Summer :)

Well, the last day of school (and work) has come and gone, and for the next 3 months we are FREE!  Well, maybe not free, more like 'more flexible'.  Um, maybe not that either.  Let's just say the schedule has changed, and we usually won't have to be out the door by 7:15am.  That's more like it!  I do seem to have a little more time to get things done when we're actually home, but for some reason the garden is still weedy....
Ok, so since summer vacation started, Chase has had a ballgame after having had only 1 practice (I don't know who does the schedule, but they need some practice, I think!)  They didn't do all that bad, and it's always fun to see how they improve over the summer.  Chase hit every time he was up, and the poor kid always ended up with the 'big' helmet, so he had to hang onto it while he ran so it didn't fall off!  Shame on me, but all I could think about when he was running was that he kind of looked like a Bobble Head...big helmet head, little body.  I know, I'm terrible.
Last weekend we went on a family vacation up North and stayed at a cabin on a lake that is owned by a guy that Jess works with.  It is sooo nice up there!  Jess, of course, went muskie fishing early in the mornings and again in the evenings, but from about 9 to 5 we did stuff together.  Played games, played catch, went for a walk, relaxed, went for a drive looking for elk (which we didn't see), and for the very first time ever, the kids went tubing.  Not the kind where you float leisurely down a river, but the kind where you lay on a tube and hang on for dear life while a crazy man pulls you around the lake behind his boat.  Emi was all gung-ho and would barely listen to the *minimal* instructions (thumb up=faster; thumb down=slower; all fingers up, palm out=stop, keep your mouth shut and teeth together so you don't bite your tongue off, and when you fall off, let go of the tube and go limp).  Jess started out very slow, and the smarty pants girl kept giving the thumbs-up to go faster.  It didn't take her long at all to figure out how to shift her weight to keep from flipping over!  After a good while, Jess and Chase decided that it was time for her to get off the tube.  Chase said "Dad, I think it's time to ditch her."  So Jess tried to get her to fall off, only it wasn't that easy!  She was bouncing over waves, back and forth across the wake, through other boat wakes, but finally she fell off.  When we got back to her I asked her if she was made of velcro or what!?  Jess couldn't believe that she stayed on for so long, and he wasn't going that easy on her, either.  Emi said she now knows what a skipping stone feels like, and  Chase told her she hung on like a tick on a dog.  jeez.  Chase was up next, and that poor kid needs to gain a little weight!  He was flopping around like a noodle out there, mostly because his 60 lbs. just couldn't weigh the tube down much at all.  The rope would get stuck in the wake during turns and slack a little, and then jerk the tube when everything straightened back out again.  He also didn't fit very well on the tube, his hips hit right in the center of the hole in the tube, so he was bending backwards just laying on the tube.  He had fun, but didn't want to go as many times as Emi did because he said after a little while his back started to hurt.  I don't blame him!  We decided that we are going to get a tube of our own, one that doesn't have a hole in the middle!  Chase is excited about that!

So today, miracle of all miracles, Chase cleaned his room.  For the past couple weeks he'd kept saying that he didn't have any clean socks, I'd tell him to make sure they were getting into the laundry so I could wash them, and I'd wash whites but there would only be about 6 of his socks in the basket.  Well, today the mystery has been solved.  Chase came and asked me for a laundry basket, and a couple minutes later came out with about 152 sock in it.  What the heck??  I asked him what he had been doing with them, and he said it wasn't him.  He explained that it must have been those troublemaking dust bunnies that stole his socks and stashed them all under his bed.  I told him that I thought those dust bunnies should wash them all, and he told me that if the dust bunnies had been taken care (meaning I should have taken care of them) of before they'd gotten big enough to drag socks around it wouldn't have been a problem.  So, I traded him the basket of socks for the broom and dust cloth, and sent HIM to do battle.  Hmph.  

So, now we get to go to Emi's first softball game of the summer.....my summer diet of popcorn has begun!