This weekend we celebrated Rhianna’s 4th birthday. Her birthday isn’t actually until later this week, but this weekend was more convenient for everyone.  We rented out a local Pizza Hut and invited some friends over, and had a great time.  Later than evening we went to the local Mexican restaurant and they let Rhi wear the big Sombrero while they sang Feliz Cumpleaños .  Seems this was the Barbie & Play-doh birthday as she racked up on both of them.  She had fun and we’re still (3 days later) opening presents that she hasn’t gotten to yet.  Laura & I got her a Trampoline for her birthday which seems to have been a big hit.  She calls it her own personal Bouncy House and makes it a point to go jump every day.

Trampolines have advanced alot since I was a kid.  This one has several improvements over the one my sisters and I destroyed:

  • Springs connect to both the top & bottom of the outer frame, rather than just the top.
  • The outer pad connects not only to the frame, but to the pad as well, eliminating those "accidents" where someone’s foot slips under the pad and through the springs.
  • Outer Net – This one is a huge difference.  A giant 8-foot tall net surrounds the entire thing, stiched to the outer pad.

Alltogether it’s a much safer "toy" than when I was a kid, and Rhi sure seems to be enjoying it. 

Rhi also did one thing this weekend that really made me proud.  While I was at DOECGF in Colorado, NCAR SCD gave away these neat little pens with Blue LED’s on them, and a button to toggle between blinking, solid on, and off.  The pens don’t write for crap, but they look neat and therefore I grabbed a few and gave them to Rhi to play with.  She’s fascinated by the blinking and continues to play with them.  Anyway, she had one in the car playing with it as we drove back to the house and she said "I broke it, it doesn’t work anymore."  I took a look at it and sure enough the LED wouldn’t come on anymore.  I thought it odd that the battery would die so suddenly on something so small as a LED, so I took a closer look.  After some inspection I found that one of the batteries (it used 3 small button-cells) was in backward. Rhianna had disassembled the pen and in putting it back together accidentally got one of the batteries in backwards.  A little engineer in training.
[tag:birthday][tag:family]

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