Well, I’ve been telling you how busy we’ve been for a while now so I suppose I should share some pictures and stories.
Last week I took Wednesday off and chaperoned a class trip for James. We went to a local “picnic park” where they have a few carnival-type rides and food is included in the admission price. It was just burgers, dogs, fries, popcorn, cotton candy, and drinks, but that can be fun. A river runs by the park and the kids can get on an inner tube at one spot and float downstream to another, where the inner tubes are collected and shuttled back to the start. Here’s James getting out of the river after a tubing run.
But that wasn’t all for that day…a friend had given me 4 Phillies tickets for that evening. Judy couldn’t go because she had a tutoring session that evening, and Marlene decided that she wasn’t enough of a baseball fan to go, so it ended up being me, Lauren, James, and a friend of James’. In this shot of James, you can get a sense of where our seats were.
The Phillies lost to the Dodgers, but it was a decent game with the lead changing a couple of times. We left our seats at the top of the 9th inning, but watched the Phillies’ last at-bat from the 3rd base side of the stadium in case there were some late-game heroics. But more importantly, on that side of the stadium we were well-positioned to make a hasty exit ahead of the crowds.
Over the weekend, we held a graduation party for Lauren. Both sets of grandparents came for the festivities and stayed with us, so we had house-full.
You can imagine the cleaning and sprucing that had to be done, inside and out, to make our lived-in home look significantly less so. It was an exhausting weekend, but a great one.
Here’s Lauren's cake, which was made by a former PChef hostess of Judy’s.
We had a local Mexican restaurant cater some of the food and we had waaay too much…we’ve been eating it ever since. Fajitas anyone?
Monday night was the graduation ceremony and was held at the University of Delaware. We were rushed to get out of the house, but I managed to take a couple of pictures of Lauren in her cap and gown before we left.
The grandparents before the ceremony began.
Marlene played in the band and I took a couple of pictures before the ceremony started.
I don’t know who the kid is behind her, but check out this accidental photobomb!
I was on the other side of the arena, so there was no way he knew I was taking a picture.
Of course I have some pictures of the graduation ceremony.
When we found Lauren after the ceremony she told us that she had just shaken hands with V.P. Joe Biden. His niece was in Lauren’s class and apparently he was watching the ceremony from some inconspicuous location. She walked past him backstage as they were exiting and he said “Congratulations!” so she stuck out her hand to shake his. Pretty cool, regardless of your politics.
Then for a picture with James we told her to pretend like she loved him.
When we got home after the graduation, we were all hungry. We hadn’t eaten much dinner (leftover Mexican food from the party!), being in such a hurry to get to graduation. So, we broke out some bagels. While we were cutting and toasting them, James brought up the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, although I have no idea what brought the subject to his mind, and asked if we could go there. Judy said, “I told you before, we’ll go there sometime when Gram and Poppy aren’t with us.” And it was really funny because Gram was sitting there and the “when Gram and Poppy aren’t with us” part sounded like “gone off to the Great Beyond”, even though she just meant a trip when they aren’t along with us. Of course I had to chime in with, “at least we have something to look forward to when…
they’re no longer with us. ”
So now you’re wondering “why did Glennbo have to tell us they were eating bagels when this conversation happened?” Okay, okay. There is more to this bagel story, and it might give you a little insight into Poppy and his namesake James. Anyway, I was the last one to toast a bagel and when I went over to the table to get some cream cheese, I thought it looked odd. It was in a little rectangular foil wrapper, like cream cheese comes in, but it looked a little more translucent than usual and when I stuck the knife in it, it had a softer consistency. I figured that it was some “lite” garbage so I looked at the wrapper and...are you ready for this?...it was....
Crisco!
Poppy and James were the only two who had used it and Poppy had already eaten his. James was half-way done, and left to wash his mouth out. They said they thought it tasted funny, but not strange enough to say anything. We all lost it! My mother-in-law was the one who had mistakenly taken it out of the refrigerator, and she felt bad, but still laughed pretty hard. We just couldn’t believe they didn’t notice anything. I said “we’ve got a real nice dinner planned at ‘Flying Fish’ at Disney, but it’ll be wasted on you guys.”
Moving on to Trip-Related Stuff!
- I gave my Mom their Magical Express documents over the weekend and described how they can put the luggage tags on the bags that they’d like to check all the way through to the room. Then, I showed her the map of the airport and started to describe how they needed to take the fake-monorail from their terminal to the main section, then go to side B, then down to level 1, etc. etc. And she interrupted me, “I thought you said that we don’t have to pick up our bags?” So I had to explain that this was for them to catch a bus to the resort and how they need to hold onto the paperwork in order to get on the bus. We’ll see if they make it!
- Judy traded some texts with her sister who lives near Vero the other day and learned that they will be away on vacation for most of the time that we’ll be there. She was kind of disappointed because we wanted to catch up with them while we were there, but her sister didn’t have a lot of choice because of converging schedules of her own family. It looks like we’ll be able to see them on our last night in Vero and they may join us for a day at Disney.
- Judy called me at the end of the workday today and asked me to come down to the mall. She wouldn’t tell me why, and I knew it sounded fishy. I figured (correctly) that I was about to receive an early Father’s Day gift, and it turned out that she got me an iPhone and needed me there so that we could transfer my Contacts list. We’d been talking about upgrading, and using the opportunity to give the younger kids our old phones, but I thought that it wouldn’t take place until later in the summer. When I found out what the surprise was, I realized why the girls were smiling so much (James isn’t much of a shopper and opted to stay home) – they were either getting a better used phone (Lauren) or their first phone (Marlene). So anyway, I’ve been loading a few apps onto it this evening, and took a peek at the DIS on it too.
- The NYC twosome heads out tomorrow! Phase 1 is about to begin! Watch the Today show Friday morning…Lauren is making a sign to hold up right now.
Link to next chapter
I did have that thought when I saw the length of your reply. Thank you for the review!
When do they leave again? I'm forgetful
They leave tomorrow (Thursday) morning!
It will be so awesome! DDIL and I turned some babies loose in PV a few years ago - such a neat experience!
My second thought is that I don't know how many animals are out there at night. I saw them all walking in a single file line like they were going to Noah's Ark right about dusk. They headed into a walled structure with barbed wire around the top that you don't really even notice behind the trees. When they were all in, the gate closed and you couldn't even tell the gate was there. Maybe not all of them retire for the evening. 
I'm sure you'll find something to do with the night vision 
Remind me never to come over to your house for bagels!!! Lots of leftover fajitas doesn't sound like the worst problem in the world though!
To make matters worse I tried it again later in my life hoping the first time was just a mistake.
