Holy Crap! We Are Having Triplets!: It's Not Your Fault Angela, It's In Their Blood

Once again, I'm back, it's Bob to continue the Saga of the Newhouse triplets torturing their mother with science fiction stuff that she could care less about.

Yesterday, I discussed how this obsession began and our ride to Orlando to attend the Star Wars Celebration VI at the Convention Center.

Today, we will actually enter the show itself! See, we can make progress after all!

I had done some research prior to the show and figured we needed to hit the Disney booth right away as it seemed to be the busiest. By the time we navigated the boys through the enormous crowd we discovered that there was no way we were going to be able to get into that booth as it seemed everyone in the county was in that little 80 foot booth. I also wanted them to do the Carbon Freeze Me thing as the boys love very little more than "I Freeze Han!" followed by an ack!

Well, that fun sounding thing cost $115 per kid, so I decided we will continue to pretend to be frozen without physical proof. I also started to have a bit of a panic attack at this point. I was 0 for 2 in what I wanted the boys to do, they weren't very interested in being pulled through all these people and my blood pressure was rising.

Thankfully, R2-D2 rolled by.

The boys weren't entirely sure what to do with him, but they were certainly intrigued. When they tried to touch him voices from all over the hall cried out, "Don't Touch Him!"

Without discussing it, Angela and I had decided that we really wanted to cover this event well. As you can see that we were taking photos from every angle. We hadn't quite got the system down yet of how to keep the cameramen out of the picture.

Another issue that I had was that I wasn't prepared to try and get the boys to pose while fighting off crowds. That is why the picture below is just of Darth Vader's crotch.

Shortly after that, we came up on a storm trooper and the boys were officially relaxed as you can see Ryan approaches him to shake his hand. I'm not sure anyone has ever shaken a stormtroopers hand before.

Michael followed that up with a hug.

I'm not 100% sure why James felt he needed to get on his knees for this picture but he and Ryan sure are happy.

At this point, my bladder was about to explode. I hadn't peed since I woke up, and this old man bladder was about to burst. I got false hope when I saw the restroom sign at one end of the convention center. I took off that direction and it was nothing but women's restrooms. At a Star Wars convention? Really? A whole wall with nothing but women's bathrooms? Seems a bit silly to me.

Anyway, while I was there I noticed a few booths with action figures so I decided, the boys will dig this. When I found them again I began to drag Ryan and James towards the figures. I do mean drag them, they were not happy to walk away from where they were seeing costume guys. As I got them to the booth they were immediately mesmerized by $15 to $20 toys, so that worked. Good work Bob.

So, I decided to move to the next booth which started James on a kicking and screaming fit that I was incredibly proud of. I mean what father wouldn't be proud of his son acting like a lunatic, attracting child protective services at an event that was meant just for the son.

Luckily at this booth, they had boxes of used toys that were priced as low as $6. They were going through the boxes and of course pulled out the ones that had the highest price tags on it and the most parts to lose. They are my boys after all.

We bought them each a toy, and I swear to you we weren't 5 feet from the booth before the first robot head was lost.

At this point the crowd seemed to thin out a bit and the picture taking spots seemed to have relatively small lines so we decided to start trying to get some pictures. At first I thought these were booths being manned by people hired to pose for pictures, but it didn't take long to realize that these were just Convention goers who would take 10 to 15 minutes or so to pose in front of these sets with people.

I kinda felt bad for these guys as we approached since they had to do quite a bit of negotiating and pleading with my kids to get them to pose for pictures.

Once again the boys approach with an attempt at a handshake, they are polite after all.

Well, we kinda got a posed picture.

Hey, look at this, we might actually have a family, posed picture. That is until you notice that James and Ryan are trying to figure out how to get the hologram started up so they practice taking on the Wookie.

This couldn't possibly be 2 posed pictures in a row could it, well, until you realize Michael this time wants to take off down that hall yelling "It's not my fault the hyperdrive doesn't work!"

Would you believe more negotiating?

Well, camo'd stormtrooper is ready for the picture.

One last try!

Ryan really wanted to ride that bike but it had a do not sit on it sign, so we had to do a quick pose while the next group really wanted to pose in front of the gate.

It's hard to see in these pictures but Michael put on the gas mask thing, they were much more interested in that then posing for pictures. Ryan didn't want any part of the droid hospital.

The boys climb into a snow speeder. Yet another example where they could give a crap about the picture, they just wanted to figure out how to get the top shut so they could blow this pop stand.

Ryan got a bit scared and started to crawl into the ship.

I decided to try and help him so we could get a pciture, can you see a little head popping out of the front seat?

Ryan never did get completely into the ship as his leg got caught.

Which of course made him very happy as I came to pull him out right when he got his leg uncaught.

At this point we rolled up on some pretty cool booths with ships and helmets displayed, but we figured out real quick that the boys wanted to try on each and every helmet, so we decided to go eat some lunch.

As we were walking to lunch we passed the autograph area. I grabbed a program to figure out how the autographs worked. They had probably 30 different people there signing. You had to buy autograph tickets for $20 cash. They had just about everybody you can think of and a whole lot more. Lots of guys who were in the movies in suits of characters I can barely remember.

The more famous people charged more, I recall that Warwick Davis was $40, Carrie Fisher and Peter Mahew were $60 and I think Anthony Daniels was $100. I do remember that Mark Hamil was $150. It doesn't take a genius to figure out we weren't going to do that, but I did want to walk by and just catch a glance of the people who shaped my life.

The majority of them were at tables with very small lines, perhaps 1 or two people at best. I was fascinated by Jake Lloyd who played Young Boy Annakin as he is known around these parts. He had 1 person at his table, he seemed nice, he got up and let them take a picture with him which the instructions said not to do. He's in his early 20's, had a ski cap on and a very young looking goatee thing.

A few tables down was the kid who played Boba Fett in Attack of the Clones. He's probably the same age as Jake but he's a better looking dude and had some hotties at his table. I was also fascinated by the guy right next to Jake, I forget his name but I recognized him instantly as Rogue Two! It was everything I had not to go up to him and say "Echo Base, this is Rogue Two. I've found them. Repeat, I've found them."

The guys who cost more than $20 had their own little pods set up so that gawkers like us couldn't see them. They had much longer lines of course. I was able to sneak a peek at Warwick Davis but that was it. I would have liked to have seen Carrie Fisher, but it might be best I didn't. From what I can tell from online reports, she was pretty funny all weekend though.

Following an incredibly expensive lunch of Papa John's Pizza, we stumbled upon literally a hundred stormtroopers marching by. James couldn't have been any happier but unfortunately I was late in getting the camera out.

I'm a pretty big fan of that picture, you have to look at it kind of close but the storm trooper is waving at James. He dug that.

Next we stumbled on the Lego playground. I had read about it, but it wasn't where I thought it was, so I felt that maybe it wasn't there on Saturday, but boy was it. The boys probably could have played here for a very long time.

Here the boys found a skyscraper that had been previously completed. They decided to make it just a tad bit taller.

Michael is the #1 architect in our house at the moment. I was scared to death our #1 destroyer in the house, Ryan, would start his Godzilla impression and take out all the creations in the play area, but he refrained. Whew.