Special Olympics

For those of you out of the loop, the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter games came to Idaho! Most everything was held in Boise, except for an event in McCall, and one in Sun Valley. One of the festivities held was called the Young Athletes Program. It consisted of different activities for special needs children from around the valley, who were to young to be involved in the special Olympics as an athlete. You had to be invited to attend, and the place was very heavily secured. Luckily, my mom's class (She teaches special education at Liberty Elementary) was invited to attend and she scored my sister and I some passes. My older sister has a special needs daughter, so it was fun for her to be able to come. This is Lindsey and Natalie, doing some of the events. Nat had the news cameras on her the entire time:) She loved it though. The faces of the kids were priceless, they were so excited when they would finish one of the events. Needless to say the place was non-stop high fives and hugs.


Some of the celebrities that attended the games were Johnny Knoxsville, Schwarzenegger, and Sarah Palin. None of these celebs came to the young athletes games, but guess who did.....?



The guy from Kyle XY!! They didn't announce him, he was just kind of there. It took a while of starring at him before I realized who it was..I knew I'd seen him somewhere. It was hilarious to watch all the teachers and aids drag their special needs kids to get a picture with him, because they didn't know nor care who he was. All they cared about was the giant Coca Cola polar bear.
It was funny because I could stand by, and chat with Kyle XY the whole time...no security or anything, but I wasn't allowed to be near the giant polar bear, only kids from the young athletes were allowed to see bear. I had to stay behind the barricade. So this was the best shot I could get of the giant bear.

We love Chuckie Cheese!

Just wheeling around

Spencer loves visiting dad for lunch.....actually it's probably just the wheelchair!
Scott is taking an all-day EMT (emergency medical training) class. One of many classes towards becoming a paramedic. Spencer is a little nervous around the dummies they use to practice on, but he loves the wheelchair!

Three Words...

Screw in door


need I say more?

Spencer's favorite things

We might as well change the name of our blog to, The Many Adventures of Spencer Pannell, because he seems to be the only one who does relatively interesting things during the day. So what does a very busy 1 year old do to fill his days..?

Help mom sweep the floor
Eat a sucker
Take a bath in purple water.Gotta love the bath water color changing tablets. I tried mixing a few together to get the purple, normally the colors are really bright, he loves them
Go for a drive
maybe a bike ride


visit with Elmo

visit with Grandpa

pick his nose

take pictures of stuff
do some light reading
play uno
throw a quick nap in...the basement's pretty cold, gotta find some way to keep warm:)
And play in dad's hats.

Pictures

We finally took Spencer in to get his picture taken. In addition to the pictures that you order, they will also put all the pictures online, so you can decide later if you want to order more (for a small fee or course). So I paid the fee, got the password, and put all the pictures that we took, off their site and into a folder on my computer. I'm sure that they anticipate people doing this, they warn you that all the pictures are on a very low resolution for online viewing only. So I'm not sure what they would look like if I were to print them out myself, but I at least have a copy of everything we took on my computer.

I love this one, we ordered an 8 X 10 copy. I just happened to have a black frame with an off white mat in it, it looks so cute!

Full-body version. I love this one as well, shows off how short his legs are:)

I decided not to buy this one, but the poem next to it says, "A parent holds their child's hands for but a moment, but they hold their hearts forever."

Instead of just showing you the picture, they have to show you different options of how you can lay it out. I didn't buy the card, but I did buy a whole bunch of different sizes (wallets and whatnot) of the picture on the left....for those of you who want a copy.

Another Valentines pose

Walking with Dinosaurs

A show called Walking with Dinosaurs recently came to the Idaho center, so Spencer and I jumped at the chance to see it. It was an information-packed view on dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were awesome! The had life-size robotic dinosaurs. For the big dinosaurs, like the T-rex (and a lot of others I can't recall the names), they weren't life-size, but still very large; they just told us the dimensions of the dinosaur fully grown. All the show did, was have a narrator, and as a dinosaur came out, he would talk about that dinosaur. They would have more than one out at a time, of different types, and a few of the times they would have a predator and prey come out, and would discuss different defense mechanisms. The dinosaurs looked so real, they were so cool just to watch; little kids were just so in awe, that they didn't seem to realize they were just listening to a 96-minute dino documentary. From the second I saw a commercial for it, months ago, I wanted to go. But I never really thought about it, I knew the tickets were spendy. Within the last week, I kept hearing more and more about it, because it was coming up. So a few days before, I went to see if there were any tickets left. Because of the price, only Spencer and I went. Scott wanted to go, but he didn't feel too bad about missing because he had volleyball that night; it takes a lot to get him to miss volleyball. I didn't get any pictures, there was no flash photography. However, ever now and then someone would let off a flash...and it was funny because instead of flashes everywhere, you could see everyone holding up there cell phones, taking videos and pictures. So I had to see cell-phone glow everywhere. I just didn't bother taking pictures. I already was by myself, and had to haul in a huge diaper bag, full of stuff to entertain in case he couldn't sit through it, and deal with both our coats, and we had to get food when we were there....so I didn't even bother digging through my bag for my camera. I had one hand holding Spencer on my lap, the other holding his bag of chips, while every few minutes grabbing the drink for him. Spencer just sat and pointed to the dinosaurs the whole time; he loved it. It was funny, when we came home, he was totally infatuated with our dog. I don't know if she resembled the dinosaurs, or what, but he just chased her around, laughing and laughing.