Noisy Toys

How many noisy toys can be running at once before the parents wig out?

Bear Fight

Edmund has his two large brown bears and was smashing them together and roaring.  Very male.

Fantasy Football Fans

Edmund helped Jonathan set up his FF team.  Now we have to start caring about football too!

Triplets

Today is the day for grey!

Be Awesome

Like Mom!

Tools

Thanks for sharing your tools, Paul!

Dapper

Such a good looking chap!

Carrots

When the boy discovered carrot sticks it was a good day.

Three

Did you know Miss Tiff had such a nice family?  Edmund was just sad he had to go to bed.

Circuit

Little Racer on the home track

Twin

Still fascinated by Little Edmund in the Mirror.

Kisses

Love from a pretty friend is the best way to go to bed!

Bed Friend

Edmund loves to throw his bed friends out of the bed.  I am not sure if he thinks that if they are all out of the bed then he will be able to get out too, or if he just really does not want to share his space with them.  When I checked on him tonight Pooh Bear was the only one left in the 100 Acre Crib.  Tigger, Piglet, and Eeyore were partying on the floor.

Thanks to the Guys

Many thanks to all the guys from the training camp event who won little footballs and gave them to Edmund.  He is enjoying them every day.  He loves to toss them to us and crawl after them.  Maybe when he can stand alone you all can teach him how to catch.

Laundry Theif

Watch out for the clean, almost naked creature who is supposed to be going to bed but is checking out the dirty laundry instead.

Football Training Camp

On the last year the Redskins have their training camp in our neck of the woods, we took the youth group to watch the squad and draftees run drills and plays.  Small fan in appropriate colors, courtesy of friends at church.

Jenny with tailgate grillmaster David.  Dan has more important things to look at than the camera.

Such as a certain #10 that some people favor.

Guitar Lesson

Fellowship Lunch

Chronicle of Cocktails: Cosmopolitan

A while ago, I won this Cosmo Mixer Shoe.  We decided to open it and mix some drinks for a game night this evening.  It was a very good summer drink.

Blueberry Cleanup

Pensive

I wonder what he is thinking. I am excited that soon he will be able to tell us. Little Mind, tell me your thoughts. Little Heart, tell me your desires. Little Bear, I love you!

Laughing

During the visit with the bikers we got Edmund going with his ball.

Bikers

Uncle David, Kirsten, and a friend of theirs biked from Herndon to our house and brought us pie and lunch.  Edmund worked on his begging and David totally fell for the big eyes and my-Mother-never-feeds-me look. Edmund got quite a bit of cookie out of him.  Kirsten shared her pizza with him.  I think he is quite take with them.  When they left Edmund had to take a nap, tired out from all the fun.  They had to bike back.  Glad they are young.

Stretch

Miss Tiff came tonight to enjoy some time with Edmund.  He is getting good at giving hugs and she seemed pleased with his efforts.

Stuff of the Month! - July

Book: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann.  A truly eye-opening look at the world-shifting changes brought about by the transfers of agriculture, ecology, people, diseases, wealth, and so on when travel to the Americas became a part of eastern hemisphere life.  Imagine Thai food without peanut sauce, Switzerland without chocolate, non-nomadic Plains Indians without horses, or the industrial revolution without rubber, and you can see where this book goes.

Movie (theater): No $3 Thursdays when you lead youth group Bible study that night.  We did go to the Loudoun Demolition Derby, though (picture here), for some very enjoyable jalopy destruction (including a rollover, reportedly rare in the tight confines of the derby pen).

Movie (home viewing): We Bought A Zoo.  A cute story involving animals, kids, and real property covenants.  Notable for its handling of the difficulty of reaching out to an indifferent teen.

Music: New Surrender by Anberlin.  Good rocking tunes with sizzling electrics, while not neglecting other instrumentation.  Even includes reasonably interesting lyrics, although that doesn't always mean a lot to me.  (I listen to opera, after all.)

Household project:  Fence segment to close off the end of our yard from little-person street access.  I wanted to match the fence to the neighbor's, which was mostly a matter of measurements.  I also wanted the gate to be pressure treated, but those boards only come as 2x4s, so I got to use the table saw to split them down to 1x4ish pieces.  This required more than one pass with the table saw, and without a jointer, I didn't always have a good match between the passes.  But a third run through the saw solved most of the mismatches, and a LOT of sanding later it wasn't too bad.

Low point: Point Blank (starring Lee Marvin).  A rather slow and repetitious story about a gangster out to get money he feels owed to him from his former partner.  Once he finds the partner, he starts working his way up the food chain from the partner in an out of control sense that the people the partner worked for bore continuing moral responsibility for the double cross.  Complete with the bad clothes, music-free sequences, and rapid zoom shots that make many 60s movies hard to watch anyway.

Other thoughts: We just watched Season 1 of Terry Goodkind's Legend of the Seeker.  First, to all the nincompoops and haters: it is a TV adaptation based on the world created in the books; it is not the books and we don't care that it has some differences.  That said, the TV show is a bit lighter fare than the books (not generally a bad thing, and saves what would have probably been dull going when it comes to the technicalities of how magic works in Goodkind's world), but still presents the major themes of honor, heroism, and the balancing of honesty with cleverness.  Recommended for anyone who enjoyed BBC's recent Robin Hood show with Jonas Armstrong.  On to Season 2.