Today, Princess K celebrated her 3rd birthday.

To celebrate her birthday, we took a trip over to PennyPickles Museum this morning and had a lot of fun.  Penny Pickel is a famous inventor in the area and his house is open to the public.  His house has lots of wacky inventions for the kids to play with and almost everything is interactive in the place.  Each room is themed to a room in a regular house, so there's a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, basement, library, music room, and more. 

 Each room in the museum has many different Rube Goldberg type of inventions with several different contraptions put together to make something...say a record player and a sewing machine together in the music room.

I've been wanting to go to this place for a few years and just never found the time to go.  Today I figured it was Princess K's 3 year birthday and I figured "why not".  I wasn't sure if she would like it at all, but knew that Super Michael would have a blast there.  He's going through a "build inventions" phase, so this place was right up his alley.  As it turns out, Princess K had a lot of fun and neither one of the kids wanted to leave.

As is usual for trips like this, we just HAD to stop in the trinket shop afterwords and look for goodies for the kids to take home to remember the place by.  Princess K choose some sort of super bubbles that you can blow and stack on top of each other.  Super Michael, true to form, took FOREVER to decide on what he wanted and ended up choosing a dog bowl with a dog toy in the end.  He's going through this phase where he REALLY wants a dog, so he has several toy dogs that he treats like real dogs to prove to his parents that he can take care of a real dog.  So, he bought these dog goodies for "Martha" and "Bolt", his two pet dogs.

So, after our trip, we decided we really liked the museum and that we need to bring Super Mommy with us on our next trip.

Our normal Saturday routine is to go to the park in the morning, and then go to the library and check out some books and kids music.  However, very unlike Southern California, it actually decided to RAIN today, so we opted for the museum today.  We don't see much of this rain stuff around these parts, so of course everybody freaks out and traffic grinds to a halt.  "Oh my God, what is this STUFF coming from the sky?  Is the world ending?  Is the SKY falling?"  One year, it got so cold here that actual SNOW fell from the sky.  Fell from the sky, but didn't' stay on the ground AT ALL.  It was still enough to snarl traffic for awhile and everybody had to pull over on the FREEWAY to decide what needed to happen. 

Which brings me to another side topic:  We took a trip to Oregon this year and saw our first snow actually FALL from the sky.  As native So Cal residents, we don't get much of a chance to actually see REAL snow, so this was an interesting adventure for us.  We HAVE gone to the local mountains on occasion and PLAYED in the snow, but we don't actually ever really see snow fall.  So, my boss picks us up at the airport and it starts snowing on our way up to the mountains.  Super Mommy and I look at each other in the back seat with a collective "oh crap, now what do we do?" look on our faces while boss man continues to drive down the freeway at full speed.  We look at each other yet again and ask each other, "Are we supposed to still be driving, aren't you supposed to do something, or flash some sort of gang sign out the window or something?".  Apparently not, as everybody around us continued on their merry way while the very SKY WAS FALLING.  It was absolutely insane.

On the way, we stopped by the grocery store to pick up, well, groceries, and it was still snowing.  Princess K came into the store with me and she, like myself, had no clue how to work with this stuff falling from the sky.  Are you supposed to actually walk through it?  Well, we managed pretty good and didn't embarrass ourselves by falling on our asses, so that's something at least.

So, long story short, we survived the snow trip, had a great time, didn't die from the cold.  Turns out, I didn't ACTUALLY have to grow my beard out to survive in the bitter cold after all, but I think I'll keep it for awhile longer just in case the temperature goes below 70 here again.

Where was I again?  Oh yeah, Princess K turned 3 today!  Happy Birthday Baby Girl!  You are turning into a really big girl, and both Super Mommy and I are really proud of you.  We're SUPER glad that you aren't "officially" a terrible 2 anymore, and hope that this carries over into real life today even though you had that temper tantrum this morning because I wouldn't let you dump your new bubbles all over Super Mega Dad's very messy car.  Sorry, I just wasn't in the mood to clean up a really big sticky mess, even though you really like that kind of thing.