It's a man weekend

Buds

We had ourselves a little man weekend while the wife was away having another WWW weekend. The WWW stands for Weekend Without and I'll let your third grade imagination run wild with the last W but in essence it's an estrogen party. Us boys, we partied it up while the wife was away. Finally a weekend with no curfew, no one cutting you off too soon and no one cooking you a hot meal, tucking you into bed, or getting up in the middle of the night with your screaming child. Who needs that?! It was time to run around in your drawers, belch as much as you want and let the occasional flatulence loose without a hint of embarrassment. We were celebrating manhood.

Fashionistas

It started off with the boys getting dressed by themselves. There was no one here to tell them they needed to match or to pick clothes out for them. Whatever they wanted to wear was fine with me. Q chose a nice black ensemble. The highlight? An extra large Jack Daniels T-shirt. Oh, to be three again! Gavin, also went with the extra large T-shirt - these boys are a growing! but decided a giant pig was more his style, a pig playing golf. They're getting so mature. It almost brings a tear to your eye.

We stayed up too late, but mostly because it needs to be dark out to blow stuff up. Blowing stuff up during the day can be fun but to get that full explosive effect you really need the cover of darkness or at least dusk so we stayed up a little past our bed time. It started with sparklers but we quickly moved into tanks, bottle rockets and small mortars. Quinny wore his spiderman PJs in case things got out of control and we needed to be rescued. Plus his spidysense would be able to sense danger a wee bit ahead of time to thwart any potential forest fires. For full disclosure purposes there was a minor grass fire but we had plenty of water and it was quickly extinguished. What? We barely have a lawn anyway with the total lack of rain and the 100+ temps here in Tempe, Arizona.

Sunday morning it was raining. God knows we needed the rain, but when you start your day at 5:30 you plan, baby and Daddy didn't plan for it to rain so he was woefully unprepared to have the boys inside all morning. We were going to do a little park action, followed by walk down to the lake and then a little fishing. What we ended up with was candy for breakfast, a spitting contest that ended prematurely when Gavin spit his bah (pacifier) into the toilet (spittoon) and retrieved with lightning quickness only to reapply to his face. Please, everyone, a collective eeeeewwwwwe. Thank-you. That was followed by a trip to the mouthwash station and on to the dump for the bah to find its final resting place. RIP, bah.

The beginnings of a pyromaniac?

I then used reverse psychology to trick them into cleaning. Ya, cleaning's fun. Here you run the swiffer. You run the vacuum and daddy will supervise drinking his coffee. We actually stripped 3 beds, did 3 loads of laundry, vacuumed 4 rooms, two rugs and poorly swiffered the wood floors. C'mon Gavin, pull your weight! We found 4 bahs, buried one so we're plus three!

We followed that relatively successful activity up with something tamer - art projects. I know, I know many of you didn't think I had it in me but I can plan a decent art project as well as the next dude home alone with two kids under age 3 with little to no art training that scored a solid C, which is totally average, people, in school. We made rocket ships. That's right, rocket ships. We cut, pasted, painted and flew our sweet, sweet rocket ships. One might say they were out of this world. Believe it.

The basement...AWESOME!

This brought us up to about 9:30 am. I know, it doesn't seem possible, but trust me it is. Gavin has a solid attention span of roughly four minutes, unless he's breaking something, which is approximately 68% of the time, in which case that can fluctuate from 30 seconds to 10 minutes depending on how flexible the item he's bending into oblivion. Books have an especially short lifespan. Quinny is around 3 1/2 so his attention span is a solid 7 minutes making him much easier to entertain.

We then, thankfully, rediscovered the basement. Oh, Mr. Unfinished Basement and your endless possibilities. I blew up an old swimming pool. The one we have now is, I'll totally ballpark it, 672 times larger and doesn't take 2 days to blow up with 3 minor blackouts.  I was only unconscious for a couple of minutes. Right, 9:32 am, and we're in the basement. The pool, no not that one, the tiny one, try and stay with me, doubles as a bouncehouse. It's not super safe but we have excellent liability insurnace. It's one of the perks of having a mid-life career change. So we bounced in our psuedo-bounce-house for 6 minutes, built a tower out of legos, destroyed said tower, I'm racking my brain for what activity can we possibly do next when suddenly like Moses receiving the 10 commandments from Mount Sinai the clouds parted, the sun peaked through and can I get an AMEN!? we could go oustside again! Hallejulia! Finally, we can just chuck some life jackets on these kids, grab a brewski and float the day away. Man-weekend. It really was that awesome. I'm not sure if you've seen the Hangover but if you have I have a string of pictures just like that of the weekend and they are hilarious. If you haven't seen it, you probably shouldn't. It's a little too shocking for most of you. Don't even google it. Seriously, don't.

PS  No one pooped in the tub (Including this guy)

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Lucky, you stink!

Had a crazy week with the 4th of July on a Wednesday.  Leap year is killing me!  You go out have a good time over the weekend, work two days, have a solid 1 day weekend, work two days and then it's the weekend again??  How is one supposed to get used to that?  Too weird!  We had Carrie's folks come up Tuesday afternoon and spend the majority of the week with us.  We had a good time using the pool into the wee hours Tuesday night, mostly to make sure the pool lights work.  We might have held some late-night swim races too.  I'm proud to say I'm an underwater champion in the sub-12 beer category! 

We hadn't planned on seeing a professional fireworks show because the boys are still too little to go through all that hassle; being up that late, dealing with crowds and that's not to mention the 100+ temps.  We moved to Arizona! There was a total burn ban including charcoal grills and no fireworks!  In a salute to this great country, while also sticking it to the man, we bought some fireworks and lit them anyway.  Let freedom ring-KA-BOOM! While we were doing that we heard the fireworks going off down by the lake so like a normal American we jumped in the SUV, drove straight down to the lake, parked on the grass and with the car/AC running watched 3 professional displays from our vantage.  It was great.  No hassle, no planning and no sweating!

But to get back to the title of this post, we had another night-swim adventure because the first one went so well so we had a redo on Friday night.  There weren't any races this time around but we still had a good time.  Around 11 O'clock we were getting ready to head in and decided to let Lucky out for his bedtime wazzer.  I'm putting some last minute items away in the garage and I can see him going after something in the bushes.  We more or less live in the country so for him to come across some local wildlife isn't strange. (I had to stop for a spotted baby fawn and momma to cross the road on the way to work this week).  He ends up cornering this thing under the two steps to get into the side door.  I'm sort of paying attention but it's dark and I can't see what he has.  Clearly, it's small, like smaller than a raccoon, so I'm not overly concerned and getting pre-occupied with the garage.  I finish up and you can tell whatever he has cornered, is getting more agitated so I call for him.  Well, it turns out it was a black kitty with a white stripe down it's back.  And then it happened. The most putrid smell on the planet.  I mean instant gag reflex and I was close enough to hear it and get the full delicious whiff-effect.  That wasn't a cute little kitty, it was a skunk! And this wasn't some charmer like Peppy-le-pew.  And just like that, Lucky cemented his nickname Stinks into Wisco-lore.  Oh, man does it reek.  It's 11:20, our dog smells like the most horrific, rancid, tainted smell, just foul. The whole great outdoors was filled with a puke-your-guts out aura floating in the wind.  It was cartoonish; so thick you could almost see it.  We couldn't find anywhere to go to get out of the smell.  The stupid skunk wouldn't leave so he was running through the shrubbery, under the deck but wouldn't actually leave so we were more or less afraid to walk into the house for fear of a close encounter spraying.  Clearly, we did not need a round two. We got the message - golden retrievers and skunks are not good playmates.

I yell for Carrie, that wakes Q up, Carrie's mother, who had already gone to bed, let's us know we stink something awful (news flash!) so we now have stinky dog, relatively stinky humans from close proximity, screaming child and my mother-in-law giving the play by play.  I jest. She handled Q like a pro, which means she was sleeping in the spider-man bed with Spider-Q for at least the short term to get him to go back to sleep.  Carrie and I got the pleasure of giving Lucky, I mean Stinky a late night bath in the dark.  Guess what?  After all that - he still stinks.  Now what?  Is that you say toemato, I say tahmato thing an old wive's tale?  I think it is and at any rate where am I going to get 10 gallons of tomato juice at midnight?  We got over it, that is his new found stink mixed with wet dog and dog shampoo, showered ourselves and spent a stinky night together in our extra polluted honeymoon suite (the master bedroom).  At least the pooch is on the floor.  It could be worse right?  I can't exactly think of how, but I'm sure it could be worse.