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.