Weekend

This weekend, Arial and Gwen went up to Wisconsin. This left Frances and Johann with me.

I wanted to make it a fun weekend for the kids (since they would be missing Arial). The following is a recounting of yesterday's events.

Friday, I had shown them these little typing games (TuxType) on our netbooks (which are the perfect size for their small hands). Johann was terribly excited to try them out. (So much so, that he got up at 6am and wanted to play them. I made him wait until I got up at 8:30.)

The default word lists were too difficult for him but the game allowed me to add new lists of my own. So, I made a list consisting of "asdf", "fdsa", "jkl" and "lkj". Johann was able to do these and it emphasized the need to keep your fingers on the home row.

They both had so much fun that it kept them busy most of the morning while I did some work.

For lunch, I had a special "Things on crackers" meal planned. The night before, I had purchased several interesting things to put on crackers. The one rule that we had was that they had to eat one whole cracker with each item on top.

We started with little squares of Spam. Predictably, Johann liked the Spam and Frances didn't.

Next up was kippers. Also unsurprisingly, I was the only one that liked them.

Third was sardines. I figured there was no way that they would like sardines but it's a good thing to be able to say you've tried. Strangely though, they both liked them (I got a slightly upward turned thumb from Frances indicating that she sorta liked them).

Finally, I brought out the Easy Cheese. Actually, it was Hy-Vee brand, which was a mistake because Easy Cheese is better than store brand. They still liked it.

After everyone had eaten one of everything, then we could eat whatever we wanted.

The cheese got a lot of use, of course. Johann ate quite a bit of the Spam and they both ate a fair amount of sardines. I mostly ate kippers.

They liked the meal so much that, when given the choice for today's lunch, they chose it again.

After lunch (and after more work), Frances asked me to play Red Light Green Light on the deck. I agreed. But when she stepped out on the deck, she immediately said, "It's too hot" and came back in.

I decided to have them put on their swimsuits and run through the sprinkler. They did that until they started tearing up the yard. That's when I had an idea.

We have this yellow slide that came from a backyard playground thing. Sometimes we lay it on our hill and the kids slide down it. Yesterday was the perfect time to try it out as a water-slide.

I put the slide on the hill, set a running hose at the top and cleaned it off (it tends to collect dirt and grime). Frances went first.

There was a worry that this wouldn't be any more fun with water than it was without. That fear was alleviated when she hit the water that collected at the bottom of the slide with a big splash.

From then on they had a blast splashing down the slide. At the end of the slide, Frances tended to run right down the hill whereas Johann would slip and slide on the wet grass. Frances was the first to go down on her stomach feet first but Johann didn't like that because it was too scratchy.

While they were doing this, I made a poor attempt at weeding the garden.

They were fairly muddy, so they got rinsed-off in both the bath and the shower.