Louisville in Pictures

I was not very consistent with my camera while we were gone, so while I have pictures, they don't really tell the story of our trip very well. And so rather than trying to insert pictures into the narrative I've already written, here are a few pictures from the trip with some commentary:
Nicholas got hours of fun from the old animal blocks and wooden soda bottles at my grandpa's house. The combinations of towers you can build with these are seemingly endless.

Nicholas particularly loved making the tower as tall as possible

From 2011 January

and carefully replicated my finding that for the bottles to make a stable middle layer in a tower you needed 3 of them. (Here he is showing me there were 3. Although I believe he said "three bottles" and then counted them as "4, 5, 6.")

From 2011 January

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Nicholas loved the zoo. However, he was not too keen on my efforts to get a picture of him with the animal statues.

From 2011 January

And, in the one photo-journalist moment of the trip, I did think to get a picture of him passed out at the zoo.

From 2011 January

For the most part I only really got the camera out to get pictures of him with individual relatives. And while Nicholas was very cooperative at the idea of posing for these pictures, he currently is in a phase where his camera smile involves tilting his head up towards the sky.

And so I have a lot of pictures like this:

From 2011 January

Or the more moderated version:

From 2011 January

And the good pictures are the ones where he is involved in some activity:

From 2011 January

From 2011 January

This may be the one exception:

From 2011 January

Given that he agreeably posed for pictures with 5 or 6 different people, I am disappointed that I ended up with nothing worthy of framing.

Oh well, even if I don't have documentary evidence, Nicholas truly did have a great time with his great grandparents, as well as a significant handful of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. And that is what really matters in the long run, even if it doesn't make for a pretty blog. Seriously, though, I wish I had taken more videos (and that those I took were smaller file sizes) because words cannot describe Nicholas and Grandpa M. playing a game that was a cross between catch and fetch, and in the house no less.