We had a fun day today

Greg has been planning to take us on an outing one day this week and today worked out for us to go. We considered a bunch of options, but we finally decided on taking a trip to the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier in Alameda that's open for tours. When we got there, Ellie immediately was nervous and scared by the size of the ship and the fact that it was sitting on the water. But when we got the the entrance and she saw that she had to cross a walkway (read: bridge) over the water to get on the ship, she grabbed the nearest guardrail and wouldn't let go. It took 10-15 minutes of cajoling to get her to cross it. But she faced her fears and she walked across a bridge where she could see the water under her feet! Yay! She was pretty happy and proud of herself that she did that and we were proud of her too.

The Hornet was incredible. It was ginormous. We went through endless corridors leading to barracks, eating areas, a huge sick bay complete with an operating room, then more barracks, a laundry facility, meeting rooms, officers areas, etc. And that's all just in the underground area. The areas on top were where they navigated and steered the ship, and where they would guide aircrafts to land on the on-deck runway. It was built in the 40s and used throughout WWII. Some fun stuff we did was lie down on the 3-tiered bunk beds, use the old toilets and sinks, and dial the (non-working) rotary phone. Ellie had never seen a rotary phone before. Ellie ended up loving the tour and having a great time.

On the way home, we had a couple of funny moments. We were driving down a street and Ellie saw a flyer tacked to a tree that had a picture of a man on it. It must have been an ad for a band or something. Ellie said, "Hey, look, there's a picture of a man on that tree!" I nodded and she said, "Maybe somebody lost their husband!"

We stopped for dinner and I grabbed a few toothpicks on the way out. Ellie had a toothpick and she was poking it into her leg and laughing that she was poking holes in herself. She bent her leg and accidentally poked herself kind of hard. Later on, she noticed she was bleeding a little bit. She was amazed. She said, "I poked myself so hard that I'm bleeding! I can't believe I poked myself with a toothpick and now I'm bleeding! Mom, you gotta put this on your blog!"

So I am.