vacation Wednesday: guys/girls time

The day started out with donuts!  As always, Doug volunteered to go get them from a local place and they were delicious.  I ordered two...and ate them both.  (The carrots to balanced it out, right?) There was a chocolate explosion and lemon blueberry.  The chocolate one was a bit better, but both were good.  

We spent the morning at the beach.

In the afternoon the guys went out for lunch and then did go-karts.

I wanted to be social, but feel alseep reading my book.  And then I was too cold (the house was cold!) so I cocooned myself in pillows.

The guys came back and we realized they had a uniform.  They hadn't realized it until that point though.

The adult girls went out for dinner and then guided painting.  The guys put the switch on the TV for the kids.

Look at that concentration!

They also took a picture to prove the kids were fed dinner.

Meanwhile, the girls had dinner.  It started raining just as we were leaving, and I was the only one that didn't bring rain anything.  Katy kindly shared her coat.

Guided painting!  It was my first time doing it and I thought things were going poorly.  But then, things magically looked ok!  My waves aren't amazing.  The example also had a weird sun...it had clouds in front and behind it and it looked more like a sun waterfall than a sun setting.  (Closest to what Laura did.)  So I opened up the gap a bit and made a smaller sun.  It's hard to see, but it looks a bit more like a sun.

At home we were lazing around, as normal, and the subject of taking pictures in white linen came up.  Oh...probably because there was a group getting their pictures done for hours that day.  Anyway, Ryan put one of the Parr family pictures into an AI engine and asked it to change the setting and clothes.  From the fingernail image, it looked close.  But then when you actually looked at the picture, it looked so wrong.  So close, and so far all at the same time.

Then he did the whole group based on the picture from the day before.  It is also disturbing, but not quite as similar to actual life in the small size.  HOWEVER, we lost a whole person!  Joshua and Marshall were changed into a single person.

Saturday: Lego, family

This morning we started looking through a new-to-us Legos.  There were a lot of fun pieces!  

Mid-afternoon Nathan and family showed up.  They're leaving super-early in the morning, but we had a lovely time with them.  The kids played in the basement and in the lake.  (Three were on the paddleboard and Isaac convinced me to paddle him out there.  While I was out there I took all the paddles back to shore with me.  They played on the board for quite a while, slowly drifting towards the other side of the lake.  They started making a valiant attempt to come home, but it was slow going so I kayaked back out and towed them home.)

We had blueberry pizza for snack, so we read "The book with no pictures."  This is not a favorite of most adults, but is the reason we have blueberry pizza and it seemed appropriate. 

Friday: blueberries

We went blueberry picking again today with Aunt C.  It was nice most of the time, but near the end the sun came up and it got hot.  Isaac out picked me by .1 pounds...a first!  A happy first.  The blueberries were all pretty wet though, so I've been working on washing and drying them.  It is a rather slow process.

Thursday: life

The sleepover went well.  Natalie came over around 9:30 and we played some games while the kids continued to play in the basement.  We finally pulled them away around lunch time.

I found another army man.  I keep thinking that I've found them all and another one shows up a month later.  This time it was in one of the Lego sets that I was getting ready to take apart.

Natalie and I also saw a Great Blue Heron on our lake!  We used to see them regularly, but I haven't seen one in years.  A lot of years.  So that was exciting.

Wednesday: sleepover

 The boys had some friends over for a sleepover tonight.  They started with Lego, played in the lake for quite a while, and then ended with Lego and screen time.  They got to sleep about twenty minutes ago.

There was a lot of giggling while in the lake.  The paddleboard gets used a ton with friends, but usually not at a paddleboard.  It was used more as a tippy platform that they all tried to get on, jumped off, and whatnot.

I finally got the raspberries weeded during this time and then sat in the hammock.  Even at 8:30 it was crazy hot out.  The day started so nice in the mid-sixties, but peaked in the low nineties.  Tomorrow is supposed to be pretty bad too.

Tuesday: this and that

It was a pretty random day.  There were several places to go, several things to do, and a nap to take.

Isaac finished painting his giraffe.  (It's a spirit giraffe, per the class guidelines, which means they only needed to make the head and a bit of the neck.  It's a nice way to not have to make an entire animal.  It is covered in a cloak.)

Isaac also got the route of the week today!  It's always a good day when he get it.

Monday: Isaac

I came upstairs, only to find that Isaac had finally fed Giraffe some leaves.  They're his favorite food.

 While we're on the subject of Isaac, I sometimes find funny memes to send to him.  They're funny enough to share with you too...

"look at the cool tan lines I got at the beach!"

vacation Tuesday: mini golf and pirate show

 Since there were plans to go out, we wore our group shirts today.  They weren't normal group shirts that matched, but everyone chose a funny shirt and we wore them on the same day.  It was so much fun seeing what shirt everyone chose as people slowly got ready for the day.  Heather also made pancakes for breakfast!

Heather woke up early and decided to go for a sunrise walk.  I joined her subsequent days, but the sunrise was never as pretty.

The kids, in age order, as always.  It was crazy easy to get a good picture this year.  I took about ten and almost all of them were good.

Seth's shirt was "Let's eat kids.  Let's eat, kids.  Punctuation saves lives."  So I encouraged Isaac to lay on the table and gave Seth some silverware and think it is the cutest picture.

Group photo!  Since it's a bit hard to tell, here are the shirts:
Amanda: Awwsassin, with a ninja cat

Ben: Got any grapes? with a duck

Laura: My plan has been foiled, with FOIL diagram

Dusty: Yes, I'm always right, with a right angle

Katy: It's called a trash can, not a trash cannot, with a racoon

Ryan: We almost always almost win, with University of Minnesota football

Heather: Knock - knock joke with oranges and bananas

Doug: What exactly don't you understand, with lots of chemical symbols

Isaac: i saying be rational and Pi saying get real

Joshua: I've got your back, with a stick figure holding another figure's back

Marshall: Why do developers like dark mode? Because light attracts bugs

Violet: (sqrt(-1))(2^2)sigma(3.14): I ate some pie

Greta: animals called by funny names, such as a llama as giraffe sheep, manta as sand flap flap, and Guinea pig as furry potato.

Dagne: pieces of cheese saying 'say people!'

Eva: maybe broccoli doesn't like you either, with a picture of a cool broccoli

Seth: Let's eat kids.  Let's eat, kids.  Punctuation saves lives.

We went mini golfing after pictures.  It was indoor golfing and that was the nicest thing ever.  They also had some interesting holes, including a caldera.  Oh!  Somehow I managed to be the overall winner too.

Heather got her first hole-in-one!

In the afternoon the kids got out some diamond art and got really into it.

Greta and I talked about books.

The adults talked.  This is what we looked like a lot of the time.

We also pulled out a puzzle!  It is a group picture from each of the years we've gone on vacation together - there were ten pictures, so I guess this means this was our tenth vacation!  That's kind of crazy to think about.

The clock didn't work.  People enjoyed changing the time.

For the evening's entertainment, we went to a pirate show with dinner.  It was really fun.  The food was good and the pirates were entertaining.  

There was a pre-show that they recommended that you arrive for.  It felt like we were in the way back seats for that, but in the end it didn't matter.  There was a little story to go along with it - the crew was recruiting a new pirate - but it was not amazing.  There was a song about how you should go buy food, drinks, and souvenirs that definitely sounded like a pirate chanty but the words did not match at all since it was just an advertisement.  Heather cracked up and couldn't stop laughing. There was also a sing-along.  Then we got to file into our seats and Joshua was overheard saying, "Phew.  I'm glad that wasn't the whole thing."

It was overall a low budget cir-de-sol, which worked well for us.  There was diving into the water.  There was fire.  There were trained animals.  There was a competition between the two pirate sides and the end and that was rigged.  You could tell that one side let the other side win so that the score could stay even.  But how else can it end in a tie so that everyone is happy at the end?

We got home with enough time to hit sunset, so back to the beach we went. 

Joshua collected a pile of shells.  Isaac dug holes.

Katy found a crab on the way back.

Isaac and I wore our pun pajamas.

Ryan finally hit the ice pops.  He had held himself back until now, although part of that might have been that we had the worst freezer ever.  It didn't make ice and it didn't freeze things.  (It did keep them cold, but that was about it.)  

I lied, it did make ice.  It made fancy ice balls at the rate of six per day - the normal ice maker was broken.  There was an ice cube tray in the freezer and the water did freeze, so I would make about 24 cubes a day and dump them into the ice holder.  It wasn't really enough, but it did the job.

We also played our biannual game of poker.  I wasn't out first, but it was close.

Ryan took all of Dusty's money.  In grad school it was a running joke that Ryan had to be careful where he sat or Dusty would take all of his money, so the joke persists.