Wednesday: shoe

When we're leaving the house, Ben sits near the exit and says, "Can you please get my shoe?"  

I laugh every time.  A shoe!  Shoes don't come in singles.

Tuesday: Kids' Food Basket

 We helped at Kids' Food Basket today.  We didn't have many lunches to pack but there were also three of us working together, so we got through them really quickly.  Joshua was so fast at opening the bags and putting in the pudding.

So then they put us on "take apart puddings".  We had to take them out of the shipping box, out of the resale box, crack them apart, and sort them vanilla/chocolate.  We were crazy fast.

So they had us take open nutrigrain bars boxes.  This was even easier than puddings, so we breezed through it.

In the end, we got to leave 30 minutes early and we felt like we did a lot of help.

Monday: Happy Birthday!

It was Joshua's birthday today!  He received several presents that kept him busy most of the day.

This was a sneaky gift we got in Japan, but Joshua knew we had gotten something.  He just thought it was from the Nintendo store - and he asked about it about every other week.  Anyway, it was a mystery Minecraft figurine and we think he ended up with the coolest one - it glows in the dark.

Sunday: Great-Grandma

We made it over to Great-grandma's tonight.  We brought the linking blocks, as normal.  It's always fun to see what the kids create.

We stayed for dinner, but it was slow!  They only had one person in the kitchen, so they were bringing out our meals one at a time.  Then our waitress started washing dishes and forgot to bring Joshua's food.  It wasn't that long, but when everyone else is eating and you've been waiting a while it felt like a long time.  Joshua was patient though and ate quickly once he got his food...Ben and I had already finished by that time.

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.