stuff i think

saturday with the fam...

Woke up this morning at an uncharacteristically late 7:15 AM. Felt good, in a lethargic sort of way...stumbled downstairs in hopes of making pancakes or waffles for the boys, but alas, we had no mix. Cereal and granola all around, troups. Updated the FotoBlog over breakfast.

Kelsey and I spent the better part of this mid-day organizing the basement, which is 1/5 storage, 4/5 Toy Central. I noticed an interesting trend - the simpler a toy is, the longer the kids will play with is. Example: An expandable nylon tunnel we have had for nearly six years is still played with nearly daily. They dive through it, wrestle in it, stand it on end and pretend the fell in a well...whatever. Complex toys (the kind with 4,236 little pieces and an instruction book that comes in the form of a .pdf file) lose their appeal almost immediatly. While dad's downloading the owners manual, the kids run off and play with the nylon tunnel...

In the afternoon, we ran to a few stores and had dinner with my mom at Panera Bread. I award them "Best Soup in the Universe". Second year in a row. Enroute home, I stopped at Stuff Mart with Jackson. He'd been saving his money and had his eye on something very specific. The boy purchased a weapon. He got his first sling shot.

This is not his father's sling shot. No, I remember cutting strips from old innertubes and stripping the bark off a Y I found in the brush pile to make one. This thing is high tech, adjustable sixty-leven different ways, and carries a warning: Projectiles may travel 200 MPH and 200 yards. I kind of took all that as advertising bravado, until we got it home. It was too dark in the back yard (and too light in the front yard - three words: Home Owners Association!) so we went to the basement and set up a series of boxes to trap the 1/4 inch steel shot. Turns out it's not to hard to plow that shot all the way through the four layers of cardboard. :) His mother will understand...in the meantime, a very happy 10 year old boy went to sleep tonight after packing it carefully back in the box, wrapping the box in a towel, placing the whole bundle in his prize wood crate and putting it on the top shelf of his closet. Nights like this...it is good to be a dad.