Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e had a really nice birthday barbeque celebration in the backyard this past weekend.  Although it was a bit smoky from the Canadian wildfires, the weather was actually quite nice for a change! The company was good.  The food was good.  The drinks were cold.  There were plenty of games to play.  The rain stopped just long enough for us to set up the yard on Friday, have a great time together on Saturday and then clean up before it started raining again.   Looking at these photos, it seems to me that everyone had a good time! As always, the kids congregated on the sailboat most of the day.  At one point, four of the grandchildren were on the sailboat at the same time (photo above).  I have no idea how they all fit in that rather small cockpit!  In hindsight, when I saw that the four of them were on the sailboat together, I should have had Liza place 10 day old Sophia into Lukey or Kenzie's arms too so I could get a photo of all the gran...

One night this past weekend, we had a marathon game night with the grandkids while watching a few movies. I'm not really one for board games (I typically avoid them like the plague) but I do enjoy playing Uno and that is what we started with on Saturday. First, Gee had to teach the kids how to play Uno... and, they did better than expected. Shuffling is out of the question, even dealing is out of the question, but they did so well in learning that the following morning Lukey and Kenzie played Uno alone and were actually remembering most of the rules on their own. They did very well! After we tired of about a million four-card-hands of Uno (four cards were far easier for them to handle than seven and the hands went fairly quickly), they switched gears and moved to the classic game of Trouble.  Apparently, they had played Trouble before but definitely needed a quick refresher from Gee. Truth be told, they remembered about as many of the rules as I did! I definitely needed a ...