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.