Eggscellent Day For Dying Eggs
Category Archives: Melanie
Spring Is Officially Here
I don’t know the actual date that it was official, but in my world it’s not official until professional baseball is underway and today we took the boys to see the Rangers’ AA team take on their AAA team. The weather was beautiful, the kids were having fun, and baseball was being played. My heart is officially full and the winter doldrums are shaken away.
My Top Three
From Cutler’s birthday party last Saturday I captured this great picture of my top three favorite people.
The Rib Brothers
Today we took the grandparents to try out our new favorite BBQ joint, Lockharts, and was terribly surprised first by Mason feeling a loose tooth after a bite of rib and then proceeding to reach in with his fingers and tear it out. The next surprise was Cutler demolishing the ribs. As he is almost exclusively a chicken guy, we were extremely shocked when he said he wanted a rib and then even more shocked when he went after a second one.
Best Lunch Date
Dinner Photo Bombs
While on the Disney cruise my mom thought it was a good idea to take photos of our food. She said something along the lines of dad would like to see them. I didn’t really see any value in doing so and so after a few times of going along with it I decided it was necessary to photo bomb a couple when she gave me her camera to photograph my food. Melanie caught me and surprisingly decided to follow suit rather than scald me for my childish behavior. Fortunately mom never noticed and I kept waiting and waiting to hear from her after she got home and showed dad the photos. Sadly that moment never came and so either they didn’t want to indulge my sense of humor or their eye sight is going with their age. Below are a sample of the photos, I’ll let you figure out which ones are photo bombed. Sadly I still sit here and chuckle as I look at the photos.
Atlantis Dolphin Adventure
As I am struggling to find anything to post, validated by the last several days’ weak attempts to continue to my daily post streak, I figured it is time to return to our Disney cruise from this past December. One of our ports of call was Nassau and we chose to visit Atlantis so that we could play with the dolphins. Our first dolphin was pregnant and overly moody, so they had to bring in a second dolphin half way through. I wish I could tell you which one is which in the pictures, but you know what they say about dolphins… Ok, they don’t really say that, but it’s a good excuse for me to not name them. I do believe the stand in was a young male, maybe two years old, named Menus. No idea what the old bat’s name was. Alas, it was a great experience and one that I would probably rate near the top of the trip.
Losing My Mind
There is pretty much nothing exciting to write about and so I was looking through old videos and photos that I hadn’t shared when I ran across our skiing videos of the boys. I thought that I had shared them while we were in Winter Park last March, but when I searched through the site I couldn’t find them. So, here are a few videos of the boys and their progression throughout the three days that we skied.
The first half of this video is from during his first lesson on the first day. The second half is from after his lesson when I took him up on the bunny hill that I stuck to the majority of that day. He had pretty much mastered going straight downhill.
This next video is from the third day after just a day and a half of lessons. That day Melanie and I took him up a couple of lifts. He eventually skied down a blue with Melanie while I took a nice and relaxing trip down a green. Was pretty amazed at how quickly and easily he picked it up. Thinking the skating knowledge definitely helps.
Here is Cutler’s first day of lessons showing he can also go straight downhill.
Here is Cutler getting one on one lessons during his second day as all of the other kids his age lost interest and headed inside for cocoa and movies.
And finally, here is Cutler on the third and final day where I was continuing my easier slopes and was fortunate enough to run across Cutler taking a run down the hill with his instructor and fellow student. The improvement is amazing after only three days.
Watching all of these over again has now made me want to get to the slopes again. Definitely one of my favorite vacations taken to date.
Date Night – Dubai Style
As today is Valentine’s Day, I feel it is appropriate to share my valentine’s last date night, which also happened to be in Dubai. I have shared a few pictures of the “seven star” hotel, Berj Al Arab that was just off the coast from our hotel, including a failed attempt at a joke where it was my dinner date for a night when Melanie had a work function. https://teamfricke.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/my-dinner-companion/ I had heard marvelous things about the lobby of this hotel and the only way to visit it was to have tea, dinner, or drinks at their 27th floor bar. Since I don’t drink tea, but I do like alcohol we chose to head up to the 27th floor for a lovely date night.
The kicker for having drinks is that you have a minimum per person set for what you have to spend that equates to around $200 total for the both us so we were expecting some really marvelous and fancy drinks as well as we fully expected to walk out of there feeling really good. What we quickly discovered when we got there was that the minimum could be hit pretty easily given their pride in the drinks. For example, a glass of champagne cost around $40 and an import beer was $30. Fortunately our love has no cost so we marveled and chuckled at the prices and had a grand time. We were even fortunately enough to get a table facing out to the ocean with a view to the downtown. Unfortunately the inside is lit in such a way, think disco, that you really can’t get much of a view but it was still great to kick back and relax with the love of my life for an extravagant date night. Something we seldom get here in Dallas.
As for the lobby that I had heard so much about, it was a bit underwhelming. They do have two interesting fountains and some nice tile work, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by the beauty, aside from the one that was on my arm that evening. Below are some pictures from our evening as well as a video of each fountain, including one that shows how high the fountain shoots up into the lobby.
Editor’s Note: The extra cheese in this email is prodded by my love for my wife and because it is Valentine’s Day. I shall resort to less sap starting tomorrow.
A Future Politician
Melanie just received this letter from Mason at his Valentine’s party at school. He is so full of love he has enough for the both of us. So glad Melanie was home from her trip and able to attend. The boys missed her terribly.
Team Fricke 