Vacation Monday: Ladies escape, acrobats swing

Doug picked up the groceries in the morning.  It filled up their car!  They also put about two items per bag, so we had plenty of plastic bags.  (Shown here is only the non-cold stuff.  The cold stuff was whisked away.)

The ladies went out by ourselves in the morning to an escape room.  It was the first one that Heather and I had done.  I loved it.  We all contributed and we got a little stuck a few times but didn't call for help.

Since we escaped so early, we walked around downtown for a bit before lunch.  We went into a five and dime and laughed about a bunch of things there.  We walked down to the...river? lake? and then went out to lunch.  We also got some fudge, which everyone kept saying was a tradition.  I finally admitted that I only remembered getting fudge in 2017...and it turns out that getting fudge is a new tradition.  One that I was totally on board with.

While we were gone, the rest of the people just kind of hung out.  The kids found some wiki stix and played with them a ton!  (They also ended up on the bottom of the table.)

They also played some arcade games.  We were all really hoping that the games were part of the rental cost, but alas, they needed quarters.  Not a huge deal though as we had plenty of other things to do...

...like the Switch.

In the afternoon we went to see the "Acrobats from Shanghai."  According to the announcer, China is millions and millions miles away from here.

My favorite acts included a hat toss,

some yo-yo type things that I can't remember the name of,

and hoop jumping.

In the evening Laura was going on a walk with her kids, and I thought sounded like a good idea for my kids too.  There were a bunch of rocks around, and they made better toys than the little playground.  We met up with the others about half way through our walk.

Finally!  The kids were down!  Some of the adults played a game of Diamonds.

Wednesday: CC's playground

Our plans got changed today, so there were no plans on the calendar.  I asked the boys what they wanted to do today, and they said they wanted to go to CC's playground.  It worked well...I had some work to do and they got to run around in a place that wasn't too hot.

Ben upgraded Joshua's mech last night...

Tuesday: more hitting

Oh, poor Joshua.  Today he hit Isaac, and it was over a really dumb thing.  Again, not hard, but it's something we need to stop.

Last time we told him there would be big consequences, like losing screen time.  And so, he lost screen time today.  To make it even worse, we had planned that today the kids would do their chores in the afternoon so that in the evening Ben could play Dragon Quest Builders with them and he lost the chance to do that.  (Especially since he hit Isaac after they had both already done their chores.)

He was sad, very sad, but also handled it a lot better than I was expecting.  He had lots of questions about how exactly this would play out but seemed to understand why it was happening.

Now the question is...will it help him stop?

Monday: firsts

While we don't have many 'firsts' anymore, they still happen.

First of all, the story starts last night around midnight.  I was reading an article about the NYC blackout and how we're not really prepared for a massive power grid problem.  It may have kept me up a little bit last night after watching Jericho years ago.

Fast forward to 2:15am when Joshua woke me up because it was too dark.  There was a power outage.  I thought a bit about how ironic it would be if this was a massive power outage.  My phone still worked so I could easily find out that the blackout was localized to around our lake.  Anyway, after a few more calls from Joshua I put him in our room for the night.

The boys got their first tool bags.

Isaac took his first drink from a metal can.  I feel like this is something that he should have done by now, but I guess it's not bad that he hasn't.  He thought the can felt really weird.

We played Isaac's new games.  Isaac did a great job with both of them, but Joshua played Ingenious too and did a good job.  He has basic strategy down (group colors, play the color that's the lowest) so it was fun to play with everyone.

The boys also used their tools.  We were very careful when Ben came home to make sure he didn't trip over it.  The cats enjoyed it too.

Sunday: 7 1/2 years

Today we had Isaac's birthday party.  Cousins came over first and they played in the lake a little bit.

Isaac opened some presents.

We had cake.  (It took Isaac a lot of breaths to blow out all eight candles.  They weren't even trick candles.)

And a good time being together.

Saturday: grinch

This morning we got a text from Evelyn and JJ, showing us their cool Lego creations and wanting to know what we were working on.  Joshua didn't want to show what he was working on that minute, but instead showed the robot that he and Ben have been working on.  Joshua did the head, hands, feet, and wings (all by himself) and Ben connected everything together.  (Isaac made a long video, detailing every aspect of the things he was making.  I stopped it after 45 sec, but Isaac wasn't done.  So I just held up the phone like I was videoing.)

In the afternoon Ben took the boys to Barnes and Noble to make a Snitch.  (Or as Joshua calls it, a Grinch.)  It was an easy build for them and they had no problems, but it was a fun little surprise.

Isaac played Dominion for the first time on vacation and loved it.  He wanted to play again tonight.  Luckily the table had been cleaned up today in our "clean the house" effort.  Joshua was on my team and did a good job getting the new cards every hand and saying, "We have a moat!" to the six or so spies that Isaac accumulated.

Vacation Monday: kids in order

Every two years we get the kids in order from oldest to youngest.  The parents then snap a whole bunch of pictures, hoping to get a good one.

2013 (we didn't have our act together, so they weren't yet in age order):

2015:

Try 1:

Try 2, with happier kids:

2017:

And that brings us to this year.  I'll admit, I cracked up at these photos.  Mainly at Joshua, who is just standing there in the middle.  We had a lot of these pictures since every parent was taking them, and for a whole bunch of them Joshua just stands there.  The other kids move around, and we finally get a smile from Joshua at the end.

(This one might be my "official" photo if I had to choose one.  You can see all the faces and no one looks too weird.)

We tried again inside, but I'm not sure the results were much better:

(This has most kids smiling, so is a pretty good runner up.)

Maybe they'll eventually be old enough to organize themselves and take this picture on the first day of vacation so they can tell the parents that it's done and already in our photo stream.