Furlough Fun

The first two days of Pop's furlough have not been too bad. Our readers may recall that the temps here were hot during the last furlough. Well, so far the highs in Wichita have been in the triple digits each of the past two days, and more are expected throughout the week. We don't care. In fact I timed this furlough (the final three weeks of furlough were to be taken at the employees discretion, just before the end of the year) to be in the summer time so that we would have things to do outside. We went to the zoo again on Monday morning, and that evening, the pool. The zoo was good as usual.

A rare photo where both D and E are looking in the right direction and smiling all at the same time. Also, we took the wagon this time. It worked out alright, I guess, but Desmond wanted to ride along with Emma far too often. After all, the morning excursions are partly for the sake of wearing the little punks out, not wearing out Pops. D and I had a few battles about him riding all of the time. He would get mad and refuse to follow along with E and I. I started taking pictures of him when he would get mad, and it would usually get him to lighten up.


That's him loitering by the giraffes. You may have to click on the photo to enlarge it so you can see how pathetic is pout is. He's pretty stubborn.


But he usually breaks down.

We've been to the pool both of the past two evenings. Tonight they were hosting some kind of "neighborhood night out" where they let in non-members from the neighborhood for free. This was unexpected on our part, but we were able to tolerate the non-member riff-raff since there was free food. We had already eaten, so we just had a snack of watermelon, carrots and chips.



There were a lot more kids there than usual, so there were some lessons to be reinforced about sharing; namely that sharing is for suckers. I was impressed by the lengths that D would go to rip a toy out of some kids mitts to get back something that that punk had stolen from Lady E. I jest...D and E are pretty rowdy, and D was retrieving toys for E, but they do share pretty good. As we were leaving some mounted police showed up for the sake of the neighborhood event. D shown here petting "Gracie".


Well tomorrow is likely to be another hot day...nice and hot...and we plan to spend some of it decorating cupcakes for Jen's B-day. The kiddos picked out the cake flavor and the frosting, and we got some decorating-icing-stuff for making the cakes festive. It should be a wonderful mess.

Also, we did get to go to the track this past weekend. Desmond rode more this time than all of the past times combined. I actually thought he was going to run his bike out of gas. The track was busy (it was a very nice day) and there were several younger kids riding nearby so he was happy to feel like he was in the mix of it all. Some photos:

Gearing up.

Pretty darn good form.


Emma seems to like going out there with us. She always seems to have fun, whether it be digging in the dirt, riding around in the wagon, playing on the trailer or all of the snacks we usually take.