'd run around and over each pond and see how big the little fish were in each pond. Usually they were different sizes, from tiny little things the size of a kid's pinky to 6-8 inch fish ready to go into the big river. I did a little bit of that today, and wasn't disappointed.
One of the old hatchery ponds has been converted to an interpretation of what the fish are like in the wild. Apparently, that's code for: These are grown-up fish as opposed to the babies in the other ponds. They were big lunkers, about the size of Edgar. The other cool thing is that there was a bucket of free fish food sitting next to the ponds. They asked that everyone take no more than a handful, but this was way better than feeding moldy bread to the fish.
Edgar loved throwing the feed in the big fish pond and watching those huge guys thrash around to get the little pellets. I loved throwing the feed in the little-fish pond and watch the water roil and seethe as thousands of fish battled over those pellets.
Anyway, Edgar had a fun time going to see some fish. I had a blast watching Edgar discover all of my favorite sights from when I was his age. His grandparents had a great time, too, even if grandpa won't admit it.
We drove home and went to upstairs-neighbor David's 7th birthday party. We got him scotch tape and pencils. He was pretty pleased. Tried to watch Despicable Me, with four 7-year-olds who had already seen the movie commenting on it throughout, while trying to keep Edgar and the older kids from hurting each other.
It's been a pretty hard week, but I think things are going to rule from now on.
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