Summer, Summer, Summertime.

Just some fun pictures (not best quality, but fun) of the boys so far this summer.

Slip n' Slide gave way to other playing, and I just have no words to explain Chi.

Went to a baseball game. There was dancing.

Probably

Chi has begun to use the word "probably" quite liberally. "I think we should do that. Probably." "Probably he runs fast." etc. It's not that he uses the word wrong, he just overuses it really. It's hard not to laugh. It also reminds me of when Gabe said "actually" all the time.

Chi also has a thing for Star Wars. Probably because of his brother...and his dad. He prefers the Clone Wars cartoon to the regular movies. And he has assigned each of us to a character. He is Anakin, but he usually announces he is "A Jedi Knight!" Gabe is Yoda. I'm Ashoka. (Gabe wants me to be Padme, but Chi refuses to switch.) and Matt is Ovi-one Denovi. :) That's how he says Obi-Wan Kenobi. It's hilarious. It's one of those things that I think I'll be sad when he finally says it correctly. Chi never shortens it either, it's always Ovi-one Denovi, even when he is talking so fast you don't understand any other words in the sentence. Probably. 

End of First

Gabe is officially done with first grade. Yesterday was the last day and they had a progressive party. They went to three different houses for picnic lunch, games and snacks. Our house was the game house. That is the nice thing about have neighborhood schools; it makes walking around for something like this possible. 

 Today, Mrs. Gibbons, his teacher had them all come out to her house for one last picnic/party. So even though there was no school today, Gabe considers this his real last day of first grade.

Tonight he is having his first sleepover. His friend Matt is coming over here. I stocked up on some junk food (we hardly ever have in the house, but I realized that a sleepover just needs junk food!), and Matt and Gabe are at the video store picking out movies and Wii games right now. I am also planning to take them mini-golfing. Luckily we have an indoor course. I wanted to just take them to the park, but it's cold and rainy today (even though we were in the 90s early this week.) so I don't think we'll be doing anything outside.

Tiredness = Weird Thoughts

Man, I am tired! You have probably already figured that out. I'm taking a break from blogging - by blogging? Hmmm. There seems to be a flaw. But, there is no one to talk to right now since Matt teaches nights right now, so I'm sort of talking to at you.

I've been working on promoting Domesticated Nomad. There are these things called Link Parties. You go to a blog and link up one of your projects and hopefully people who wouldn't have found you otherwise, come visit your blog. This brings more traffic and usually some more followers. I started small. I didn't even realize how many of these parties are out there. Over the first few months of blogging I was doing 15 parties a week (that built up slowly), and I was averaging between 60-100 pageviews a week and picking up a few followers a week. 

But the bloggers who have built up faster are doing about 10 parties a DAY. So over the last few days I have been working on building up my link parties. It's been a lot of work finding the parties, linking up and then having to link back to the party on my blog. Then because of so much I have spreadsheets to keep track of what has been linked where, so all of that has to be updated. But in the last two days my pageviews have been over 160, and I'm not even done adding the extra link parties. So it's a pain, but it's working. Not so much an empire, but a little village perhaps.


Gabe's last day is tomorrow. I'll post soon about his wrap up of first grade.

Eleven years...

Each year we try to do something new for our anniversary (though last year we repeated our honeymoon trip), and some years it has just been a road trip to find a new place to live in a new state which isn't terribly exciting. But we try. So, this year we went to Traverse City. We'd never been and everyone told us we had to go.


We loaded up the family, all our sinus infections be damned. Which for me meant a very painful drive because we went up in elevation and I couldn't get my ears to pop! We were supposed to take a cruise on a catamaran, but they accidentally double booked so we didn't get that (refund plus gift certificates though, so we'll try again another time.) There was a point in all this we were questioning why we were still going, but we are glad we did.


The boys kept us giggling all through lunch at the Mackinaw Brewery. The food was okay. Even I thought the fish was well done and I'm not a lake fish person. The beer was not bad for a microbrewery, but nothing to write home about. Really the highlight of lunch was being with our goofy boys.


After lunch we popped into The Cherry Republic to taste and stock up on all things cherry. We sampled lots of things, Cherry BBQ, Cherry Mustard, Cherry Salsa. And we did some wine tasting. Although I wouldn't switch from grapes on a regular basis, we settled on a bottle of 100% Cherry Wine to bring home. Oh, and dark chocolate covered cherries. Mmmm.


This was a bin full of cherry pits that the boys climbed into.

There were lots of great shops and bakeries and eateries, but we didn't think the boys were much interested so we'll have to save exploring more for another trip. We went to the beach right near down town. 

The water was FREEZING! Not that we expected to really do more than stick our toes in, but wow-zah! it was like dunking toes into ice water. It was truly painful to stand in it.

But the boys really wanted to be there for the sand. 

Malachi desperately wanted to build a sandcastle and put a flag in it.

I was even on this trip. There is rarely photographic evidence of my existence. We are trying to be better about that.

We wrapped up our time at the park with a ride on the mini train. It was a loud steam engine, so Malachi rode the whole time with his hands on his ears. :)

Moomers is an acclaimed ice cream place that is right on the premise of its own dairy. So we went out and tried some ice cream before heading home. Unfortunately the cows were all in the barn so we didn't get to see them. The ice cream was good. I had Cherries Moobilee because I was in cherry country, so what else. :) Matt got Spider Moo which was red and blue. It was a mix of their blue raspberry and red pop ice cream. The Red Pop ice cream really tasted like red pop. It was crazy. The boys got cookies and cream and lime sherbet, in case you are curious.

That is probably my favorite picture from the trip. It was foggy out in the bay, but you could see white sails from the boats dotting the horizon.