The boyz of summer

What we've been doing recently:

 With a school friend, on the way home from the playground

 Outing to Red Hook (Brooklyn)

 Red. Hook. Get it?

 Newfound skillz

A short history of the world

Over breakfast, in a Power Rangers outfit, of course.

Sistah trip part deux: Gallup!

So Gallup, New Mexico, is a totally fascinating place. Not big-city fascinating, with Broadway shows and crowds of people, but its own special kind of fascinating. I took a LOT of pictures. And I still didn't quite capture the whole place, since it's all about wide open spaces. Here are a few, though. 

If you want to know what downtown Gallup looks like, it looks a bit like this:

Or, well, maybe more like this, to be honest:

Here's the main strip on route 66:

The town's oldest pawn shop, filled with 99 years of Native American (Zuni and Navajo)  craftsmanship.  Kind of sad, really, knowing that all that amazing beadwork, silver jewelry, etc, had to be pawned for cash. 

The inside of the pawn shop

Then there were these awesome murals:

And a baby:

And some of this:

And lots of this: 

Check out how steep some of the hills in town are!

Then we went to the flea market, where it was way too hot for the baby:

But the other kids got to ride ponies:

And there were more dramatic clouds:

While we were in town, they had the Gallup family triathlon. The kids all competed in various events:

This is what the track looked like where they ran the running part.

It was "monsoon" season there, so every afternoon the clouds would gather and rain somewhere. Not usually where we were, but that didn't stop the cousins from making up elaborate stories about what the dark, ominous clouds meant...

...while the baby tried to eat stuff he found on the ground.

We also went on a hike to find some tadpoles. It looked like this:

At one point, my sister told me there were bears out where we were. I didn't really believe her, until I suddenly realized, wait, she's not lying. There are bears out here. We're in the middle of nowhere, that's where bears live. I had a little freak-out, but managed to soldier on.

Cousin A is not phased by the thought of bears.

But she does like babies.

So, then we saw more of this:

We were going to hike up this:

But we only got to the foot of it:

before it started POURING, so we ran back to civilization and refueled:

A Dairy Queen on Route 66

Get your licks on Route 66

And here's that baby again: