I am finally giving myself permission to go and purchase a new small digital camera. You'll remember my last camera whoas last year ... well for the last six months or more display has not worked. An annoying quirk I didn't feel justified a $150 trip to Cannon (our last experience with sending cameras to Cannon proved to be an expensive waste of time and money). I decided I would wait it out and get my money's worth. Surely a year would be long enough, right? It's taken 2400 pictures, that's pretty good isn't it?
My brother laughs at my camera whoas. He doesn't know anyone who goes through digital cameras more than us. He says, "Kate, you're probably the only person who would be getting ripped off by purchasing the service plan option from Best Buy." So true ... we're defiantly going that route!
We'll it's been more than a year - what a nice discovery - and a few weeks ago I announced to GR that I'd been seriously considering purchasing a new little camera. And after downloading the pictures from the Cannon's memory card a few minutes ago I've decided it's time.
(Friday, July 13th) This was our road trip to Dave and Busters for an over the top lunch and afternoon of fun and games in the arcade. Diane wanted to do this as a last ha-rah to Elspeth's visit, and it was all that and more. GR took the day off work, Chris was in town to fly back with Elspeth and the girls, so the entire family was together.
We had a great lunch and then everyone headed back to the arcade ... wow! It's been nearly 20 years since I've played arcade games at Six Flags, I had a lot of catching up to do. Sam did really well playing skee ball, Emily won 150 tickets her first time on Speed Demon, and Rebecca made very consistent contributions of 50 tickets here and there to the family bucket. When it was time to go, we pooled our tickets, and thanks to a huge contribution of tickets from Grandpa Bob (2,000 or so), each of the 5 grandchildren had 600 points to go shopping in the prize shop.
Alex enjoying a chocolate milk shake:
Sam after getting an amazing score playing Skee Ball:
Emily and her 150 tickets from Speed Demon:
Sam riding a motorcycle game (Grandpa's helping him steer):
GR and Chris playing the game Bob played to rack up the 2000 tickets:
So you can see the camera isn't in tip top shape. I have manage to "fix" the lens cover and it's now opening all the way ... but I still think I'll be purchasing a new camera in the near future.
Sunday, Sam turned 4, and he starts our family string of 5 more birthdays over the next 6 weeks ... gotta love it! Lots of cake, lots of ice cream, lots of presents!
GR and I work really hard at make our kids birthday's special (what parents don't!?). But our family schedule the week leading up to Sam's birthday and the week after, made it difficult, if not impossible to have a traditional party with friends - something we're hoping we can have before the end of the summer. Weeks before, we started asking him what he wanted his cake to be, and we went from Bob the Builder, to Superman, to Baseball, and finally settled on Batman. And so the search for a Batman cake mold started. Apparently the caped crusader has fallen out of Wilton's favor, because a batman mold does not exist, unless of course you want to purchase a vintage one from ebay and Sam didn't really leave us much time for that option.
Saturday morning GR went shopping and got awesome presents for Sam. He is so much better at shopping for toys than I am. I spends hours and hours agonizing, searching for just the right things, and come home with some lame thing no real child would find fun, he spends 30 minutes and $50 and comes home with a ton of really cool, fun things Sam will LOVE!
Saturday afternoon I went in search of Batman party supplies - thank you party supply store for having SOMETHING for me to purchase!! In an effort to go a bit over the top and make up for the no batman cake and no party, I purchased a HUGE batman mylar balloon for him as part of his party decorations. I also purchased a little button for him to wear to church that said "Birthday Boy."
When we asked Sam what he'd like to have for his special Birthday dinner, he requested Pancakes (of course!) and called Grandma and Grandpa to invite them to join us. We had a fantastic meal ... stacks and stacks of sprinkle pancakes, sausage links, country potatoes, scrambled eggs and a huge bowl of the reddest strawberries.
After dinner we opened presents - Sam did the same thing with each package he opened. He'd open the gift, see what it was, then flip it over to the back and exam it ... I think he was doing his best to "read" the directions, study every picture, and figure out exactly how to use the new toy or game he got. He got a couple of great indoor/outdoor toys that involve things flying in the air, and three really fun new games - we've already played two of them, and are hoping to have time to play the third this week.
While Sam helped me frost the cupcakes he asked if they were for all his friends to eat. I hated have to explain that we hadn't invited friends ... then he asked where his cake was, and I had to explain that I made special batman cupcakes instead ... "you can make a real cake Mom" ... sigh. Thankfully, there were no tears and in the end he was very pleased with the colored cupcakes and the homemade Batman cupcake toppers. Just before sitting down to dinner we called one of Sam's good friends from church, George, to see if he and his family could come over for cupcakes and ice cream. Thankfully, they were able to join us and we had a great time polishing off a box of cookies and cream ice cream and 1/2 the cupcakes.
Throughout the day Sam got lots of phone calls from Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, cousins wishing him Happy Birthday. We tried to let him answer the phone as much as possible and it was so cute to see his face light up when he heard who had called and then say, "Thank you, Merryn," or "Thanks Grandpa Art." Just like a big kid.
Monday morning Sam and Rebecca both had well child check ups. For those interested, Sam is now 41.2 lbs. (75%) and 42.5" tall (90%). At this rate he grow to be about 6'1" - 6'2". Becca's stats are about the same ... 61.4 lbs (80%) and 51" tall (90%).
Last year GR starting working on his dream of getting a commercial fireworks license. It meant shadowing other licensed professionals multiple times, studying rules and laws, taking classes and of course, an exam. Late this spring he completed all the necessary requirement and started getting all the paper work together ... passing the test, getting licensed and insured, and then getting the permits to shoot them off a Diane's.
Thankfully it all came together beautifully, the fireworks were selected, ordered and picked up after the breakfast on the 4th ... GR had a permit to shoot, but not a permit to store, so they could only be picked up on the day of the shoot, if the shoot didn't happen, then the fireworks had to be packed back up and returned to their trailer in the middle nowhere Kansas that night.
We had a fun morning and afternoon of swimming and shooting off an assortment of my favorite daytime fireworks ... airplanes, tanks. I've decided these are my favorites because they aren't obnoxiously loud and they "do something" other than explode.
The weather was really warm and humid, so the kids barely made a dent in the collection GR and I purchased the night before. This is how GR and I have come to work the purchasing of fireworks. I will go with him, help him pick out what we want and need, then I leave to get the car and he pays for it. I could never support his love of the 4th of July if I truly knew the dollar amount of each item we exploded during the day.
By 3pm, GR started checking the weather radar constantly. Huge dark gray and black clouds started descending on us from the north cutting the outdoor daytime explosions short. And 45 minutes later, the tornado sirens were sounding and the pouring rain started. In hopes that everything would clear by evening we forged head with our plans and told the few people who knew how to reach us as Bob and Diane's that unless it was raining at 9pm, the show would go on!
Here's a faith promoting story that I want to record for our family history ... this account is written by my Mom, and was shared on her blog:
"As we were working [cleaning up the toy room at Grandma's house], we looked up through the windows of the toy room and saw dark clouds and then rain. Rebecca said, "My Dad is going to be so bummed if it rains!" ... I thought about it, and suggested to her that we have a prayer. "Explain all that to Heavenly Father," I said, "and ask Him if the rain could stop for the fireworks." Rebecca did just that. She offered a very simple and direct prayer. While I was still in the toy room, Rebecca went out to the kitchen and according to Kathleen, told her Dad not to worry: we'd had a prayer and everything would be all right. (Mary Ann said Rebecca was a little concerned that it was still raining at 5 pm and thought her prayer had not been answered.) But by 6:30, the rain had stopped and people were arriving and setting up lawn chairs..."
The boys started setting up their launching stations at 6:30 a full hour later than they'd hoped, so things were getting pretty stressful and hurried for everyone. But we had a great turn out of people for root beer floats, parachutes, sparklers and the big show.
The only way I have to judge on the number of people who attended is to look at the number of root beer floats I served. When you consider that not everyone had a float, and a good number of the kids came for a minimum of seconds, this isn't the most accurate way of counting, but from the crowd pictures I took, 144 could be close. For those interested we also went through 198 sparklers!
Although I'm pretty experienced at serving root beer floats in mass, I learn something new each year. This was the first year I actually accepted peoples offerings to bring either a box of ice cream or a 2-liter of root beer. I'm always a little reluctant to farm some of this out because, my formula is exact ... 1 box + 1 2-liter = 16, 8 oz. root beer floats. Things come up, stuff happens, and if one person who offered to bring something doesn't show, I'm in real trouble. I delegated out four boxes of ice cream and four 2-liters of root beer, but with the weather, my trust in others wavered and I decided I'd better be prepared to serve everyone ... at least half of my delegated items didn't show, but I had others bring either a box or 2-liter I wasn't expecting so we ended up with plenty for everyone and I didn't end up with too much left over. I still haven't decided how I'm going to handle offers to bring ice cream or soda next year...
This year we moved off the back deck and set up a table closer to the crowd and that proved very successful. We served a lot more floats than the year.
I've decided to switch to a 10oz cup instead of the 8oz. We were serving floats so quickly, the foam didn't have time to settle, and the root beer per portions weren't where the needed to be, this years floats were a bit lop sided ... heavy on the ice cream and a little light on the root beer ... I ended up with too much root beer left over.
The fireworks display was fantastic!! We got most of the show on video and we're trying to edit it all down so it will fit on U-Tube ... right now it's 14 minute, 4 minutes too long. Back to the drawing board. The fireworks where big and beautiful and perfect! No one got hurt, there were no scary miss fires, like we've had in the past, we had a great crowd even with the questionable weather - and the crowd loved it.
By 10pm the crowd was packed up and heading home, and by 11pm we had our stuff cleaned up, packed up and were heading home.
GR and "the boys" have already starting planning next years show, so mark your calendars, and plan to join us! They are going set up three firing stations instead of two to speed up the launching and they've decided to reduce crowd confusion they need to select smaller cakes (they had three, and which each cake, the crowd thought it was the finally).
