The Rainforest Cafe

It is that time of year- Rudy's anniversary. It's a weekend earlier than we usually celebrate it, but next weekend is looking really busy, and today started as a dreary, rainy day, so we headed into AC by train.

Jada and Niko enjoyed the train ride.

Once we were seated (by the gorillas upon request by Rudy), the animals immediate started making noise. Oh, and so did the ones in the restaurant. ;)

Lunch was delicious and then we had the ultimate dessert- VOLCANO! As you can see by the kids' expressions, they were all impressed.

The sun was coming out as we left the restaurant, so we walked down the boardwalk, viewed a Korean War Memorial and found an art park just a block off the boardwalk.

There were five different art areas with art exhibits that were able to be climbed on, touched, played with. including neon words along the grass and a shipwreck.

Some military planes flew by.

The boys climbed up to the ship's mast.

Art depicting how people and nature are connected.

It ended up being a beautiful day to walk around Atlantic City and start celebrating our 7 years with our boy!

Rudy's 6th Anniversary

Today is the 6th anniversary of the day Paul and I arrived in Guatemala to bring Rudy home. Yesterday we took our annual trip by train to the Rainforest Cafe in Atlantic City to celebrate. We got a late start but arrived in time at the train station- only to find that the train was running late- and increasing got later (eventually about 45 minutes). We knew getting home was going to be tight because of the train schedule and considered just driving in, but Rudy protested and wanted to take the train. So Paul took the car and drove into AC to meet us, while Rudy, N and I waited for the train. And waited and waited.
It finally arrived and two boys were very excited. We believe this was N's first train ride and as we arrived in AC, he started asking for "more choo choo", so I guess we'll be doing it again soon.

Because we were later than expected, we knew we'd have to wait for dinner, so we put our name in and then walked over to The Pier for a snack. We came back with about 20 minutes to kill before being seated. N was not happy with the alligator in the front that periodically moved.

We finally were seated and got to be right next to one of the elephants.

At first N wasn't too happy with that but we gradually talked him down from it.

What better way to pass time than to set up your army men on the rocks!

As we finished dinner ChaCha entered the restaurant. N immediately spotted him and started yelling, "Hi Frog." So we went over to see him. As you can see, he was so excited.

As we walked back to the car (note to self and anyone else local: great, cheap parking on Mississippi Avenue behind Pizza di Roma), the light show on Boardwalk Hall was going. The boys were instantly mesmerized so we stopped. This was a different show than Paul and I saw when we went in for our anniversary; we liked it much better.

The boys were all amazed.

Another great celebration of a very special boy.