TBnJ

On Sunday morning, we all went for a neighborhood walk. We had to turn on our downstairs AC because after repeated days of near or over 100 degrees, the upstairs AC was no longer enough to cool the entire house. So we all left while we ran the AC with the windows open to get rid of that initial funky smell after not having been used for 6 or 8 months.

We took a walk around our block and the adjoining one checking out the flowers and wildlife along the way. We found several bugs, one of which we can't seem to identify. It's pictured at left. Anyone recognize it?

When we got back from the walk, we tackled some yard work and some yard play. J volunteered to help Daddy-o with trimming some bushes. She wins the quote of the weekend award. Daddy-o handed her a branch off of one of the holly-type bushes and told her, "Watch out: It's prickly." J responded, "It's not prickl-- OUCH!" Yes, it was prickly. She was much less willing to deal with those bushes after that. She did, however, sit patiently for a while clipping at other branches to make them smaller to fit into a yard waste bag to take to ADS for the compost pile.

Meanwhile, T and B were rigging up all kinds of creative toys. They were putting stuffed animals on the butt scooters pictured at right, strapping them on with the jump ropes as both a seat belt and a towing rope, and attaching the butt scooters to the Big Wheels and the Cozy Coupe.

On Monday, we had friends come over to play in the yard with toys and our inflatable pool. We were outside from about 9:15 until 12:45 when hunger, heat and exhaustion sent us scurrying inside. We had a great time, though.

After a nap, Daddy-o and the kids went back outside to play with a rocket kit of T's. They tried doing a baking soda and vinegar rocket, but T says it only went up "about a half a foot." I have yet to confirm with Daddy-o how far it went since T's estimates are always interesting and usually wrong.

Other photos of Memorial Day weekend are on Flickr starting here.

The kids (mainly T and B, I think) also watched Return to Neverland this weekend. I didn't watch beyond about the first ten minutes. I wasn't too thrilled with what I watched, and I definitely wasn't impressed with the animation. Wendy's face often became an amorphic blob as she moved. Daddy-o watched the latter half of the movie. He said it was ok but predictable. The boys thought it was ok, but they didn't have much desire to watch it again.

Labels: around the house, kid sayings, movies and tv