Life has certainly seemed pretty fast paced in the last couple of months. It seems like we are always on the go. Needless to say, I can’t remember half of the stories that we would have normally blogged about, and we’ve probably forgotten all of the funny things the kids say. I think the latter may be partly because the kids say CRAZY stuff almost every day. Especially Andrew. Just pretend the weirdest thing you might here a kid say and then put it in Andrew’s mouth. Yep, that’s about it.
Just to give you one that is still fresh in memory: Andrew is awesome about playing with Baby Zack. When he gets tired of it though, he’ll go up to Katie and say, “Okay, mom, the Andrew Show is over. It’s time for the Mommy Show.” Additionally, if Zack ever gets upset Andrew immediately informs his mom that “Zack’s hungry!”
I’m just going to go back through the pictures that are on my phone. They are not the highest quality pictures and most of the pictures are taken on Katie’s phone, so this is just a sampling of the stuff we’ve been up to.
FATHER’S AND SON’S CAMPOUT
First of all the day of the campout was my “regular day off” or RDO since everything in the military has to have an acronym. If I haven’t told you yet, I have every other Friday off. It's fantastic. I absolutely love it. Love it to DEATH. So Andrew and I went out on errands to basically pick up some stuff for the Father's and Son's campout while Ben was at school.
First we dropped off the Suburban to have the tires rotated, then while that happened I took Andrew to lunch at Burger King and we walked down the street to a local butcher shop.
I got Andrew his hamburger and he kind of stared at it in disgust. “Why do they call it Booger King?” he asked me. “They don’t they call it BURGER King.” “Oh! That’s better!” He went on to ask me more about that but that was all he really needed to know to start eating his hamburger.
The local butcher shop is awesome. They will prepare any cut of meat I want there including sausage without sugar. So I ordered some chorizo made into links for my dinner on the campout and bought some knuckle bones for the dogs.
TANGENT STORY: We have to separate the dogs when we give them bones. Dandy didn’t finish hers so Katie put it in a plastic bag and left it on the porch. Some long time later Kallie was asked to take it out to the back yard. She got a little surprise too. The bone was FULL of the grossest, wettest, biggest maggots I have ever seen. Just the way these little buggers undulated their body to move along was gross enough to induce a gag reflex. I took over and dumped all of them on the grass. It was a pile probably .5” tall and spread over a decent diameter. After dinner I went out and couldn’t see one maggot. I found a straggler up on the porch. So I put him on the grass to find out where they all went. Not 30 seconds later the ants had found him. Unfortunately, now we have an ant problem…
Then we picked up the car and went to Walmart for the first time. Then we went to Costco. Then we went back to the meat market to pick up my order. Then we went back to Walmart to pick up things we had forgotten as well as things that we thought we were going to buy at Costco that weren't there. By that time Andrew was like “Dad, I'm tired.” I was too. I hate shopping and especially when it takes up the whole day.
We went home and I packed up the car. When Ben got out of school we took off. Of course, we had to stop by a Walmart one more time on the way there to pick up everything I remembered had been forgotten. Crazy.
The Father's and Son's campout was awesome. We drove about an hour north of where we live into the bottom of the Rockies and camped out up by these red rock formations and Ponderosa pines. I think the stars were actually brighter than what we see up at the cabin in Timberlakes. I was laying next to Andrew trying to get him to fall asleep when he says, “I'm scared.” “Of what?” “Something that's REALLY dangerous!” “There's nothing really dangerous right now.” “Oh, when will there be?” “I'll let you know if it comes up.” “Okay.”
So when we moved here I ended up finding my old CO2 pellet gun that I had as a teenager. So I bought some new pellets and CO2 and brought it on the campout. Ben loved shooting it. A couple of other kids got interested too. The family in the next camp over had brought some green gas air soft guns. I might have to get Ben one. Forget that, I might have to get me one.
Anyways. Ben played capture the flag with a bunch of kids that night and Andrew and I made a couple of smores. The next day we shot the gun some more and had breakfast and played around. Andrew was climbing up and down this felled pine tree like it was nothing. The kid was probably 6 feet in the air with his hands covered in pine sap and happy as could be. Crazy. As we were about to leave he had a little twig in his hands that he was scraping with his keys. I asked what he was doing and he said he wanted to “peel” it. He's been watching Ben learn how to carve wood with his pocket knife.
We got back and Ben had a birthday party, which just happens to be when Kallie presents us with a birthday party invitation that she received sometime which also requires an RSVP. We tried to call them but they didn't pick up so Katie rushed her off to Walmart in to buy a gift on the off chance and then took her over. You would think that after all the excitement and rush she caused us she would be thrilled to go to the party. NOPE. She started crying and hiding behind Katie and she wouldn't even say hi to the friends there who came up to talk to her. She completely shut down and came home. Crazy. Nothing like buying someone you don’t know yet a $15 birthday gift and then not enjoying the party.
WE WATCH THE SOLAR ECLIPSE
It turns out that the solar eclipse this past spring was set to be centered right across Albuquerque. So of course, we have to go see it. We were talking to another family in the ward and decided to drive up to the top of Sandia Peak (the mountain right on the east side of Albuquerque) to watch it. It was the perfect plan, and really how many nerds would have the same idea?
Well, we were nearing the top about 45 minutes before the main event to find that about a couple thousand fellow nerds had the same idea. Brilliant. So we drove back down around to the other side of the mountain to watch it from the foothills.
We had a couple of ways to view the eclipse, but it wasn’t until we went to leave that we realized how stupid we were. As we got back in the car we found that with both sliding doors open we could have had the perfect show watching it through four panes of tinted auto glass. Oh, well.
ZACK GETS MAD
Yeah, this is about as bad as it gets.
GRANDMA AND PAPA VISIT:
Mom and Dad came down to visit us Memorial Day weekend. They brought Hailey and Ava. They initially were going to bring Caden, but apparently he had been pooping his pants everyday. I guess he finally had 1 day were he didn't poop his pants and then thought that Grandma was going to take him. He was a little upset when informed that Ava had taken his place.
While they were here we went to the zo0. For some reason Albuquerque has a pretty fantastic zoo and botanical gardens (the aquarium – not so much). Things started out pretty fun.
While we were waiting for the zoo train the kids started tearing apart the souvenir store. They had a bunch of stuffed animals and other things that we weren’t going to buy. The kids all wanted to take their picture with a favorite stuffed animal though. Ava picked one up, hugged it, said, “I’m going to walk outside now,” and bolted for the door. Luckily, I caught her before it became a security incident.
We also got to watch the polar bears get fed. It was pretty cool watching a giant polar boar take a 20 foot dive to catch a fish. It was also a little unnerving to watch those guys sniffing the air trying to figure out how to get to the crowd to spruce up their diet a bit while waiting for the fish.
It was going pretty good, but when Grandma gets tired the party comes to an end pretty fast. Eventually, Hailey started whining about something and before she even finished her sentence Mom goes, “No ice cream for you!” Ahhhhhh, memories.
On Saturday we were going to go swimming but it was pretty windy and cold so we went to see the Lorax. Then we bought kites and food and went to go have a picnic in the park. It was almost impossible to eat however because the wind was so strong. It was crazy wind. It was pretty obvious that the kites would have been ripped to shreds so we simply went home.
At home we figured out how to make ice cream that wouldn't be completely terrible on the Meat Lovers Diet. Heavy whipping cream, agave, vanilla extract, and peppermint extract. It was fantastic.
Sunday after church we actually took the kites out to the field at the high school. It was just perfect. We had bought two delta kites and a decorative type flower kite. The deltas were really cool. You have to have two spools of string to fly them and you can turn them left or right by manipulating the strings. I haven't flown a kite since I lived Arizona as a kid. I can remember running up and down the stupid street trying to get that kite in the air with no wind. Crazy. It was a lot easier this time. We actually had wind.
Unfortunately, Mom really wanted to get home so they left around 5 or 6 in the morning on Monday. It was really sad to see them go but we were set to see them again soon as you’ll find out in the next block of “catch-up” stories.
