Tommy's Monkey Bus Birthday Party

We celebrated Tommy's 5th birthday a little early this weekend with a visit from the Monkey Bus. Tommy was joined by Cassie and 14 friends (along with Grandma Sandy and Papa Leo and some parents) at our house for the party on Saturday. We scheduled a visit from the "Monkey Bus" from 2-3 p.m. The Monkey Bus is a moving play gym featuring a zip line, ball pit and climbing area. As you can see from the pictures, the kids had a great time.

View pictures from the party at http://picasaweb.google.com/jason.c.eckert/TommySMonkeyBusBirthday#.

EckSpot Brief Review of Transformers 2

Cari and I don't get out to movies very often. This weekend, with my parents in town, we had the opportunity to go out for a date night and decided to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at our local "value" (formerly dollar) theater. We really enjoyed the movie!

Transformers 2 is a fun action flick. It does an excellent job telling the story of the Transformers and the origins of their ongoing civil war. Although I grew up with the original cartoon series and collected the figurines, I never realized that the Transformers are actually an alien race. The special effects and action sequences are very well done. The movie was a little long (150 minutes) and some of the dialog between the Transformers was difficult to understand. Having said that, enjoying the performance of Megan Fox made the duration of the movie very enjoyable, especially for the men in the audience.

We highly recommend Transformers 2, especially as a value theater or DVD selection.

Labor Day Weekend at Lake Lure, NC

We enjoyed a great Labor Day Weekend trip to Lake Lure, NC (about nine hours from our house). We spent lots of time at the pool, rented kayaks, took a guided tour of the lake, saw Chimney Rock, and enjoyed tennis and mini-golf. A quick but memorable trip. Our pictures are shared at http://picasaweb.google.com/jason.c.eckert/LakeLureNC#.