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Helicopters in the Park
This week was full with swim lessons, some ailments for Eli, and several celebrations.
Monday through Thursday mornings were swim lessons for all of the kids. Avey was dreading it, and Hakan couldn’t wait to get there. Carver was somewhere in between. The first day went better than Avey expected, but after doing it each morning, she got pretty sick of it. There are still 4 days to go, and we hope that they’ll go smoothly.
On a library trip early in the week, we got thinking about getting Carver his own library card. He signed up for the reading program over the summer, and he’s learning more responsibility, so this seemed like a good move. We got him all set, but then had to go home before he had a chance to pick something to check out. He was patient until we could go yesterday, and he came home with 4 video games. Maybe we can get him to try some new books soon…
The weather has been great this week, so we’ve tried to take advantage by going outside more. We took an afternoon to go and visit the same park where we did some sledding back in January. The park has a nice walkway that goes all around a forested area, so the kids took their scooters and bikes and rode around that, and then we found the hill where we’d done the sledding. The boys had a grand time running down it as fast as gravity could pull them.
The sickness that has been making its way throughout the household finally caught me this week. Before school let out, Avey complained of achy joints and general fatigue, but she had no fever, and just a mild cough otherwise. I came down with the same thing Wednesday, and it was probably at its worst on Thursday, but Kira let me sleep extra long Friday morning so I felt almost normal.
Feeling better may have led me to overdo it a tad on Friday. I took on the project of ripping out some very old and rotten wood that makes the boundaries for our “garden” area, which the previous owners obviously never even touched. I figure I want to eventually put our shed in that spot, and so I have plans to put down a foundation, but I want to clear it all and level out the dirt first. Anyway, some of the logs were very heavy, and so I used our riding mower to drag them away, but the actual lifting and digging took a toll on my back. I didn’t throw it out, but it was hanging by a thread all the rest of Friday. I’ve stretched it out so that now I’m feeling on the mend, but Hannah is keeping a watchful eye on me as I try to overdo it with other lifting and such.
We spent the evening on Friday at a safety festival thing at a nearby park. They had police officers, ambulance workers, rescue crews, and all sorts of other teams who might get called in to respond to an emergency. That was a fun time overall, although poor Apollo just wanted to run around and meet some other dogs, but he had to be kept on a tight leash so as to keep from scaring anyone. During the police dog demonstration, Merritt was playing in the sand of the volleyball pit, and Apollo was also exploring it. He kept hearing the police dog, and was flipping out trying to get over there. At one point he got out his energy by bouncing around and dashing through the sand, taking bites of it. After about 5 seconds, he stopped in his tracks and hung his sand-covered tongue out with an expression on his face that said, “What have I done?”
The highlight of the day was witnessing a helicopter land in the baseball field of the park, and then the kids got to get in and check it out.
After all that excitement, the two older boys wanted to get their faces painted before going home.
They enjoyed them for a few minutes, and then we had to scrub them off for bed.
Yesterday, Carver went to a schoolmate’s birthday party while Hannah and I took Apollo and the younger boys to the dog park (there’s playground equipment for the kids next to the dog park). When we picked Carver up from the facility, the boys wanted to come in, where they were invited to play a couple of rounds of dodge ball. Merritt just bounced a basketball, as he has been fascinated with the sport since seeing a Harlem Globetrotter video on YouTube. After the game, they gave all three of the boys some party favors, including coupons for our favorite ice cream place in town. Kira took the kids there later that afternoon during a round of errands, while I got caught up with some things around the house.
In a low point for the week, we’ve run into some new dishwasher woes. My repair from January seems to be working fine, but now there’s a new issue, where the top rack is not getting clean. It did that a couple of times, then it seemed better, but now it’s much worse. I took it apart and cleaned out all of the tubes, and everything as near as I can tell is working just fine, but the water is just not making it to the top. I think I’ve finally narrowed down the problem that it’s not filling with enough water, which is a problem I’m not sure I’m ready to take on, so we’ve used our home warranty that came with the house to call in a professional on Tuesday of this coming week. We hope this will solve the issue forever, but these are the joys of owning, right?
We’re just a couple of weeks away from our year anniversary of moving in, so that will be fun to celebrate. I may need to make a comprehensive list of all of the things I’ve updated just to feel like I’m making progress…