Remember our Busytown game?

One of your favorite games to play was Busytown. It was a neat game, based on the Richard Scarry characters and books, in which we actually "cooperated" help one another.

First we had to put the board together! It was very long, stretching six or seven feet across the floor.

Then we'd spin to see if we drew a card or if the pigs got to eat picnic food. If we drew a card, we had to find the object on the card and place a "magnifying glass" over it; when the hourglass timer was done, we'd stop and count how many of the objets we found - and that's how many spaces we got to move.

The object of the games was to reach the picnic blanket before the pigs ate up all of the food!

Your name/pic is in the newspaper!

Your picture and name appeared in Wednesday's (May 15's) St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper! The newspaper ran article about my recent hiking book, "Headin' to the Cabin."

The article included a picture of us when you were just two years old when we were hiking Red Rock Canyon State Park in California. It also describes how to came to write my hiking books because of our experiences together and notes that the book is dedicated to you.

In just a couple of weeks, I'll be reading a hiking essay, which includes you in it, at three bookstores. The stores are in Stillwater, Minn., and Hudson and Menomonie, Wis.

I've saved a copy of the newspaper article for you to have one day. But the article also appears online.

Our hike along Monte Cristo Creek

Four years ago today we went hiking in the mountainous Angeles National Forest on the Monte Cristo Creek Trail. Temperatures were in the high 90s in the desert where we lived, so I thought the mountains would be a bit cooler.

It was cooler, and we were helped in that the trail paralleled a creek. Still, the terrain was at a low enough elevation that it still was desert, so we didn't walk too far before having to turn around.

We parked at a campground near the trailhead, and I remember that when you saw the ash from a campfire ring you got all excited and wanted to play in it (see picture at left). I stopped you just in time by giving you a snack of dehydrated ice cream!

Unfortuantely, the area we hiked no longer looks like it did then. Later that summer, a horrible forest fire swept through the area and burned up the campground and surrounding woodlands.

Here's a whole bunch of pictures from our expedition!

Attending Fire Appreciation Day 2011

Trying on the U.S. Forest Service's
firefighting gear.

Two years ago today, we went to Los Angeles County Fire Appreciation Day in Lancaster, Calif.! Though a little hot, all of the great fire, police and ambulances vehicles on display there were worth it!

We got to go inside a real station and see what it looked like. After that, we made the rounds, stopping at (and climbing into!) all of the great fire trucks, ambulances and police cars that we could.

There also were demonstrations of firemen putting out fires and "rescuing" people, but usually they were very crowded, and with the heat we decided to skip them. I think you got a new fire hat there, too, if I recall.

Here's a whole bunch of pictures from our adventure!

Remember your Scooby Doo game?

One of your favorite games to play as a preschooler was the Scooby Doo haunted house game. We bought it at Toys 'R Us.

We could be any of the Scooby Doo gang, and a spinner would tell us what to do. Sometimes when we landed on a square, we had to push down a ghost, and that would set in motion all of these traps. If our character got caught in a trap, we had to start over!

The game was really hard to keep together! It was made of cardboard and plastic, and when pressing the ghost, sometimes some of the traps on the board came apart! Still, we had lots of fun with it.

At above right is a picture of what the game looked like.

Remember your Batcave playset?

One of your favorite toys to play with when a prechooler was the Batcave by Imaginext.

The playset unfolded, had two levels (four if you count the floor and the cave roof), boasted an elevator, a chamber that could be closed, and several entry points. We bought a bunch of accessories with it, including the Batcopter and some of the Batman villains.

We used the playset for lots of fun besides playing Batman. I remember on many occasions it became part of the rebel base for our Star Wars character or somehow was incorporated into other storylines using our other action figures.

Above left is a picture of the Batcave playset we had!

My email to you for May 11, 2013

Here is my email sent to you on May 11, 2013, in case you did not receive it:

Dear Kieran,

How are you doing? I’m doing fine. I had so much fun with you yesterday! I can’t wait to see you again in just two weeks on the afternoon of May 24.

Thank you for introducing your stuffie penguins to me! They look like they’ve received lots of love and affection from you, and that’s cool. I remember how much you enjoyed the penguin cartoons that you would watch on the DVD player when we made those long drives from Palmdale to San Diego. It was always a great pleasure of mine to hear you laugh and giggle from the back seat!

Putting together the “Star Trek” legos was a lot of fun, too. You did a great job of following the instructions. We still have the Klingon ship and the transporter to build. There were a couple of other “Star Trek” lego models at the toy store, so I shall pick them up for the next time we get together. I think there were some other characters we can get as well. They also had Lone Ranger Lego sets, so maybe we’ll do those when we run out of “Star Trek” kits!

Is your wooden car model holding up well? If the wheels ever fall off, you just have to use some wood glue to put them back together. You did a very nice job of painting the car!

You were very good at playing War! I shall have to find some additional games for us to play. Have you ever heard of the game “Operation”? You have to pick up little pieces out of a “body,” but if you touch the body it buzzes and you don’t get the piece. Whoever has the most pieces at the end wins. I bet you would like that game. Speaking of the body, the next time we get together I also will bring the human body book with the skeleton that we can put together.

I am glad you enjoyed the book about Egypt, too. It had a lot of interesting pictures, didn’t it? One of your favorite places to go when I lived in Encinitas/San Diego was the Museum of Man, which had a whole section of Egyptian mummies and sarcophaguses as well as a great children’s area for learning about Egypt. We’d take the trolley there, and on the walk over from the trolley stop would look around in the sculpture garden and sometimes have lunch in the open air cafeteria next to it. Their gift store was a lot of fun, too – if I remember correctly, we got you some Egypt and Darwin toys, there. Anyway, the museum was one of your favorite places, and you’d even beg me to go there!

We had so much fun that we didn’t have time to do everything, like play with the Hot Wheels car, the map puzzle, or the sticker play book. Maybe next time!

Well, that is all for now. I love you and miss you like crazy. I’ll write again next Saturday and will see you on May 24!

Love,

Dad