The Oklahoma Meachams Visit Vegas!

We had a great long weekend with Mike and Lauren and Noah and Will visiting.  They stayed at the Aliante Hotel, just on the other side of the highway from us.  They loved it (hint, hint, for you who haven't visited yet...).  Lauren took this great photo of the boys sleeping poolside at the hotel.  Now that's a Vegas vacation.  They also did awake things like visit the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay.

Then they stayed with us.  They loved that, too (hint, hint, again, for Joshua, Taylor & Natalie, Mom & Dad, in case my first hint wasn't clear enough).  Roxanne and Joshua were staying with us, too, so it was a full house and a lot of fun. We made dinner a couple nights, featuring risotto, a salad with our first attempt to make pan fried goat-cheese cakes, halibut, leek and potato cakes, steaks, and a jasmine custard made with jasmine flowers Roxanne and I picked ourselves from the backyard.

The kids loved the chicks. It really was nice timing for them (the chickens) to arrive early, just in time for them (Noah and Will).  Here's little Will with El Pollo Loco, who he gave nice little kisses to.  Will is a reserved little boy, who was very tired and not feeling well from his travels, and his only smiles for us in the first couple days were actually for the chickens.  He was really pretty excited about them. 

And here's Noah with KFC.  Noah liked to hold the chickens, and he was actually pretty good and still pretty gentle in catching them.  He made sure they all got attention and good holding time.  Speaking of KFC, we've been asked a few times why we would name a pet chicken "KFC."  The answer, which we give in a whisper so no chickens overhear, is so she doesn't find out she's a chicken.  You can recognize KFC by her bandit's mask around her eyes.  You can recognize Noah by his supreme cuteness.

That's Roxanne with El Pollo Loco, who, despite her initial dominance of the pecking order and crazy behavior as a hatchling is now the smallest and meekest of the two-week old chicks.  But she's still the smartest, being the first to figure out new environments and follow her strong chicken instincts in scratching, enjoying dust baths, and other such chicken things.  You can recognize El Pollo Loco from her pretty brown head and back.  Roxanne is easily recognized by her big beautiful smile and intense niceness.  She was great entertaining Noah, and they had a lot of fun at the park around the corner.

Finally, that was Joshua with Chick-Fil-A.  Chick-Fil-A is the easiest to recognize: she's the blonde one (and she's Roxanne's favorite).  Joshua, likewise, is easy to distinguish.  He's the 13-year-old who's almost as tall as me and always looks either sleepy (in the morning) or hungry (the rest of the time).  

There were LOTS of great photos from hiking at Red Rock and such, and I couldn't pick from them to post here.  I set up a shutterfly site so you can download ones you want (I think there's some gems there for you, Mike and Lauren, though my favorite is yours at the pool that I stole for the blog).  Here's a link to our shutterfly site. Here's a link to Lauren's shutterfly site, for good measure.  There's some great photos there.

Postscripts

The chickens grow FAST. Even if they would sit nice and still like they did for the first pictures we took, there's no way all three would fit in my hands.  They have more than doubled in size.  For the kids out there, we'll be posting a chicken update regularly to show their development.