The River

jumping off the diving board

Geez, a family goes out and gets a pool and all of a sudden the blogging comes to a stand still.

For the first time in a long long time our social calendar is full.  With so many friends and family close and everyone in our new northen climate taking full advantage of the outstanding weather our entire summer is nearly packed.  We realized we didn't have too many open weekends left to head up to the river and enjoy the Big Muddy for a weekend so we decided to head up there on Friday night. 

Traveling with the boys in the car is okay but it's much better at certain times of the day.  After school isn't a great time to go because they're a little wound up from school and usually run around outside until dinner time to wear themselves out. To put them in the car for that hour, the dinner hour and then the hour brefore the bedtime routine is pushing our luck.  Quinny is pretty good.  He's grown into an excellent big brother and is helping out on a daily basis.  You mix that with his own growing maturity; being able to pick his clothes out, get dressed, get drinks and snacks for himself and you have a pretty outstanding three year old.  Gavin is in that middle stage.  He's just learning how to talk so he's great at understanding you but it's a little harder for him to tell you what he wants so he still spends a great deal of his time going "ahhh, ahhh, ahhh, ahh."  I hate it.  I absolutelty hate it.  You could pick him up because he was ahh, ahh, ahh something and you try to figure it out.  You give him what he wants and then approximately 1 milliscecond later it's ahh, ahh, ahh for something else, which leads me to go to AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH land, which is 1 millisecond away from the insane asylum.  Now, if this was a 3-4 week stage, which is how long most annoying habits our boys have had like when Q was enamored with the F-bomb (we're glad he moved on from that stage).  He hasn't said it once since we moved to puritanical Wisconsin.  Those immoral Floridians! I could totally survive but Gavin has been at it for like a year. 

The kid loves sunglasses - beware!

Anyway, we were heading to the river my ahh, ahh, ahh boy screamed for 2 hours of the three hour drive.  That's not necessarily odd behavior (welcome to parenting!) but ususally you live in a house where you can run far enough away to get a brief reprieve where in the car packed with all your gear and your fat best friend, Stinks, there is nowhere to hide my friends.  So you grin and bear and go to your special place.  But even your special place can't withstand the force of a 1 year old screaming for 2 hours.  It's tough....

...But then you get to the river and go boating and have the time of your life.  The boys had a party night on Friday where Quinny stayed up almost until midnight - a new record!  No naps the next day and everyone was pretty good and kept their cool.  Q and I did some fishing where he caught maybe 7-8 bluegills in the morning.  We had another fishing pool fiasco.  I've now bought 4 for Quentin.  Maybe I should invest/invent a kid's fishing store.  Everyone had a good time until that drive home when we had a screaming repeat.  We finally pull into the driveway and I can see something swimming in the pool.  It was an enormous mouse doing laps around the pool - the backstroke.  Okay, so maybe not the backstroke but definitely enormous and definitely swimming.  After launching the mouse with the skimmer over the fence and back into the woods we open up the filter and find four live frogs.  We were just happy to know that someone was enjoying the pool over the weekend while we were gone.

It's Official

Friends, family and hangers-on, grab your speedos! It's official- the pool was opened today.  Who knew that it would be this easy?  The only real problem we have is we have no, and I mean no idea how to keep this thing up and running.  There was some talk about procuring a robot to clean the pool.  That sure beats my wife working from home with a pool boy swinging by all too often.  Something about chlorine tablets, alkaline (you mean throw some batteries in there?) and acid - no not that kind.  Well, actually I have no idea what kind of acid they're talking about.  Ah, it's blue and he said we can swim in it.  I'm sure the rest of it will get worked out down the road at some point.  They say the best way to learn is to screw up a lot and learn the hard way.  Check and double check!  So feel free to book your get away weekend to fabulously LG and come take a dip in the pool.

As far as the rest of the house goes it's a slow and methodical process with a picture getting hung there, a last remaining box getting unpacked there, one of our children hammering a bunch of hammer holes into a newly patched and painted wall there.  Neither child will admit it even under intense lighting and questioning.  You have go to be kidding me.  We didn't even make it a month without destroying a newly patched wall.  My mom says it adds character.  It adds something alright.

Putting on the final touches is slow going.  You thought the curtains you took seven years to buy at the old house would fit nicely.  Then you realize the ceilings are two feet lower so not so much.  Anyone want some really well thought out curtain purchases that are basically new?  Just kidding, the Martha Stewart in Carrie mixed with a hint of MacGuyver thinks she can work it out.  Until then we're still the number one house in the neighborhood for voyeurism.

The super snobby garbage men finally came to haul our much needed massive 1 month pile of trash away.  What's with the over picky garbage folks here in the Midwest?  If you can't cram it into the one (let me stress one here) garbage can they provide you they won't take it.  Let's see here.  Um, this is America!  You can't limit a family of four plus a slightly overweight, or rather big boned dog to an entire week's worth of garbage crammed into one measly garbage can!?  What is this communist China?  So, once a month they'll take whatever you can pull, push or drag to the curb so we stocked piled our trash for an entire month and then let the curb have it.  We could barely pull out of the driveway to get to work.  And the titans of industry took not one, not two but three separate and timed throughout the day literally from 8am to 5pm to pick it all up.  The snobby garbage man picking up his one measly can came at 8.  Some guy cruised through at noon and took just the cardboard.  When I say some guy, I don't mean Elmer from down the street. I mean our once-in-a-while-cardboard-picker-upper-garbage man, if you can still call him a man.  And then the trash man came that took all the fun stuff.  You should've seen all the traffic our garbage was getting.  Everyone and their mother would slow down and take a gander at all that trash.  Unfortunately, in this case, one man's trash, was simply one man's trash.

Check out the sweet transformation of the pool in 3 short days.  Can't wait to take a dip!