Friday Outing

On Friday, I drove with the boys to meet a friend in Annapolis. She had recently moved to Delaware, so we just met in the middle for lunch. It was SO beautiful there this time of year, I love that little town! I wish I were a photographer so I just walk around and take pictures of quaint little towns ;-) We parked right by this cute little college campus, it looked like it was right out of a movie.

This is just one of the many trees we saw there, it was gorgeous! Seriously, this picture doesn't do it justice, the colors were so vivid! I'm not sure if I've ever said anything nice about the East Coast before on my blog. There aren't a ton of great things to say, but there are a small handful, so here goes: the trees here are out of this world! Seriously, there's nothing like them on the West Coast! I hate summer here because of the humidity, and the winter and spring are so cold and stormy that I don't like them either. But I do love the fall! The weather is pleasant for the most part, there are a lot of crisp, fall days (my favorite!) and the trees are gorgeous! So there, that's one thing I actually do like about the East Coast.

After a yummy lunch of crab cakes, my friend and I walked up and down the main street and window shopped. I also bought some fudge. And took a few pictures of the boys.


My friend is 38 weeks pregnant and she wasn't feeling well while we were walking, so she headed home early. I still had the entire afternoon open, so I stopped by Renee's new house on the way home. She lives in Maryland near her school, so it's about 45 minutes away from us and I've never made it to her house before. She baked a sweet potato for the boys to eat for dinner and made me an Oregon Chai latte (oh man, I can't wait for Christmas so I can get one every single day!!!). Then, all of a sudden, she turned to me and said, "Kimmy, I really want to take you guys to my lab so the boys can chase the robot around!" Renee's a research assistant to a professor and they build autonomous robots and flying mechanical insects (seriously! like right out of old-fashioned spy movies!). Definitely not something I hear everyday, but that's exactly what we ended up doing! Jack seemed a little unsure about a robot running around him and just kind of eyed it warily, but Cullen loved it! Of course he did, his favorite activity is chasing our cats around, why wouldn't he love chasing robots?

The goal is to eventually get the robot to be autonomous and see an obstacle and turn to avoid it without a human having to tell it to turn. It's not quite there yet, though, so Renee had to chase it around and make sure it didn't run into the boys. This was almost as funny as watching Cullen chase it! And, of course I was worried the whole time that the boys would slobber on it or pull out some wire and that we'd owe the University of Maryland a few million dollars, but thankfully, they didn't break it. Anyways, my camera died right when we got there, but I got a really short video just so you can see what the robot was like.



My best friend and I live in different universes now, she is in grad school studying aerospace and creating robots that think by themselves and I'm a stay-at-home mom. For some reason, she still likes me, though, and isn't completely bored with me yet. I think my super cute and hilarious kids may have something to do with it! Regardless, thanks for taking us Renee, it was really fun!