Check Mates

Our Hero is all about playing No-Stress Chess these days. Good thing, too, because there's not much these days to which the adjective no-stress might be applied. NSC is chess as you know it, Fans, but with a deck of cards. Each card has a piece on it with a reminder of how it moves. Players draw cards and move the piece on the card. So it's a good way to learn the game even if strategy is sacrificed at the alter of the cards to a large extent.

When Julie arrived home last night, Joe asked her to play NSC. She was game (oh, pun intended, Fans, pun intended). As she captured Joe's pieces, he would say in a singsong voice, "I don't ca-are, I don't ca-are," which Julie found very unsportsmanlike. But Joe informed her he only cared about the king. Ah.

Then Julie captured the king. "Joe said "I don't ca-are, I don't ca-are. . .ca-are, ca-are. Oh." And then he laughed and so did Julie.

Check.

Take me out to the ballgame

As luck would have it, the first chance to bring one of the kids to a Twins game with our season ticket package was today-Fathers Day!  It was a beautiful 80 degree sunny day and the Twins hosted the Detroit Tigers. Ted and Joe got to their seats just before the national anthem, so Joe got the full experience. Joe was full of questions, and baseball isn't the easiest game to learn, but he tried to fit it all into his own logic. He was clear that we wanted Tigers to be out not Twins. And he was quick to tell his mother later about how the pitcher made a mistake and hit the batter. But there were lots of questions about which team was hitting, when the pitcher would come from "behind that little gate" (aka the outfield bullpen), and what inning it was. I think the highlights for Joe (and Ted) was the fireworks during the national anthem, the cotton candy in the first inning, visiting the organist and asking what all the buttons do, the fireworks when Dozier hit a HR to break up the no hitter in the fifth, singing Take Me out to the Ballgame, the ice cream cone in the seventh, and running the bases after the game (every Sunday game is kids day!), and finally the foam finger his Dad bought him on the way out (thats the Rod Carew statue for the non fans out there). Ted couldn't have asked for a better Fathers Day outing or for a better buddy to watch the game with. 

First Summer Storm of the Season

Just before this picture was taken, Birdie shook her head, and then looked over at Julie with this smile.

Boo, trying to find safe harbor.

Yesterday afternoon there was a pretty terrific afternoon thunderstorm which scrubbed our plans to attend the annual St. Louis Park Parktacular when Birdie woke up from her nap.  Julie was out and about and pulled into the garage not long after the storm had broken out.  She was driving in the car thinking about how nice it would be to watch the storm from the porch when she remembered the trusty white plastic chairs that are usually yard party seating.  She ran from the garage--with two of them over her head--to the backdoor, where Ted met her, took them, and put them right into the porch, where we promptly put ourselves to watch the storm (except for Our Hero who was watching Cars and, really, Berenice who was less watching then fretting and hoping that if the world was ending as she suspected, there would be Greenies in heaven).  There might not have been Greenies, but it was a little slice of heaven.

Birdie's First Swimming Lesson

Swimmers, before class.

Birdie went to her first swimming lesson yesterday morning!  A new session began at the swim school ad while Joe continued on in the Littles 3 class, Clara began in the Little 1 class.  Conveniently, their classes are at the same time: 8am.    Now a Saturday morning 8am swimming lesson sounds like it might be awful, but--as we discovered--it is actually pretty great as there aren't as many families who want to be swimming at that time (especially in the summer) so the usual hubbub of the Foss Swim School was greatly reduced.  As it happens, Clara is the only swimmer in her Littles 1 class, and her teacher, Ms. Courtney, was clearly delighted that her first swimmer out of the box on Saturdays this session was going to be "a little ball of sunshine."

At her first lesson, Birdie did a little bit of everything that she will be taught this session by Ms. Courtney:  monkey cheeks, putting one's face in the water, scooping, kicking, floating like a pancake (one one's back).  Because Joe has talked about all of these things (and had, in fact, just the night before instructed Clara on monkey cheek making in preparation for the big day), Clara picked right up on what Ms. Courtney was laying down and tried it all which made Ms. Courtney very, very happy.  As she told Julie: "She's very brave which is going to be very helpful!"  Birdie likes to kick just one leg right now, largely because she's twisting to watch her would-be kicking prowess, which you can see in this short video of Birdie in the water.

Stoop Setting

Clara said this morning that she liked this outfit a lot.  It's her two favorite colors.  (Those are purple shorts, in case you can't see them well enough to tell.)

The Longhorns had practice and a game tonight, but at 7pm, so the boys went to the soccer fields while the Birds stayed home.  Today was our first summer like day here in the Cities in weeks.  Clear blue skies, sunshine, warm-but-not-hot temperatures.  In short, a perfect day for a little soccer.

Turns out, this weather is also perfect for sitting on the front stoop and polishing off the last quarter of the "pink cookies" (strawberry wafers*) in the bucket while watching the neighbor across the street putter in her garden.  Which is exactly what the Birds did.  Our neighbor across the street has provided hours and hours of free entertainment with her incessant yard puttering, and watching her from our porch was one of our favorite ways to putter away an evening.  We're gonna miss her, Fans.  We're gonna miss her.

* For our adult Fans, we can recommend trying them with champagne, and would also encourage you to keep an eye out for this in your locale's hipster bar.  Don't you think that combo screams hipster bar?