Sunday: on the busy side

Today ended up being rather busy.  After church we visited Grandma.  There are a bunch of painted rocks outside the entrance to the building and so we painted our own rocks.  The paint markers were getting a bit old, but we still got some nice rocks. 

 

Then we put the rocks outside Grandma's window.  They're not the easiest to see, but they're there!

We met Ben's family for Captain Sundae after dinner.  The night was perfect for ice cream.

Saturday: reading cat

 Been came out of the bedroom after nap time, saw Isaac and Joshua reading, and so say down on the couch to read.  I wasn't going to pass up family read-together time, do I say down to read.  Then Horizon settled on the couch, so I gave him a book too. He was surprisingly engrossed in it.

Friday: weekend-ish

 This morning Isaac set up a Dominion game.  Horizon, aka game cat, played on my team.

I donated blood today.  It went about normal...not perfect but no major issues.  I'm going to try power red next time and see how that goes.

Ben was putting a Lego set together and showed us a new color piece we hadn't seen before.  (Reddish orange, if you really care).  We called it pumpkin orange.  We had finished our conversation and Isaac comes out with, "it looks a little blue to me."  

Thursday: forth of July

Happy Forth of July!  We didn't do anything too special, although there were some fireworks at the end of the day.

Joshua spent two hours this morning reading all the Super Rabbit Boy books.  I'm not sure what prompted the goal, but he read them well.

A little later we were looking at our bruises, because Ben actually had some.  I always have some bruises and Joshua often has some, so we looked up how to prevent bruises.  Mayo Clinic has the following helpful tips: use good lighting and avoid clutter.  We all laughed about the help.

This evening were fireworks.  Two neighbors to our left put on a huge show.  Two neighbors to our right put on a large show.  We decided to watch the fireworks inside for comfort and no bugs.  It was a little weird, but worked well.

Wednesday: off

The day was slightly off.  It started with rain during a playground trip with friends.  Then the kids were a bit off at our house.  Then Joshua wasn't enjoying racquetball like normal.  Nothing was wrong and there weren't any real complaints, besides the rain, but things weren't flowing like normal either.

Since we're talking about complaints, I'd like to complain about on-line recipes.  

1) What is up with the time estimates.  Yesterday I made (a delicious) cajon pasta that estimated 20 minutes.  One hour later I'm finally finishing up.  Now, I know that there are metrics and views and what-not based on that time, but can we please make it a bit closer to reality?  Chicken does not almost cook through in 3-4 minutes, even when in small pieces.

2) Why aren't the amounts of the ingredients put into the recipe?  Again, it seems like they're following tradition from when cookbooks wouldn't do that to save space/paper.  I get that.  But scrolling up and down to find out how much of something I need to put in drives me nuts.  There is no reason the amounts can't also be part of the instructions.

XKCD

Tuesday: pretty normal day

We didn't have anything all that special today.  So we started by getting groceries.  This was the third week at Aldi and it's almost working for me...but not quite.  I think I'm going to try an every other week Meijer/Aldi switch, because most of the time I think I can handle thinking about two weeks of grocery needs.  And I can get just get milk and fruit at each location.

We also went rock climbing today and several walls had just been changed out and there was a take-away game going on in the alcove and so we stayed longer than normal.  But it was fun.  I'm getting better at my (very easy) routes.

Last night in karate we were doing knife defense.  As in, someone comes at you with a knife and what do you do?  We did it for almost 35 minutes and I keep finding hurts on my hand today.  (Nothing major.  If I had been exercising it'd be the equivalent of sore muscles.)  First a place where the skin rubbed off because I was holding the knife too hard when I was the attacker.  Then a random bruise on the side of my thumb.  Then some soreness on the back of my hand where the metacarpal takedown was held.  During practice I found myself talking a lot..."pinkie over the arm" or "pull up, push down, twist" or "let go already!"  If someone actually comes at me some time my plan is to scare them off just through my knowledge.

Monday: Pier Cove Beach

One of Isaac's summer requests, and there weren't many of them, was to go rock hunting.  Hmm.  I have no idea where one would do this, so I googled it, of course.  There was a random reddit post that said we should go to Pier Cove - but watch out, there are only 10 parking spaces.

We got there at 9:30 and it was in the 60s and sunny.  It was busier than we expected, but there were still about three parking spaces.  We walked down the steps and it was perfect.  There were piles of rocks.  Piles!

Cheryl came with us and brought shelling bags.  Joshua immediately started collecting the big rocks to make a mountain.  He could only fit a few in the bag before needing to add to his mountain.  Isaac enjoyed looking through all the rocks.  I enjoyed looking through the rocks.

This was Joshua's mountain.  Happily, he decided to throw them all in the water so there were a lot of wonderful plop sounds.  I love the plop of a large rock in the water.

Sunday: instagram

We started an instagram account for our Lego builds.  Joshua is the most prolific, but I've been trying to get others in too.

Find us at itsjustanotherbrick

Its = Isaac
Just = Joshua
Another = Amanda
Brick = Ben

We were contemplating names for a little bit and poor Ben always got stuck with 'brick'.

Saturday: Joshua's best life

Joshua had a great day.

The sleepover went very well.  He was asleep by 8:30pm last night and slept the whole night.

Ben worked on getting Minecraft Dungeons, a game he's been asking for for about six months, up and running for everyone.  We had finally found it on sale about a month ago.  He was so excited.  (And, it worked.  Sometimes when we try to get something like this up and running it doesn't work so well, but Ben got the kinks ironed out before telling Joshua.)

His friend decided to try rock climbing after a year of periodic declines.  (We didn't ask too much, but it would come up once in a while.)  I don't think he loved it, but he really did a great job for his first time.

Friday: sleeping bag

Joshua is at a sleepover tonight.  We were going rock climbing right before dropping him off, but forgot his sleeping bag.  

Isaac finished his first V4 in the cave and promptly fell off the route, landing straight on his back.  He completely had the wind knocked out of him.  He was super excited that he got the route, but he was done climbing for the day.

Since we finished a little earlier than expected and because Joshua has had a hard time actually staying at the sleepover in the past I decided we could run home to get the sleeping bag.  Usually this would end up adding about 15-20 minutes to the trip, for an expected total of 25-30 minutes.  An hour later I was finally pulling into the driveway.  I'm not sure what was going on, but I think there was a train that was just sitting across a major road.  Due to construction, I wasn't sure I'd be able to go the alternate route.  I was a bit grumpy when I got home.

I got a text at 6:30pm saying Joshua was feeling a bit nervous about sleeping over.  I gave some reasonable suggestions, but deep down I was thinking, "You better not come home because I got that dumb sleeping bag for you!"

He didn't come home.  I also didn't hear any further updates, so am assuming that everything ended up fine.

Thursday: TreeRunner, Fiber, Craig's Cruisers

It was a busy, but wonderful day!

It started out with TreeRunner, a ropes and zipline course, for Ben, Isaac, and me.  Joshua said he didn't want to go at Christmas time but was hemming and hawing yesterday.  I looked up the ages and he wasn't old enough for the harder courses, so we all used that as an excuse for him to not go.  In hindsight, I think it was the correct decision.  Even if we had waited until the end of the summer when he could have gone on a third tier course with parents, he would have struggled.  (For perspective, we only went as high as the third tier courses.  There were some large steps.)  He will enjoy it more in a few years.

Anyway, I only embarrassed myself once by forgetting to put the zip trolley on the line.  I was just so used to doing the click-click of the safety loops that I forgot to add the trolley on the first zip line.  The staff member was more than happy to come get me though; I think it was a nice excuse to actually do something.

The zip lines were probably the best part.  The second tier obstacles were probably my second favorite part.  They tended to be interesting and challenging without actually being hard...except that the safety cable was often exactly where I needed my center of mass to be.  The third tier obstacles were mostly interesting, although there were a few that I would have been ok skipping.

Anyway, it was a lovely morning for the three of us doing something rather different that normal.  Ben hurt a lot afterwards, but we were expecting that.

We got home and found the fiber people had ended up digging a hole in our yard.  They're laying fiber down for internet, and so there have been lots of flags all over the neighborhood.  I was hoping that they'd be able to ignore our yard for the most part, but that was not the case.  It was pretty much what I was expecting even.  So we had a reasonable sized hole when we went to take our nap, but when I woke up there was a ton of machinery in the yard and they were drilling a hole (I think).  So much for being ignored.

Lastly, we went to Craig's Cruisers for Cheryl's birthday.  It was a lovely time.  I played a few arcade games, but air hockey with the kids was my favorite.  Everyone did a round of go-karts (and it was just us, which was fun).  Joshua did the bouncy thing while everyone else started mini-golf.  We joined them before too long and took charge of the scorecards.  I was going to give Joshua my second attraction ticket because I knew mini-golf was going to take a while, but he ended up having a really good time being scorekeeper for the kids so we just stayed with it and brought the second attraction home.

I was exhausted.

Wednesday: activities

Isaac has been working in a new coding language.  The families know I hate jumping games, and yet his game started out with plain levels 1 and 2.  Then he made a 'secret mom level' that, while it still has jumps, doesn't have as many or as hard of jumps.

We've been working on puzzles this summer.  This one caught their attention, especially at the end.  We played a "which mini-figure is the coldest?" or "which mini-figure is the Giraffe-est?"  It brought up some interesting discussion.  The kids then did several rounds of picking out a piece and giving the piece and the box lid to the other sibling and trying to figure out what mini figure it was from.

 

This afternoon we went to a park with friends.  Then this evening was VBS family style...I wasn't really sure what this meant, but it was a low key VBS with a few activities.  Isaac and I helped out in the craft area and left Joshua to hang out with friends, which was weird since it was family VBS.

Tuesday: 200

We went rock climbing with some friends again today.  Isaac did an amazing job working on a V4 in the cave - I couldn't believe that he held on as "easily" as he did.  I felt like I made some progress and have an idea of what to work on next time we go.  Joshua got bored rather quickly and I almost gave him permission to go get his book, but then he found a project too.  He climbed (and jumped off of) a route in the alcove (formerly known as the kids' area) 200 times.  He was a ball of sweat.

I didn't see Tornado all day until 5pm.  The kids kept saying that he was around and that Tornado had snuggled with them, but I didn't even see him.  Normally it isn't a huge deal, but we recently got them some new feeders and I wanted to make sure he was eating.  I know that if I stick his face in the feeder he'll eat, but I don't know if he'll eat without me doing so.*

*I'm writing this on Wednesday, and it looks like he at least ate some overnight.

Monday: morning zombies

First, I get a morning hug from Joshua.

Second, I get a morning squeeze from Joshua.

Third, he turns around in my hug so we're facing the same way.  He's just the right height so my arm go under his armpits, making his arms stick straight out.  We have morning zombie time, where he says "brains" and I try to find something that has a brain for him to eat.

However, he will not let me take a picture of this.

Weekend: cottage

The kids and I went up to the cottage for the weekend to see Dad and Pat and Nathan and his family.  It was a lovely weekend.  It was great to see Nathan and Liz and the cousins had a great time playing together.

We got there around 11am and the whole day was on-and-off rain.  We enjoyed being outside when it wasn't raining and enjoyed doing inside things when it was.  At one point we played a few rounds of boche ball.  Isaac threw the snitch first down a hill and it landed about half way down.  Then we threw the rest of the balls and they almost went in the lake.  We all laughed about it a lot.

Liz brought up a rubberband bracelet making kit and it was a hit.  Joshua made close to ten bracelets and Isaac made interesting creations.

We also finally got around to making quills.  It's been a project that we've been waiting for for about two years.  Joshua was given an eagle feather recently so the timing was perfect.

After Joshua was finished trying his out, I took it over.  It took a ton of ink!  Writing in cursive and print was about the same; all old documents must be in cursive because that was just the style of the times.  I also had a lot of splatter and double lines, but for my first try it wasn't too bad.  Since I had to dip the quill every word or two it took a really long time to write.

Dad needed help moving some dock sections up a hill.  The kids actually helped, Nathan and I just heckled Dad.  When he was debating if the dock section would fit between two things, we said helpful things like, "Someone once told us that taking a few extra minutes to make sure something fits is worth the time."  Or "I was taught by someone to measure twice cut once."  Or "if only there was this thing to help one figure out if something will fit through a space."

In the evening we played a game of space base.  Isaac won the game; it's been a while since he's won.  But he had an amazing strategy and ended up with 44 base income if Dad/JJ or I rolled a 3 or a 4.  

The morning was cold!  It was a bit of a shock after the heatwave this past week.  More bracelets were made, some games were played, and the kids still played outside.  They made up a game involving the swing and played it a lot.

Isaac and Joshua went tubing before lunch, but when they got out of the boat their lips were turning blue.  Pat turned on the fire for them.  The weather started to get nice just as we were about to go, but I also wanted to get home and see Ben a bit.

Friday: Terra Firma

We went to a rock climbing place in Grand Rapids today, just to do something different.  (Also, it was air conditioned and our normal gym isn't and it's hot out.)

We also met up with one of Joshua's friends.  Both kids had a great time.  They climbed for about two hours, then they left and we went to have lunch.  We went back after lunch.  Joshua didn't climb for long as he said his shoes were hurting, but he was content to read while Isaac finished up.  Isaac continued to climb for 1-1.5hours, getting in a ton of new routes.

On this route, which looked like a big rainbow, the top was at the end of the rainbow.  I suggested that he just use his toe to get it but Isaac refused.  The elation on his face when he figured out how to get it with his hands was cool.

The cave.  It wasn't tall, which was both nice and not nice at the same time.