Happy Father's Day!

Look at them kids all singing to me!  They sang "I'm so glad when daddy comes home" and I tried to get a picture when they were all blowing a kiss at the end.  My picture is a little too early or late, but the kids are all singing great.

The kids are trying to make the most of their summer, and that's included many trips to the library.  Everyone has a reading goal, and the kids are working hard on theirs.  The library even has a program to try to read for 1200 minutes over the summer, and the kids have been flying through it.  At the library, they have one of those giant teddy bears, and it does look like a pretty good place to sit and read a book.

When I was heading to the train to go to work, I got out of my car and saw that someone had a visitor on their windshield.  It caught my attention because I don't think I've ever seen a bird here before.

The kids made a bed for Jelly out of blankets, and she's been using it!  We're going to leave it while we're gone on our vacation so she remembers how much we love her.

Apparently Grayson has a new milk trick, and keeps a cup in the door where it's always ready when he needs a hit.  This does seem like the best way to get a drink...

We had a big storm roll through in the middle of the night.  I think it was Friday night to Saturday.  All I remember is that it woke me up several times, but I was also so tired that night that I just dropped right back to sleep.  I spent all day Friday cutting wood for bookshelves and painting them, so I was extra tired that night.  All that to say, I sure didn't get out of bed to take a look at the storm, but it seemed louder than usual. In the morning, Monica went for a walk and saw that the cactus around the neighborhood had been hit pretty hard.

On Saturday, I was out in the garage painting and working on the shelves.  I had a headlamp on to make sure I had good lighting, and apparently it was twisted a bit and pushing the cord into my head.  It didn't hurt until I took it off, and I had a pretty nice line from it.

Grayson went with Monica to the grocery store to do a little Father's Day shopping.  He is holding exactly the present he knew he wanted to get for me!  Also, I can't imagine it's very comfortable to lay in a wire cart, but at least he had a bag for his head.

Brooke has been working hard to learn a Cougarette dance from Youtube, and Kayla came over on Saturday and they worked on it together.  They got it down pretty well and were excited to show it off.  Amazing job girls.

Monica found a little leaf bug type guy in the evening when cleaning.  I don't know exactly what it is.  It looks like a leaf from the side, but it's also not that big.  Like, I think real leaf bugs are bigger, so I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it looks like one.

My kids know all the best ways to wrap up presents!  Grayson really loved the giraffe, and can't read well enough to know what the bag said.  It's okay, I also just looked at the pictures and loved it!

This morning I was putting on my Father's day tie I got a few years back, and realized we still hadn't written the year on it.  I started going through pictures and blog posts and didn't have a picture from the year I got it, nor did I mention it in a blog.  I love that tie and since it's never been featured, I'll tell you about it. It's a plain white tie, but then each of the kids put a handprint on it in a different color.  Anyway, I guess you never know when I might need to know that Grayson gave me a rainbow whisk in 2026, but now it's documented for future Alex when he needs to know.  Oh, he also gave me a Switch gift card, and suggested I could use it for the Mario Wonder DLC, but we need a Switch 2 first.

Brooke gave me some Calvin and Hobbs comics, and they were great fun to read.  The kids have really been enjoying reading them.  We don't get a newspaper, so the kids don't get to sneak the comics like I always did growing up, but now I can at least share Calvin and Hobbs with them (and Garfield once the bookshelves are done).

And from Winry I got Captain Crunch! Yum, I'm so excited to eat it.  You can also see that I got chocolate covered cinnamon bears from Monica. I really wanted some a week or two back, and found out that NOWHERE anywhere around here sells them.

When Monica asked what food I wanted for Father's day my only request was a Jeremiah's ice cream cake.  It turns out it's all just ice cream and Italian ice, but it was fantastic!  They were very nice and let Monica pick any flavors she wanted, so we had peanut butter and salted caramel Italian ice in chocolate soft serve with Biscoff cookie crumbs.  It was supreme.

And I think that's a wrap for now.  I don't have a picture of the bookshelves yet since I didn't quite finish.  As I was assembling them, I thought to check how many nails I should use per shelf, and saw recommendations to not use nails at all, but to use something else like glue or screws for strength.  So I started drilling holes and putting in screws until my drill died a little before 11 pm. So hopefully I'll have a minute on Monday to finish adding screws and getting the shelves put up.  And hopefully I'll take a picture.  I spent all day Friday (holiday for Juneteenth) and Saturday working on them, and only have a picture of a dent in my head to show for it!  And in closing, here's Jelly getting a drink from the sink in slow-mo.
 

Lemonade Stand

The kids annual lemonade stand was this Saturday!  They were very excited, and had a pretty good turnout.  They printed flyers and put them on the neighbors doors the afternoon before. While we were out, a kid rode up to me on a scooter and asked us to come to his lemonade stand. So after handing out flyers in the hot hot sun, we went to their lemonade stand Friday night!  I guess it's the right time of year.  

On Friday, the kids worked on actually making the lemonade and rice crispy treats.  They worked very hard on everything as they were hoping to be able to make some money for souvenirs while we're in Hawaii.  In addition to their flyers and spreading the world locally, I also reached out to my family with the offer of vicarious consumption, and tried my best to provide entertaining responses for their generosity.

And that's literally what we had pictures of.  At the start of the week there was still a lot of waking up in the middle of the night to get Grayson medicine to help with his recovery.  He had quite a few times where he woke up very sad with his throat hurting a lot. He also really didn't like the taste of the medicine and he pretty much decided he was ready to be done.  He had a follow up on Wednesday and they said everything was looking good and most of the scabs looked like they were gone. I believe that  meant we'd made it through the worst of it, and it seems like that was true.  So now we're getting back into regular life with less screen time and more general play.  I am a bit surprised, looking back, that none of our post-surgery pictures were this week, but I guess this week was just the sleep deprivation part.  At this point everything is back to normal and we're all having a wonderful, lemonade-filled day.
 

Girls Recitals, Grayson Tonsillectomy

Hello from beautiful dance recital after-party!  We had a whole crew come out to see the girls dance this week, and the Packers came to watch too.  Everyone had a great time.

Winry had three dances.  First was hip hop.

Then jazz.

And finally tumble pom.

She did super great in all her dances, and it was so much fun to watch.  The whole audience went wild for the 80's throwback they were wearing in their final dance number.  I'm really proud of her and glad she's having so much fun dancing.  Here's our family all together after her recital.  On the way home from Winry's recital, we all stopped at Jeremiah's for some water-ice, and, as always, you can't have a bad time at Jeremiah's.  Also, Grayson heard "Jeremiah was a Bullfrog" for the first time, I believe on the drive over, and was in LOVE!  We had to listen to it again and again and he thought it was so funny he couldn't stop laughing.

We're deep in preparations for Grayson's tonsillectomy, which includes reserving a full drawer in the freezer for popsicles, which he is very excited about.

Tuesday we had Brooke's dance recital, and she had 5 dances, however, I only seem to have been able to find pictures of 4.  She does so many types of dance I'm not even going to try to guess what is what.  This is her mad hatter dance for company.

And then she had this dance with a nice lift in it.

There was this up-beat ditty with a shiny skirt.

Ooh, ooh, this one is tumble pom!  I know this one!

And then she closed down the show with her final company dance to a song I'm going to guess is called "Butterfly."  Brooke's recital was the earlier show in the day, so after we had everyone over for pizza.

Most of our guests left Tuesday evening after pizza and bed, but my parents stuck around for the rest of the week. Wednesday morning Monica and I took Grayson to the hospital for his tonsillectomy.  He brought a few stuffed animals, including this new bear from Niki.

He was in a very good mood and very excited to get going.  He had fun changing into his hospital clothes, and just couldn't believe the hose on the sphygmomanometer was as long as his arm!

Coming out of surgery was a different story.  I came in with my camera running in case he said something funny, but he was just sad.  He did NOT want his IV in his hand any more and told us it hurt and needed to come out over and over until the nurse was able to take it out.  He did, however, immediately chomp down on his first popsicle of the day.  I think on day 1 he might have had 10 in total by the end of the day.

After he'd been awake for maybe 45 minutes they took out the IV and wrapped a bandage onto the back of his hand.  He did still sometimes say his hand hurt while the bandage was there, and also that a blister on the top of his foot hurt, but his throat and nose were just fine (he had is adenoids out too).  Phineas and Ferb wasn't calming him as I had hoped, but once we got him calmer he asked for the Switch and that helped him get through the rest of waiting at the hospital.

Being hand fed popsicles didn't hurt either.  In the end we had to stay for 2 hours after he woke up so they could monitor things.  Towards the end, he was more than ready to head for home, but was a champion the whole time.  He even took off his bandage over the IV spot when it was time.

That night, Brooke offered to sleep in his room with him.  Personally, I think she was worried about him and wanted to be in there to keep an eye on him.  I don't think we usually woke her up when we gave him medicine in the middle of the night. She tried to help comfort him a few times when he woke up, or came to get us if he was crying and we weren't there yet. So all in all she was a great helper, and I think Grayson liked having her there too.

I was in the backyard with the girls playing lacrosse, and I suddenly heart a rotation of bird calls.  It was all from this one guy on the neighbors' roof, so I figured it was a mockingbird.  I took a video of it, and when I showed it to Monica she pulled out her bird call identifying app and it identified about 6 birds, including the mockingbird.  They're pretty fun to listen to.  It very much reminded me of one of these toy laser guns from when I was a kid.

Monica found a lizard chilling in our garden, and they are welcome guests there.  Please, eat all our bugs, but mostly eat all the mosquitos!

My parents had a great time hanging out with their grandkids while visiting, and that includes reading book after book after book to Grayson.  I'll admit, he spent a lot of his recovery week watching tv or playing the switch. But if they got him going on reading stories, he would just bring another and another all day long.  

Oh, and we had a pretty decent rain storm on Friday, and I was showing my mom how we don't have rain gutters in the back.  I guess it's cause waterfalls are so pretty.

On Saturday I took my parents to the airport. When I got back home, I took the girls over to a town festival where they had tiles to paint for a mosaic!  They're doing a 250th anniversary of the USA mural, and had little tiles you could paint.  You were supposed to paint your square of the picture first, and then could add whatever you wanted to it after.  I'm really excited to get to see the final result!

Then we went over to the food trucks and got hot dogs for lunch, and they were some of the best hot dogs we've ever eaten.  The place was called Topp Dawg, and if you see it somewhere, you gotta go try one.

Then, when we were heading for home I got a call from Monica saying that Grayson had decided he wanted to paint a tile.  So I dropped the girls off and took Grayson back over for round 2.  He got a swath of blue sky, so on top of his blue he painted a frog!  And he painted it all by himself.  I helped find a reference image to copy, and helped him break it into pieces like painting a big circle first, and paint this leg with a line like this or whatever, but he did the whole thing by himself, amazing!

As you might have guessed, Grayson was feeling a lot better towards the end of the week.  He lost his popsicle craze after day 2 or so because he ate so many the first few days.  On Saturday afternoon he found his tattoos he got for Christmas and asked Winry to open a tattoo parlor.  You can't even see them all, because this is actually a picture of him putting on like 8 pairs of socks at once, and those are covering a few.

Sunday was stake conference, and we just watched it from home while Grayson was recovering.  I'm sure we could have made it work at the church, but I have this weird feeling that sitting in the chapel that long would have made his throat hurt.  After church, we decided to go over and see how the temple construction is going.  It seems good to me, though I'm no construction expert. Especially not when you're talking stone and steel I beams.

I had the treat for FHE on Sunday, and I decided to make homemade Tim Tams.  They turned out pretty tasty, but I think for attempt 2 I'm going to look for a different biscuit recipe that's a bit lighter, and bakes crisper.  Don't get me wrong, they were very good, but if you think Tim Tam, when you take a bite and it's not crisp you also think "stale," and that's not what I was going for.

What a week.  A bit of an adventure for everyone.  Oh, and I even missed a trip to Chicago for work to stay home for the surgery.  Obviously work understood, it's just more the fact that literally everything landed on this same week.  Hopefully Grayson continues to recover great over the next week. They did warn us that 5-7 days after surgery his scabs would start coming off and that would be the worst of it, so that's what we're heading into right now.  Wish us luck!!