Em N Ru: Boat and Birthday

Wednesday we cleaned house and headed south for Dorena Lake. With the temperature near 100 we saw no reason to be in Salem.

We stopped at mom's house for the Sea Doo and Fred was there so we grabbed him too. We got on the water as fast as humanly possible, and had a long swim in the middle of the lake. Fred wanted to drag behind the boat so we let out a rope and I pulled him along. No float or anything. He says he feels like a dolphin.

Jeremy and his kiddos came out and joined us at 4:30pm and I gave everyone a ride it the tube. Fred needed to get to rehearsal (and replace a lawnmower blade) so he left about 5:30pm. We ate, swam, and the kids played a game of king of the tube. After another round of pulls we called it a day. As we were packing up I gave Jeremy his birthday present, a giant jar and some cold brew tea.

On the way to mom's I stopped off at my friend Dave's house to check on things as he is in Spain. His place looked great, his plants had been regularly watered, but the grass needed some mowing.

Jeremy turned 40 today, to celebrate I launched him off the tube into the water repeatedly at high velocity.

They actually did pretty well being towed like this.

The other two kids are under or behind the tube.

He was hardly moving, but he likes to drive.

A game when we got back.

Thursday July 2 Happy Birthday Ruben!

I got him up, fed him a pancake, then we went to work. I told Dave I would check in on his place while he was gone, and I just hadn't had a chance. So to help out Norm his awesome watering guy I wanted to do some mowing. We drove to Dave's and Ru picked blueberries while I mowed the easy lawns. Dave doesn't have a fancy lawn mower, and I got to bag all the grass and spread it in the garden as mulch. After the top lawn I was tired and I recruited Ru to help with the bottom yard. Because he was so full of berries (He had picked two gallons already, one for Dave and one for us) He came down to help.

His birthday wish was probably not learning how to use a lawn mower.

The grass was a little overgrown, I just counted it as a great workout.

After

We really weren't watering the grass, he was watering me.

I had him spray me down. We finished around noon and it was scorching hot.

Arby's Bacon sandwich. He said it was delicious, and he had fun boinging the curly fries.

We ate lunch at mom's, finishing off the Arby's and having a salad. I told Ruben the story of his birth, a birthday tradition. His dad came over around 2pm.

I liked the reflection

He got them all out.

A gift from his dad

Mom's thermometer

Max and Jeff (Ruben's dad) ate cupcakes and Ru opened his gift. He got a hamster habitat. Ru will have to wait to get the hamster till we get back from all our adventures. We had fun putting it together when we got home. We left Mom's at abut 3pm, and I had promised Ru that he could play his new video game "Kaiso Mario" which he did. He couldn't make it past the first level so he went to my air conditioned room to watch youtube tutorials.

I left him to it and went to madrigal rehearsal. I almost skipped it but we have 5 performances coming up and we are learning two new songs that are really tricky.