Posts filed under 'Outings'
Well… looks like it’s been a while since our last update here… so guess I better do one.
First off, I have added a full fledged photo gallery to the site. It isn’t integrated into this blog thingy, but will allow people to get the full sized images and varying sizes on the way up to that. Great for if you want versions to print out, or just look at. So will strive to put up a decent sampling of Dallin and other Barker related pictures there fairly often.
Dallin is doing great. His jaundice is long since past with no ill effects. He had a bit of a rash, but that seems to be under control as well. Kaylene has been recovering well, and just had her 6 week checkup where the doctor said, no more monkeys jumping… no wait… said she was doing great and gave her a clean bill of health.
He really loves getting baths, except for getting out of them when it’s a tad cold on his wet skin. He’s just starting to fall asleep without us rocking him and stuff… so kinda on his own. This is very nice for all of us. He’s only getting up 2-3 times a night, and was even once last night… so as far as we know (since we’re new to this) he’s being pretty nice to us.
We are trying to introduce him to a wide array of music, and we think he likes Weird Al the best so far 
Recent Events
07/29 - We took him on his first “outing” to the Utah County fair. He just slept through it as we pushed him around in his stroller, which was a good thing cause it sure was boring.
08/08 - We had his blessing. It was great to have family and friends from the area come share in our special day… we wish all those who were not local would have been able to attend… but what can you do.
08/13 - We had a company party, and so we got to show him off to my coworkers. As usual, everyone was amazed with all his hair and naturally how cute he was.
08/20 - We went and did the alpine loop, and visited cascade springs. It was our first visit “up” into the mountains since we’ve come back and man was it beautiful. It was great to have the amazingly clean air filled with the smell of pine. I haven’t gone through the 100+ pictures I took yet, so will put up some of my favs sometime soon.
Think that about gets us up to date… nothing too special. There are about 10 or so new pics in the gallery, so enjoy. These are brought to you by Kaylene who had a photo shoot with the little guy today… got some great shots. I will try and post a few other misc shots of him from weeks past sometime soon.
Till then!
August 26th, 2005
After much back and forth, we decided to head off to Colorado for Thanksgiving to visit the Whiteheads (Kaylene’s older sister’s family). After weeks of lovely fall weather during November (2 weekends ago it was like 70 degrees), it finally decided to snow on us the morning of our heading out (25 meg movie of snows). This wasn’t any ole snow storm, this one dumped 6-8 inches in Lees Summit and similar amounts around the rest of the metro. We were really worried about the roads, but luckily the roads were just a bit wet, and not iced up. Although there was a car off the road at just about every offramp as we left the city.
The snow only stuck around for 40 miles or so out of the metro and the rest was smooth sailing. Just the joyous trek across the baren wasteland that is Kansas ahead of us.
We arrived, and are enjoying the company of family. I brought my computer with me so that I could LAN with the boys. Trying not to whoop on em too much, but when you have such mad 1337 skillz, how can you not?
Turkey day itself was fun. We started off with a turkey bowl.. for which I continue to pay the price. Playing football once a year causes a fair amount of pain on the muscles and joints. My team won both games, and Ben’s lost both (hmmmm). Got a touchdown, a few sacks, a few hurries, and an interception or two. Nice of them to let me play and abuse myself at their expense. I did jam my thumb pretty good on Ben’s elbow trying to block a pass he was getting, but it’s not really a Turkey Bowl if I don’t come home with some kind of injury.
Back home for some good eats. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy… all the goods made by our beloved wives who slaved and toiled over a hot oven while we went out and caused ourselves great pain. Maybe we’ll trade next year 
More fraggin with the guys, a nap, and then a game of Cranium where it was fun watching everyone get up and have to do charade type things.
Today (day after Thanksgiving) we had a good breakfast and the women folk when shopping. Men stayed home and… well…. fragged. Went and did some ice skating (man they keep that place cold) and some laser tag.
Back home where I made some Zuka Juices (fruit smoothie place I used to work and still remember the recipies for) and now we are waiting for pie.
It’s been a lot of fun hanging out here with the family as we get to do so so rarely. Slight chance these guys will move out our way if the company they are in talks with will just up their offer (lamers). If so it will be great to have some family so close by, if not… then it means they got a better offer elsewhere, and I guess we’ll have to support them in that too.
Anyway… enough typing this novel, but I have to make up for all the lack of postings. Then again, we just have no life and so this is what you get. Now… where’s that pie???
November 26th, 2004
Finally got out to “Uncle Ted’s” for a camout/paintball trip after it was delayed last month due to weather (and vehicle issues). I checked the weather a mere hours before going up and it said nothing about rain… so I wasn’t prepared for it when it did rain. From 10pm to 10am straight… lightning, thunder, and lotsa wata. The tent with the YM in it had a few inches of standing water… it was pretty sad.
Got to play 4 rounds of paintball. I obliterated the competition. First game I was paired off with Jordan Whitney, and he did pretty good for a 10 yr old on his first outing. Got himself a kill
Got 2 kills, then 2 kills, then 3 kills then, 3 kills… now that I look at that, I was kinda hogging all the kills. Gotta keep those YM humble Jeff got the only shot on me while we were playing Gettysburg (load one ball at a time). But we were playing that you had to get hit twice to go out, and so I got him back for that. Still have the bruise 3 days later.
I stupidly forgot my camera, but stole the above from Jeff… thanks Jeff!
September 21st, 2004
We had heard that Weird Al was coming to town and playing at the Starlight Theater several weeks ago and so we went to see if they had any good tickets left… naturally they didn’t. So we decided to try and win some tickets and then maybe if worse came to worse, we’d buy some cheap nosebleed seats. Well the feeble attempts at winning tickets were not helped by my owning an iPod which I listen to on the way to and from work, and for some odd reason no one was giving away tickets during my playlists.
So two days before the concert I decided to see what tickets were left, and for some odd reason some prime tickets were available. So I went ahead and grabbed them.
Now let me take a moment to express my pure distain for buying tickets from ticketmaster (they don’t deserve a link). The tickets were $38 a seat (which isn’t my issue), but there was an $8 “convenience” charge for EACH TICKET!!! What the heck is that all about? We called the place they were playing to see if we could come down and buy the tickets there, but they said the same $8 per ticket charge would apply. So if we didn’t use the “convenient” way to buy the tickets we still had to pay the convenience fee. What a joke! Then to add insult to injury, there was another $4.something processing charge. If you are going to give me this rediculous charge at least do me the decency of masking it, and just make the tickets be $46 each. Highway robbery at it’s finest…
Anyway… we got to the theater an hour early or so and it was a PERFECT evening. 72 or so degrees and just a slight breeze. Our tickets were dead center and 20 or so rows back… pretty sweet. Some comedian comes out and makes fun of various things around KC (the plaza, the triangle, Sprint, etc) and actually made me chuckle a few times (I don’t laugh easily).
Finally the show starts. This was only my 3-4 “professional” concert, and my first time seing Weird Al. He put on a great show, and was easily my favorite out of the shows I had seen. When I started thinking about it, I know more of his songs then probably any other artist. I guess this was an extension of his Poodle Hat tour so he played several songs from that album. Several of them I didn’t know either the parody or the original song… guess I’m getting out of touch.
But he did do some classics… All about the Pentiums, Horoscope (which I proudly know the long fast part in the middle), The Saga Begins (Star Wars I one), Yoda, Amish Paradise, I was Only Kidding, a compelation set or two, and several others I of course forgot.
We had a total blast and are going to make sure to get tickets early next time he comes. A highly recommended show from a great artist.
August 14th, 2004
I’ve been wanting to go to the zoo for several years now (starting back in Utah) and just never got around to it. So Friday night I decided that we’d go to the Kansas City Zoo on Saturday morning… Weather was supposed to be in the upper 60’s and overcast the whole day so figured it would probably be one of the last nice weekends before the summer heat came.
The zoo is layed out kind of in continents. You have baboons in one area, chimps in another gorillas in another, so it’s kinda weird not being able to see all the similar kind of animals at once, but also kinda interesting to see what is from where.
Overall it was a fun day, with a LOT of walking. I won’t go over each little detail but there were two that were really cool. First was a bird show that we went to watch while waiting for the second thing. I know, bird show shmird show… which was kinda what I thought going into it. During the show they asked for two adult volunteers and if they had a camera all the better. So I held mine up and got picked. We were told to go sit on these chairs. Then they bring out this big ole owl that they are going to send to a stand that is inches behind us. Luckily my camera has video, so I switched to that thinking it would be cooler to get the full action instead of one shot at a picture that I would probably miss. I wasn’t mistaken… this huge owl comes flying at us and lands basically on our heads. Having it come right at the camera is pretty sweet. Then they sent it off to another stand across the crowd, and then back to us, before going back up to the stage.
The second part was the best. They have a cage full of lorikeets that they allow 25 or so people into feed every hour. They give you a small plastic container of nectar (which is the majority of their diet) and you just hold it in your hand. You walk into the cage and they just come right up and land on your hand to start eating. There were some people that had 4 on each arm, Kaylene (my wife) had one keep landing on her head. The most I got was 3 on one arm, but had several on my shoulders a couple times. We hung out for like 20 minutes just having these beautiful rainbow colored birds flying all around and landing on us just to check things out. It was such a cool experience and worth the price of admission itself. It may be a worth a return trip to go do that again when it’s not overcast just to get some better shots with the brighter light.
The rest of the zoo was pretty cool, got some other cool shots. A large part of me wanting to go was to get some fun pictures and to play with the camera which I seem to be wanting to do more and more lately. They had a number of walk through bird aviaries which was nice to be able to get the pics without glass or wire between us. The kangaroos are just out in a field where they could walk up to you if they wanted (but naturally don’t).
Several times we had the whole “is a zoo cruel?” discussion as we would run into a particularly pathetic looking animal in a bland cage. It seems the “big ticket” animals get it pretty good, and a few others just get the shaft. We still don’t know how we feel about it, but it was just sad to see a few animals in a bad setting. While others seemed to be just fine, and you never know the back story of how maybe these particular specimens would have already died were it not for human intervention.
Anyway… good times were had and to anyone in the area, I highly recommend a visit for the lorikeet feeding alone. It was a blast and we will enjoy the pictures and video for some time.
June 20th, 2004