Memorial Day and Birthday wishes

Happy Memorial Day all. My thoughts and prayers go out to those families who have lost loved ones in the service of our country as well as to those who are on the pointy-end of the spear right now and not able to spend the holiday weekend with their families. I'm grateful that I get to spend the weekend with my family this year.

BT BT

In addition to being Memorial Day, it's also ES's 8th birthday. Last year, I posted a collection of some of my favorite photos of / with ES, so I won't redo that. Since it happens to be on a holiday, we let ES open his presents this morning so he can play with them all day.

Unbeknownst to me, my wonderful wife bought ES a shovel for his birthday.


Um... Sweetie???

"What?" She said, "He said he wanted a shovel!"

Um... Sweetie... if he had asked for a machine gun, would you have given it to him? I'm having flashbacks to, "the hole was already there, I'm just taking the dirt out of it" from last year.

He's also very excited about his Nerf dart gun set. We have also ordered the Wii game to go with it. It's pretty cool, you can pull out the Nerf dart part of it and insert the Wii remote to play the Nerf Wii game.

This year marked another first. This is the first time I've ever seen ES actually READ much less even notice he got any birthday cards.

ES is doing a great job reading. His teacher says he's reading at the 5th-6th grade level. He brings home lengthy non-fiction books and devours them within a day or two of checking them out. Last week it was a book about the Romans. This week is was a book about the Vikings. Yesterday, we watched Battle for Britain on Blu-Ray, and I was impressed that ES was able to read the subtitles for the German parts fast enough that I didn't have to pause the movie for him to read it. (Aside: For a 1969 movie, that was very nicely preserved and produced in Blu-Ray).

We've had a busy holiday weekend here. We had friends over for dinner Friday and made spiedies. We had friends over for dinner Saturday and made pizza and raspberry martinis. We had a church home group meeting at our house Sunday.

Limited Edition Pizza

Wheat crust, Chili Man smokey mountain barbecue sauce, Monterey Jack cheese, onions, cilantro, and leftover steak and chicken spiedies. It was SO good! This is my last bottle of Chili Man since he closed his business.

Both Friday and Saturday we ate dinner out on the deck and enjoyed watching the ducks and the turtles and fish in the pond and listening to a bullfrog croaking. The quack mafia pays us a visit each night looking for handouts. It's neat to see how the mamma duck always stands in between us and the baby. It took some trickery to lure the mamma out of the way so someone could get a picture of the baby.

Tonight we're going to the Japanese steakhouse for ES's birthday dinner (his choice - darn!). We aren't actually having his party until next weekend because we figured his friends would have other plans over the holiday weekend.

I hope you all are enjoying your weekend! I'm off to do things outside around the house.