Soggy weekend but bright smiles

 

Pretty slow week as the rain continues to dream of being piled like snow.  Fortunately the rain was not snow as we had over 3 inches of rain during a three-day soaking rain.  We stayed busy albeit mostly indoor events.  We did have to cancel our camping plans, but that too was clearly for the best.  We played some cards and lady luck was shining on Sophia and when Merrick finally thought he had a winning hand of three aces, Sophia came snarffed up the pot with a straight.  The kids brought pumpkins home from their Friday afternoon field trip and after soaking them in the rain on Saturday, they were able to gut and carve them on Sunday.  We did try to roast some of the seeds, but unfortunately they dumped off the cookie sheet and spilled all over the preheated oven.  Saturday Sophia did don all her rain gear and go pick the last of the chocolate mint in the flower beds.  She has been using it for evening tea and given the massive amount that she picked we also decide she should take a mint tea bath.  We piled a large amount of mint into an old nylon and steeped it in her bath.  It was a quality menthol type pore cleansing bath, perfect for a rainy afternoon.  The rainy weekend was interspersed with some cooking including ginger cookies and banana bread.  We also added (and by we I mean Sophia and I) garlic sauteed octopus to our gustatory digressions.  This is not a smell that leaves a closed up house very easily.  We did have a couple of nerf gun fights, a requirement.  Sophia had noticed that all the girl spies in the movies are well dressed so so had to wear her dress and carry her extra, actually all, bullets in her matching clutch purse.  Then grandma Nancy came over for a couple of days to go to school with the kids.  They had grandparents' day on consecutive days so the fortunate kids were able to have grandma around and go to school with them.  Everyone seemed to pretty smile despite the rain.

Just more reasons to smile

Each week brings a new form of entertainment or a least a new spin on an old favorite.  We started the week with the completion of a project we started the weekend before, locker shelves.  The kids have lockers at their new school and it took me longer than it should have to realize that they were going to need locker shelves.  We spent some time in the garage making shelving units for their books, shoes and assorted 'things."  As long as I was going to help them put the shelves in, we also cut the handles off some cheap mirrors and used some mounting tape to stick them to their locker doors.  Rounding off the feng-shu challenged decor was a collection of pictures I printed out for each of them from the past summer.  Decorating their lockers was really pretty fun, and it was a gas watching Merrick check his hair in his mirror--he won't even comb it at home.  The apples that Merrick and I picked the previous weekend had lost their crispness and appeal and were going to be better served in frozen storage until Thanksgiving for pies.  Both kids helped core and slice the apples and we easily bagged enough for two pies.  Merrick also tried his hand at reloading shotgun shells, in reality he was just depriming about 600 hulls, but the job was done either way. Sunday morning we headed to the Oconto for some squirrel hunting.  Neither kid chose to bring their BB gun, which proved a poor decision, as the woods was crawling with chipmunks.  I don't think we were ever out of sight of a chipmunk and while Sophia was putting a well planned stalk on a red squirrel, Merrick and I were in a stare down battle with a chipmunk that was only about 5 feet away.  All of them would have been quality BB gun hunting, but only served as a starter topic on sportsmanship when carrying a 20 gauge.  We hiked and sat, hiked and sat.  The kids sat quietly looking for squirrels and whittling with their pocket knives. We napped in front of a late afternoon Packer's game and then headed down to the bike trail to catch what is likely the last batch of free-range grasshoppers for Mitch.  With the cool temperatures the grass hoppers were easy pickings and I think we came home with nearly 30 of them to feed our resident dragon.  Friday night we also tried our hand at survival fires.  We each had a 'firestick' which is an industrially created version of flint and steel.  We made sparks like crazy but in the end we didn't get a fire going.  Not a bad thing to practice however.