Day #38

Aloha!

It’s currently 1:14am, and I really should be sleeping. Unforunately I am just now sitting down to type out my blog for the day, so I guess my night time/early morning dreaming will have to wait for a few minutes.

Today was a good day. It had peaks and valleys like any other, but overall it was a positive experience. It started out with a morning filled with 4-6 year old fun! We worked on the letter ‘q’ today, which proved to be rather difficult for some. We tried to get the kids to draw pictures of Queens, but apparently it wasn’t an inspiring enough letter association. We ended up with a collection of drawings about just about everything except for queens. I think the closest we got to ‘queen’ was a picture of a ‘pretty princess’. I guess ‘p’ is kind of like a backwards ‘q’..Methinks that the concept of drawing a picture to match the letter ‘q’ was somewhat lost today! It’s all good though. After our attempt at ‘q’ we took the kids over to the school where we proceeded to create what ended up being a fairly decent tasting ‘chocolate chip cookie bar’. I’m always am somewhat leery of baking/cooking with small children because there is lots of opportunity for strange things to be added to the mixutre. I’m not talking about extra ingredients either…I’m sure that you can think of some of the different foreign objects that a 4-6 year old is capable of adding to a recipe. I won’t go into it, but it occasionally makes me think twice before eating. With that being said, I think that today went pretty well, and Nanajean and I managed to maintain a certain level of quality control over the cookie bars. I suppose that we likely killed any strange additions to our batter by cooking it at 350 degrees, but who knows? 🙂 Anyway, the cookie bars turned out nicely and the morning ended without any significant bloodshed!

Now, this afternoon was the moment of truth. After having our BBQ plans quashed last week, we rescheduled for this Friday. The day started out sunny, then clouded over…We held our breath…As lunch began the sun once again peaked from behind the clouds. That was all the encouragement we needed. Out came the volleyball/badminton net, out came the barbeque, out came the hotdogs, out came the hotdog buns, out came the freezies and drink boxes and on went the BBQ! The afternoon turned into a really fun ‘hang-out’ with some of our older kids. I got to play the traditional male role of grill-master. It was Nanajean’s BBQ, but she was more than happy to turn the grilling over to me! Now, I have never really BBQ’d anything in my life (aside from a couple of burgers with Cofield crew) so I put on my best confident air and went about the hotdogging process. I am happy to report that I successfully navigated the array of knobs and dials on the BBQ and cooked the ‘dogs’ to a tasty finish. I didn’t even have to let my ‘rookie’ grilling status show! Such subterfuge! The kids had a great time hanging out with us, and were entertained for most of the afternoon. It was also a nice break for all of us as well!

After the BBQ I was hit with a rather intense wave of tiredness, so in a natural reaction, I crawled into bed and fell asleep! I woke up about 25 minutes later to the sound of kids banging on our door and didn’t feel particularly refreshed, but as I sit here now, I am rather grateful for those extra moments of shuteye. After being so rudely awakened I decided that I might as well do my best to stay conscious. So…I pulled out my latest novel (Kiss the Girls by James Patterson: A nice page turning read) and proceeded to read for 4 hours. It was pure uninterupted reading, from essentially the start of the book until the end. I haven’t done a 1 day read of a book in a while, and it felt great to do it again!

After the read, we made another couragous decision. We decided that we were going to attempt a campfire. There was rain in the forecast for this evening, and it did eventually come at about 12:00am, but we made it through the night! A successful campfire was enjoyed by ourselves and a number of our camp kids and random neighbourhood kids. By the way, I also want to mention that I have been using the pocket knife that my dad sent me up with a lot lately. I haven’t even lost any extremities yet!

I should also explain that we decided earlier this morning that we weren’t going to make the trek over to Camp Bigfoot today. Based on the fact that we had nice weather we felt that our time would be better spent having our BBQ and campfire. We may be taking a car ride around the lake to the camp tomorrow to visit for the afternoon. Once again though, the forecast is for cold and rain, so we’ll see what happens.

The last thing that I want to touch on quickly is the monumental event that took place at 42 Normandy Gardens today. This is a big deal, so please pay close attention! Today, the peachy, fresh from camp, baby of the family, sister of mine Lyndsay returned! Lyndsay had been away at camp for the majority of the month of July. This had left Barb and Bruce (mom and dad) alone in the expansive mansion of a home that we live in…I’m sure that they enjoyed the peace and quiet of not having Lyndsay or I around for the last month, but I’m pretty sure that Lyndsay’s return is much appreciated. She really is a pretty decent sister, and probably a pretty decent daughter to have kicking around 42. So, I think that her return today should be noted. If you happen to see her around, ask her to sing you a campfire song! Anyway, even though I’m not really affected by Lyndsay’s return to the homestead, I do feel that she will be able to stablize the goings on, on the homefront and provide some much needed supervision over my parents! No more crazy house parties!

Alright, it’s almost 2am now, so I should probably consider sleep at this point.

Oh, by the way, Happy August!

G’Day!