Our Trip To Florida

We are just back from a lovely three day getaway to Destin, Florida. This year, breaking with tradition, Marty and I went by ourselves.

We had a very relaxing, very nice stay, at a perfect place called the Pelican Resort. It was right ON the beach.

We went to the Gulfarium and saw a dolphin show, a sea lion show, and some sting-rays and sharks drifting around in murky green water. We fed popcorn to the the screaming seagulls. We cruised around aboard The Southern Star around the choppy (very choppy) waters of the harbor and sea.




We went to the movies, we ate out, we visited with Marty's cousin Sarah and her family.

Destin is definitely my new favorite Florida spot.

And two mornings we were able to stand on our balcony and watch dolphins frolicking in the water just offshore. Genuine frolicking, too: Jumping, twirling, flipping, and body surfing!

I have come away relaxed, decompressed, soothed, and ready to continue with real life.

Happy New Year everyone!

Christmas at Gram and Grandad's

We had our Early Christmas at Gram and Grandad's house last week. They are going to Boston, so this was our chance to celebrate together. Mom made a lovely dinner...see the Christmas themed jello, for example? The table was beautiful and Christmasy looking and everyone was in good cheer. Except for Sam, that is...he wasn't feeling so great and by the end of the gathering was ready for bed.

Benny made this little ornament in school on Christmas Craft Day.

Merry Christmas Grandad!

Their home was lovely and so wonderfully decorated. The tree was so pretty!

The boys were showered with toys galore and they enjoyed all of them.

Benny was especially happy and excited. The boys love passing out gifts and seeing who got what. They had the Christmas Spirit going on!

Thank you Mom and Dad for another lovely year and another lovely holiday!

Science Museum

We went to the Tulles science museum in Cartersville yesterday. It was a very nice place. We saw early attempts at cars and motorbikes, replicas of the Wright brothes plane and The Appolo space capsule, airplane engines, gems, minerals, fossils, dinosaur bones, and much more.

The boys especially loved the children's section at the end, where they could pan for gems to their heart's content. And they got to keep everything they found. Both boys came home with a small bag of gemstones of all colors. The guides were great at identifying the lumps of gems and helped make it very exciting for the kids.

After that, they did a "fossil dig," in a specialized area for kids. They each could keep one fossil and both of them ended up with a fang-like tooth.

It was fun and we plan to go back!

Gem panners hard at work in this photo!

Marty, don't look behind you............


Yikes!

What's a science museum without a T Rex?

A prehistoric porcupine of sorts.

Rumpled but having fun.

We practically had the place to ourselves!


Coming home the conversation between the boys went something like this:

Sam: Benny, would you rather drink a bottle of ketchup or a bottle of hot sauce?
Benny: It depends. What kind of hot sauce are we talking about?

Sam: From Chipolte's Mexican Resteraunt.

Benny: Oh man. I'll take the ketchup.

Sam: I'd do hot sauce. Would your rather jump from a fifty foot tall cliff or a fifty foot tall building?

Benny: What am I landing on?
Sam: Concrete.

Benny: Then it really doesn't matter what I pick.

Sam: Pick one.

Benny: A building.

Sam: I'd take cliff. Would you rather......

And on and on. Where they get these odd things to talk about is beyond me!

On The Blog

Last night we took Spike out for his daily romp. We gave him a Ritz cracker, which of course is larger than his whole head. He LOVED it. He was so cute eating the cracker that we took pictures. (I know. We're pathetic.) The whole time we were taking pictures, Benny kept saying, "This is going on the blog. This is SO going on the blog!"

He meant my blog, not his. So....to oblige Benny, here are hamster and cracker pics.

Thanks for indulging us!

Thanksgiving

Better late than never, right? Pictures from Thanksgiving!

Karen and family were visiting for the holiday, and it was so nice. Marty brought fishing gear, (including live minnows) and took the boys out on the dock for some cold and nippy fishing.

He was the picture of patience, as the boys were all about repeated casting, putting fingers in the minnow bucket and spearing them on hooks, casting some more, getting their lines tangled in tree branches, and commenting on the cold.

In addition to fishing, we had a lovely day visiting with each other, eating, and the boys played outside in the giant ball Gram and Grandad got them.

As always Mom made a specatacular dinner. The food was perfect! And of course Mom and Dad were the gracious hosts they always are.

It was another great meal, a nice day with family, and I look forward to it again next year. Thank you Mom and Dad for making Thanksgiving so special!

Tree Trimming

It's that time of year again. Out comes the tree, the box of beloved ornaments, and two boys ready and eager to decorate. (Though you certainly can't tell that from the expression on their faces in this first photo!)

My mom has always bought the boys a special Hallmark ornament for each year of their life. So it's a lot of fun for the boys to find "their" particular ornaments mixed in with the others, and to hang them up themselves. Each year they take great care in selecting just the right spots for "their" ornaments. And each year the spots get a little higher on the tree.

There are also many ornaments handmade by Mom that I love to take out and look at all over again each year.

And it seems no matter how crushed and dismal the tree looks when I pull it out of its box and first set it up, by the time it's fluffed a little, and decorated to the hilt, it looks beautiful!

Marty being the tall man that he is always has the job of putting the angel on top of the tree. Benny told me later that he thought HE could also reach the top of the tree without a ladder. I told him next year he can try it.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

The Giant Ball

A while back, we were at Mom's house. She had some toy catalouges out and asked the boys to look through them to see if they saw anything they might want for Christmas. Sam immediately zeroed in on a giant inflatable ball that you can actually GET INSIDE OF and roll around in! Or as Benny put it, "It's like the ball we have for our hamster, only bigger, and you put people inside of it."

Sam said he wanted the ball for Christmas, and he said, "I don't care if I don't get anything else except the ball. That would be fine. If that's the only present I get, that's okay, because I really want it!"

Being the wonderful grandparents they are, Mom and Dad bought The Big Ball and suprised everyone with it at Thanksgiving. Cole, Carter, Sam and Benny were thrilled.

Cole went to work getting the ball inflated.

Grandad helped them load it up in his wagon and off they all went to the park.

Here's a shot for scale purposes. See the scope of what we're talking about? Is it any wonder they were thrilled?

(All these pictures were taken by Karen, btw.)

Down the hill they go. And it was not enough to put one child in the ball at a time, no, no, no. Please. That's for rookies. They had to get inside the ball in pairs. They had to lie down on the ground and have someone inside the ball roll over them. They had to put that ball through the gauntlet.

And it did not take long for the ball, sadly, to be punctured beyond salvaging, and succumb to tatters.

Grandad ordered a new one, but it's not here yet. For now we have to live with the memories of the Big Ball and how wonderful it was.

Thank you Gram and Grandad for making the boys soooo happy!

You Are Correct!

The boys and I were driving in the car a couple of days ago, and as usual they were jabbering over each other. Sam said he had to memorize the meaning of the word "Autobiography" for school. I explained that an autobiography is a book you write about yourself. It has to be YOU as the author because if someone else writes about you, it becomes a biography, not an autobiography.

Sam said he needed more than one definition of the word for the test.

Irritably I said, but that's the definition. There's no way to make up other definitions. That's it.

Sam said, "No, I need a definition the teacher already told me. Something about narrative....maybe? Something like that. She told me but I can't remember."

I was about to roll my eyes at the way it was becoming unecessarily complicated. I said, "Sam. An autobiography is when you write about yourself. Period."

Benny, who had obviously been making an effort to wait for a break in the conversation so as not to interuppt, saw a chance to speak. And he said, "You could also call it a Personal Narrative."

Sam said, "That's it! That's the one the teacher wants us to remember."

Well. What a humbling moment for Impatient Mom. Look at us. One of us has a master's degree in writing, has studied words, definitions, and book genres. One of us in third grade and is nine years old. But who paid attention, and who remembered what he was taught, and who came up with a Nail-It-On-The-Head, Slam-Dunk definition of an autobiography?

"A Personal Narrative."


Having kids can be many things, and sometimes, it's humbling. This was one of those times!

Counting Quarters

See the intensity? This is no job for the innattentive. My guys are counting and rolling quarters, thank you very much. And they are using Benny's prized coin rolling machine. You drop in the coins, it sorts them into the appropriate funnel, and out they come in neat wrappers.

Marty keeps a jar of change on the dresser, and every so often he gets it out and he and Benny count up and roll the change. Benny enjoys it and so do I. I think it appeals to his math sense and his desire to sort things out and see them organized. He is a most focused man when he's on the job.

And for the record, we ended up with forty dollars in quarters!

Drama in the Leaves

The boys have enjoyed playing in the leaves this fall. But do they go out and simply jump in the pile? No. There are productions. There are rules. There are procedures.

Last week they called me out to see the "show" they had planned. I filmed it. It was brief and puzzling but appeared to make perfect sense to them. I cut it off when Sam whacked his face on a branch, but that was okay as the show was over anyway (and Sam was fine.) They laughed, they caught their breath, they played some more.

Enjoy!

Video Test

I have a new gadget...it's a Flip Video. I am running a test blog today to see if my video clip will show up here. Since the boys are not home my only active subject was Spike, the hamster. So I filmed him. So here he is, if it works. And if it does work, then there will be family video clips to come!

Tumbling

Have I mentioned that my boys are active? True, we have periods where everyone sprawls in front of the TV and eats and otherwise does not move. And Sam does spend some time on the computer playing some beloved video game lately. But overall, this is the life they prefer.

Tumbling, flipping, bouncing, and as always, challenging themselves and each other.

You can't really tell, but you better believe the trampoline has a net all the way around it!

Yesterday they were bouncing like crazy on the trampoline and I had the harmless notion I'd take a few pictures. Well, the minute they saw the camera, I had two directors on my hands. "Wait. Not yet. I'm going to do a flip with a twist and you catch me in mid-air. There. Did you get it? Did you? Let me see. No, no, now we have to do it over. Do it again. Watch. Are you watching? Ready? One, two, THREE!"

And of course with the excitement came pushing and bumping.

I had to leave because the directing was getting a bit much for me. And once the camera disappeared, the boys returned to true Boy-Code passtime: Trying to knock each other down without using their hands!

It sounds brutal, but they really have perfected the art of the leg sweep, and the giggling and laughing and shrieks of delight put my mind at ease. I raked leaves while they wore themselves to a frazzle, then we all went inside for some cold drinks.

On a side note, you know one of the downsides of the Mom Job Description? Having to say "no" to some of their eager brainstorms. Like yesterday. Granted it was only 65 degrees out, but do I really want them to get out the hose and spray themselves all over while jumping on the trampoline in the middle of November? Not really. Naturally the response is a dejected, "But WHY?" Which is another question that is just part of the Mom Job Description.

Lately on Facebook my Aunt Martha has been encouraging us to reflect on things we're thankful for. Yesterday, listening to the boys laugh and laugh and laugh, I reflected on how thankful I am to hear that sound.

Bustin' Wood

Today was a great fall day; the perfect day for building a fire in the fireplace. But do have a fire, first you have to 'bust some wood.'

Benny loves it when Marty announces it is time to bust up some wood. Benny has been dying to use the axe and chop wood just like Marty. Well today, now that he is nine, it was finally time for him to give it a try.





The axe was heavier than he thought, and it was all harder than he thought, but he did an excellent job. He heaved that axe high and really had good aim at the spot Marty indicated.

We had a lovely blazing fire this evening, thanks to the two woodsmen!

Mug Shot

The thing about having a Mom with a new camera is......

She is ALWAYS taking your picture!!!

Love the resigned look. I took this after Benny's musical last week, while we were waiting for the singing star to emerge from backstage. My new camera was still burning a hole in my pocket and I was itching to try it out in all different lights. Sam humoured me, but I don't think he was thrilled.

I tell him it's his own fault for being so photogenic.