Family field trip

A Year with Frog and Toad was being performed at the Old Log Theatre so I thought it would be fun for Boden to go with his cousin, grandma, and uncle.  I would have loved to have gone, too, since I remember the stories of Frog and Toad from my childhood and I do love the theatre, but at 4 weeks old, August is still quite unpredictable.  So we stayed home and I waited for everyone to tell me about it.  Boden continues to have about a 20-25 min attention threshold after which he asks when "it" will be over and starts to lose interest but he made it through and I continue to get bits of info about the play from him so he must have been paying attention.  If I ask directly about it, though, he says "I don't remember" which is unbelievable because he remembers nearly everything.  But, if I'm patient, he'll bring it up and say some little tidbit of memory from the play that he found amusing or boring--eventually, I'll be able to piece together the whole thing.  Thank goodness my mom provided some reliable details for me.

State Fair Bound

I had zero desire to waddle around the Fair this year so I used my Lady-in-Waiting status to get me out of the trip.  As I was pregnant with Boden exactly 5 years ago, I vividly remember that State Fair experience...it wasn't a good one.  So I sent the boys off for a little guy time and some instructions to try to make a few healthy choices while they were there.  I thought they'd be home by early afternoon, but they weren't even off Machinery Hill by that time--too busy checking out all the equipment!  Apparently, Boden was telling anyone who would listen that he and his dad were going to buy a farm and he was  going to drive the tractors; dad was going to be in charge of the animals.  I got regular reports via text of all the fun they were having and I figured we'd have an exhausted boy by the evening--he fell asleep before the bus left the State Fair lot but caught his second wind once he got home!

At Alphabet Forest



The pride and perils of geocaching

Given Boden's interest in pirates and "treasure", I thought now would be a good time to try out geocaching--searching for hidden treasure!  A fellow gymnastics mom told me a bit about it and showed me the app she used so I downloaded it and we got started on a weekend day when Todd needed a little time for home improvement.  Our first search was successful--it took a little time to find but we met an older lady and her granddaughter whom Boden quickly recruited.  The lady had been geocaching with her husband and knew the cache we were in search of, so we knew we were in the right area.  Finally, we stumbled upon it!  With the confidence of finding our first cache under our belt, I checked the app for another hidden treasure and we headed out.  The second one was a bit of a walk into Carver Park.  After the 5th minute of constant whining about how far we'd walked and "I wish it was closer"s, I was wishing i had brought the stroller (geocaching tip:  have the stroller on hand if the kiddo is going to be helping with the search.).  As my tolerance was wearing thin, the map indicated we were close.  Per the map, we needed to do a little off-roading so we headed up the embankment and started looking high and low (the first one was hanging from a tree, so I thought anything was possible).  There were some downed trees that looked like the perfect place so we zeroed in on that area...then I felt something painful on my leg, looked down, thought it was a huge ant, then Boden yelled--I had stepped on a hornet's nest and they weren't happy.  Boden was getting stung, I was getting stung and trying to get them off him, and we were running and swatting and yelling.  It was awful.  At the end of it all, I had lost my sunglasses, we didn't find the cache, i had at least 15 stings, Boden had about 5 and I was carrying my crying little dude back to the car trying to explain the hornets' behavior and that wouldn't happen every time we went geocaching.  Luckily, we redeemed ourselves 2 days later when I popped Boden in a stroller and we headed off in search of the same cache and my sunglasses.  We found the cache about 15 feet from the hornet spot...but my sunglasses are still out there.  :(

Photo:  our first cache!!

Fireman Boden

This past weekend, Boden got invited to spend the evening at the Chanhassen fire house by one of his pre-school classmates whose dad is on the force.  While we were there, he got to check out some of the fire men's fire protecting gear and rescue vehicles, turn the hose on and clean off the driveway, and ride in the fire truck (Todd got ride along, too) with the lights on.  The fire marshal of Edina also stopped by and the kids all got to turn on his vehicle's lights and sirens.  He thought it was all very cool and it was fun to see his excitement.