Last Friday, Brian took some time off in the afternoon and surprised Logan with a trip to Bear’s training camp. He asked the little guys if they wanted to go and they had no interest. I think you’ll be able to tell from the picture below that Logan had an AWESOME time. He came back with a smile on his face and a training-camp tee shirt. Brian said he literally never stopped asking questions for the 2 hours they were there.

 

For Father’s Day this year, I gave Brian a home-brew IPA beer kit along with a set of bottles, caps and a capper. He really liked the idea and soon set about making his first galloon of brew. It looked like a cool process…I watched it intermittently as I walked past the kitchen one Saturday afternoon. The first part of the process smelled…yummy…sort of like oatmeal. Anyway, fast forward past the 2 weeks it sat in the basement and past the 2 weeks it sat in bottles in the pantry to last Thursday. That morning, I went to the pantry to grab something for breakfast. The first thing I noticed was a bunch of small black things everywhere on the floor…upon closer inspection, I realized that the entire floor was covered in a sticky substance. I examined all the shelves and realized that one of Brian’s beer bottles had literally exploded. The base of the bottle still sat on the shelf with it’s beer bottle brothers, but the rest was…everywhere! It must have happened during the night because all the beer was dry…and, it was acting as a glue for the thousands of pieces of glass that were on the floor, the shelves, on boxes and on the walls of the pantry. Later, Brian told me that he got a low yield from the first batch and that the sugar content in each bottle was probably much higher than it should normally be. I can attest to that…all the shards were STUCK! I spent most of the day emptying the pantry, cleaning each thing as it came out and putting the whole thing back together. The good news is that my WAY-overdue-for-a-cleaning pantry now looks sparkly clean. Here is the label I’m planning to make for Brian’s first batch of beer:

Get it? Like “clean up on Aisle 5” over the loudspeaker at the grocery store?? We thought it was funny anyway ;)

Brian tests one of the surviving beers…not bad…a little sweet ;)

Dear Logan,

I hope that when you grow up, you don’t remember the times I yelled at you…like last night when you guys were being nuts as always and refusing to go to bed. I hope you remember the afternoon that you spent with AJ and Madi, creating a “neighborhood football team”…the day you piled helmets and footballs in our garage and planned out your Saturday game schedule, the day you went up and got one of your white “sleep” tee-shirts and wanted to make a jersey from it, the day that I quickly did a stencil on the cricut and spent the next hour making you a decent-looking shirt with fabric paint that we had laying around. No mommy is perfect, but we all do what we can, right!?

As some of you know, Logan has rarely been seen these past 2 months (give or take) without a football in his hand…usually begging some adult to throw it to him while he “run routes”. Since Brian and I have neither the inclination nor the actual time (with soccer, lacrosse etc) to let him play “real” football, I signed him up for flag football through the park district…which started yesterday. Practice was at 6. We had to do a countdown like allllll day. It lasted an hour…or as Logan said “like 2 minutes”. They practiced hiking the ball, passing from person to person while running and throwing while running 2 different patterns. Logan could so barely contain himself that the coaches asked him multiple times to please stop running around (he was clearly mimicking catching the ball and running like mad) and focus on what they were doing. From my perspective, it was a lot of standing in line and waiting for your turn. I think Logan only touched the ball 10 times in the whole hour. While we really really hope he has a fun time with this sport, I think he might start realizing pretty soon that it’s not going to be him with the ball all the time…and I’m not sure how he’s going to feel about that ;)

I know I was going to post pics of Aiden’s party, but I first had to write about the boys’ current form of summer entertainment: building forts in the basement. This all started with Aiden and our friend Ryan from down the street taking all the “floor tiles” in the basement and building them into cool structures. They worked on a number of forts last week…even adding a “patio” with a grill on it one afternoon. The problem was that the rest of the basement was a royal wreck so they were building these cool things around piles of geotracks, balls, building blocks and other non-sense. Ryan came over to play yesterday afternoon and I convinced them all that we should clean up and make a HUGE area for their forts. I’ll give credit where credit is due and say that Ryan was the best helper in the clean up. However, the 5 of us got it done and now it’s a beautiful area of fort-building creativeness! Ryan and his sister Mackenzie were just here a while ago building smaller forts that surround a “community” area. When they went home for lunch, I took wraps, oranges and lemonade, plus a music player, down for the boys to enjoy. Every so often I hear a fight break out, but for now…they are playing, staying cool, being creative and NOT playing video games :) I’m listening to the music too…right now they are jamming out to The Black Keys.

Fort Town:

community area during lunch time

This is the structure Mackenzie built for herself

Logan’s – covered with blankets from upstairs

Ryan and Brady apparently share this mini fort

Aiden’s fort

Logan and Aiden using the ipad to set up their music on the Sonos player. They were playing selections from Aiden’s party mix.

Brady and Aiden jam out to “Surf Bird” (the b-b-b-bird-bird-bird, the bird is the word….)

Here is Logan’s “surf bird”

He calls this the “papa ooo-mow-mow” part and that finger-thing is supposed to be a mustache. I should tell him that putting his finger there actually means “unibrow”. ha!

The past few weeks have been non-stop craziness and fun. The last weekend in June, we went for the first of 2 annual camping trips. Despite some major storms that blew through Friday night, we had a blast as always. We did have to bid farewell to a second pop-up (easy up) tent. We lost our first one in a similar storm camping 2 years ago around the same time. Of the 4 tents that were up covering our food and eating area, only ours was damaged. It’s gotten to be such a joke that last Friday, when we put up a new-new-new pop up in the backyard for Aiden’s Saturday birthday, all the neighbors said we should probably take it down given our “Friday night luck with pop up tents”. ha!

We returned home from camping and began the two-day clean-up process that found us at Wednesday, July 4th. We enjoyed the annual bike parade through the neighborhood followed by our traditional post-parade swim in the clubhouse pool. That night we got together with a family down the street for some delicious fish tacos before heading around the bend to witness the fireworks show from a neighbor’s back yard.

Brian took the entire week of the 4th off and it was a VERY good thing because we had two birthday parties for Aiden. One was for his preschool friends on Friday the 6th and the other was for the neighborhood crew and family on Saturday the 7th. This year’s theme was “Splash Bash” and was all about water balloon games. Between the two parties, I filled up about 650 water balloons! Two of my friends helped me out one day and the three of us covered about 200 of those together.

We are now to Wednesday of the week after the parties. Brian has returned to work, the house has returned to normal and I’ve returned to the blog ;) Here are about a gazillion pictures of our crazy summer weeks:

CAMPING

One of the best things about camping is constant access to junk food!

It was HOT that weekend…so we brought along 2 water slides and…

a big inflatable pool. Any excuse I can have to avoid the pool at the campgrounds is GOOOOOD!

For a while on Saturday, the men had a little man-cave under a tent. 

“Hey mom…take a picture of my nose sweat!”

At one point, Logan took me on a walk in the forest and pointed out all his favorite spots. He’s a little nature lover!

We ran into a bunch of “sassy girls”  

The smaller camp sites across the road weren’t reserved the weekend we were there so, at one point when our shade ran out, we dragged some chairs across the way and made a little hang out under the trees.

Brian bonding with the two other little guys at camping: Matt and Dustin.

FOURTH OF JULY BIKE PARADE

AIDEN’S BASEBALL GAME ON JULY 2nd

I’ll put the party highlight pics in a separate post…