Gilmore Car Museum

 Both Brian and I had a day off of work earlier this week, so we decided to do something as a family.  We let Tam decide...did he want to see cars (Gilmore Car Museum) or did he want to see planes (Air Zoo)?  After some debate, Tam picked the car museum, which was about an hour drive south of our home.

Apparently, this is one of the best car museums in the country with models ranging from the first cars up to 2006 race cars.  I don't know how many cars they had in total, but it seemed like a couple hundred and all are housed in 8 or 9 big barn / buildings.  (We didn't see them all because it got close to nap time).

Tam insisted on bringing his large plastic McQueen race car, just in case he saw McQueen at the museum.  

Once at the museum, we were all impressed.  I liked that it was huge and had lots of open space around the cars for maneuvering the stroller and checking things out.  Tam had fun running around and zooming McQueen around the cars.  He did a great job at not touching any of them and only looking with his eyes.  Jude was just happy to be out with all of us and to practice walking.

Jude rode in the stroller for part of the time...
pushed the stroller for some of the time...
crawled a small bit...
was carried on shoulders for moments...
and tottled around holding a hand for some of the time.

 Wow....dashboards of cars have changed pretty drastically in the past century!
Tam noted that there were no seat belts in the cars.
All the cars had placards beside them that were really informative and well written.  Both Brian and I appreciated learning knew information about the different models.  I noticed that the top of the line cars from the turn of the century are still out of my price-range today! ($6,000!) 

Here's Jude enjoying a breeze blowing into one of the barns...
 just like if he was riding in one of these open carriage cars :-) 

 I think Tam's favorite car wasn't a car, but a double decker bus.  This one isn't restored yet, so we were allowed to clambour on board and up to the top.  Tam loved checking out the world from all of the different windows.

 

There were more modern cars too...a whole room devoted to the '50s, '60s, and '70s.   Loved looking at all the different grills and fins.

There were also a handful of really fast cars: race cars, rocket cars, and stock cars.  Jude liked this big open room to crawl around in.  Tam immediately found buttons to push...which changed the projection screen to show different pit crews.  One of the shorts was a bit from the Cars Movie...complete with ...yep, McQueen!  Other buttons he found showed off the different engine sounds. (noisy buttons he liked to push quite a bit.)

We saw maybe 2/3rds of the grounds, ate lunch at their diner, went up in the double decker bus again, and headed home.  I know that my knowledge of cars has gone up exponential since Tam's birth, and this museum helped further it even more.  Yep, a very successful excursion that we all enjoyed :-)

A mom's 6th sense

The past few nights I haven't been able to sleep at night.  I would just toss and turn in bed until the wee hours of the morning.  I had even tried reading in the spare room until I nod off on my book.  This, of course, made me ornery.  The poor kids had to put up with me snapping at them for silly things.  I knew it was from lack of sleep, but I just couldn't seem to drift off at night.

Well, things changed last night.

After, I put Jude to bed, I set Tam up on the computer with a game while I went down to the basement to start a load of laundry.  On the way down the stairs, I smelt something odd, like burnt stuff.  WTF?  I put the clothes in the machine, started it up, and went on to investigate the smell.

My nose led me to the main basement light switch at the top of the stairs.   There was definitely a burning smell emanating.  Okay...this isn't good.

I touch the switch to turn off the light and and, wowie, was it HOT.  And the plate, and the wall around the switch was hot, too.  Okay...no this really isn't good.  I first think to pop off the switch plate and investigate.  My second thought was to grab the fire extinguisher because I had visions of the switch plate coming off and the wall igniting into flames. I did neither of these things.

I googled "Hot light switch plate."
Thank God for the Internet and Google. 
Within moments, I had a plan, was pretty sure the house wasn't going to burn down, and nearly positive it could be fixed by my handy husband.

What did I do?  Duh...I flipped the breaker for that switch (and the kitchen) to kill the electricity for the night and left it alone. When Brian got home from work, I informed him of the situation and he replaced the switch the next day.

Here's the troublesome switch.  You can see the burnt plastic area at the top of white flip part.

So how does this link to me not sleeping?  Well, when I did sleep the past few days, I dreamt several times of fires...both forest fires, fires next door so we had to evacuate the house, and fires in our own house.  It made me think of what I would grab if I only had minutes to get out of the house.  Now that the switch has been replaced, no burning dreams last night and I slept so well!  I like to think that I somehow smelt the smoldering earlier in the week when it was first starting and my subconscious was trying to inform me of the danger. 

Cool.
Go mom sense.

Tam and Mama post

Tam is helping with this post...the following are his thoughts on random letters and spelling his name...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzxxxffffgggghhhh
tttttttttttttaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Maybe some numbers?

zzzzzzzzzzzz333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
llllllllllllllllllllll
llllllllllll
lllllllll
l
llllll
lll
ll
ll
l
l
tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

And the shift key...
TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTttttttttttttttttttttttttttTtTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

Can you tell what is the favorite letter currently?
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
44444444444444444444444444444444
4555
ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc
ccccccccccccccccc

first steps on his own

Jude just repeatedly took his first UNASSITED steps!

Yep, he toddle from me to Brian (about 3 steps) all on his own.  Man-oh-man the huge ear to ear grin on his face was awesome.  He went back and forth between us and to Tam about six times before giving up and crawling again.

What a huge step in our little man's life.
Perhaps we can catch it on video soon.