Tuesday: Joshua

 To start with, we have some of Joshua's school work:

His Star Student poster

What he did this summer.  This was the bike ride when he fell down, but I guess it was still a memorable trip.

I really like his drawing of a character in his book.

We were driving home today and the car was quiet.  Suddenly I get a question in a serious voice.

J: Mom, what type of animal is a mermaid?  Fish, mammal, bird, or insect?

J: Because dragons are obviously reptiles, Phoenixes are birds, and unicorns are mammals.

J: But mermaids could be fish or mammals.

A: hmm.  Good question.  Well, do mermaids lay eggs or have baby mermaids?

I: I think baby mermaids

A: yeah, that's what I think too.  So that would make the mammals.  Dolphins are mammals too, so it is possible. 

Monday: life

It was a rather normal day today.  I helped out at kids' food basket.  I thought I had signed up to pack lunches, but apparently I had signed up for food prep.  We made turkey roll-ups and cut cucumbers.  The turkey was fine, but the knives they gave us to cut the cucumbers didn't stay straight.  I already can't cut things very straight, so they just exacerbated the problem.  My hand was starting to ache by the end, but luckily it was the end!  We got out early so I had time to make a quick trip to Menards.

I had a nice lunch with a friend from karate.  I picked up the kids from school.  My new statement is "tell me two details about your day" and it's worked quite well.  Sometimes I get random things like "a car drove really fast by the playground during recess" but I usually get pretty relevant things.

Saturday: corn maze, apple picking, Castle Panic

This morning we went to the corn maze and apple picking with Aunt C.  It was a beautiful day.  The kids were super excited in the corn maze and doing a great job with taking turns picking a direction...but then above the truck we got lost.  We went round and round until I finally pulled out my phone help us.  Joshua was flagging a bit by the time we actually escaped part one.  Part two went much faster.  Isaac was the main leader, and we examined the picture of the maze better before we went in.  We still got a little stuck in the bottom right section, but once we looked at a picture again we were able to figure out where we were and how to escape.

In the upper peninsula:

Isaac leading the way:

We picked some apples afterwards.  As always, it's easy to get a lot of apples.  Joshua was very vocal about Empire apples being his favorite, but he saw the variety and immediately knew.  (It was a very good apple).  However, I'm also not sure if he remembered from last year or if he just liked the name because of Star Wars.

In the afternoon we played a game called Castle Panic.  It isn't my favorite game, but it was Joshua's turn to pick.  Our castle was almost destroyed when a fortuitous boulder rolled through the middle of our broken castle and killed a bunch of monsters that were about to finish destroying our castle.  At one point after that we had a single castle section and a wall protecting it on one of six sides, which looked a bit ridiculous.  We won in the end with one castle tower and one random wall remaining.

Friday: gutters and garage doors

I cleaned two of our gutters today.  The rest of the gutters seemed ok from the ground, so I'm not too worried about them.  These two gutters are also 'easy' to get to so that helps the whole process.  I was happy that the whole process (including taking a shower afterwards) only took an hour.  When I got to the first gutter I was greeted by some plants.

We also had our new garage door installed today!  I don't have a picture of the new door, but they look very similar.  The windows are very slightly different, but not enough that you could tell with a casual glance.  This was the old door...you can see the bend.

Vacation Sunday (Aug 21): travel

Getting off the boat went well.  Picking up our luggage went quickly and finding the bus we needed wasn't obvious but it was rather easy.

On our way to the airport we got notified that our flights had been canceled due to thunderstorms in Dallas.  (They got a ton of rain.  I saw many pictures of flooding over the next few days.)  Anyway, they wanted to rebook us at 6:30AM the next day, which obviously would have been annoying.

Since we booked our flights via the cruise line and not independently, Ben was able to make a few phone calls and get our airline switched so that we could get home only an hour later.  (It was a bit hard to find the correct phone number, but he did a nice job.)  So we were at the airport significantly earlier than we needed to be, but that was rather good because the security check line was LONG.  We probably stood in it for an hour.  Turns out when three cruise ships all unload at the same time the airport gets a bit overwhelmed.

Our flight leaving Seattle was a little late.  However, we were able to stop at a bathroom and walk (albeit very directly) to our next flight.  We were just getting to the gate as they started to board.

My luggage wheels broke off during the flight.  I was very happy that they at least waited until our last stop to break, because I couldn't carry the 50 pounds easily.  Since it was already broken I just dragged it to the car.  The plastic got very hot (friction) and I almost burned myself getting it in, but reflexes kicked in.

We finally got home and the cats were happy to see us.

Thursday: traffic

Ugh, the traffic.

They've been doing construction on a road since...March or so...and it finally hit a busy intersection.  It's been a little annoying before, but for the last three weeks a major intersection that leads to the south side of Holland has been closed.  It isn't the intersection itself though, so while very annoying as long as I remember it the detour isn't too bad.

Fast forward to something this week when they decided to close a close-by intersection too in order to work on the railroad tracks.  Now they've closed a north-south road and an east-west road: my normal route and my secondary route.  This has caused traffic to become insane.  Last week I was trying to cross back to the north side of Holland and it was bad but the traffic was moving.  Today I tried and it took me forever to go a short block.  Google said it would take me 20 minutes to get home (instead of a normal five minutes) but I didn't believe it.  So I went the extra-long way around because there are only two real options to go between the north and south sides of Holland due to a lake.  There was still a busy stretch, but we were at least moving.  It took me 20 minutes to get home (so 30 all told).  I still think it was the correct choice, but I really hope they open up the railroad tracks soon.

vacation Saturday (Aug 20): mostly at sea

While the itinerary says Victoria today, the Victoria stop is super short and we didn’t book any excursions so we’ll just be having another boat day. We once again woke up at a decent time (7:30am) which means tomorrow’s wake up to go to the airport is going to be so annoying. Our internal clocks are changing just in time to go home, as expected.

It was a grey morning, so we decided to go in the hot tub. We easily found an empty one and brought our books in. We did take a brief dip in the pool which was refreshing and not nearly as cold as we had been expecting. However, the hot tub was right next to the fog horn. We heard it a few times as we got in and then it stopped, but around the time we were getting close to getting out it started again.  Every time it went off I jumped. A lot. So it encouraged us to get out just a bit faster.

Neither of us were hungry, so we were planning on having a late lunch and then seeing the magic show.

However, whales appeared! There were so many. We were actually talking to the kids when we saw

the first two (and the closest ones that we saw) and I yelled, “whale!” There were a few times we saw

four or five spouts all together. Most of the whales were pretty far away, but the spouts were still easy

to spot and the binoculars came in handy. We ordered room service near the beginning of the whales

and although it took a while to get to us it worked well.