MN Thompson's

Christopher is 7!!! Beth and I survived his first sleepover party (4 other boys stayed over). None of his friends had ever been to an official sleepover so this was a bit of a test for several of them (and us). They all passed – no issues at all (whew). The theme was Star Wars – which basically means a lot of fighting with sticks and light sabers and anything else you can get your hands on.

Here’s what’s on Christopher’s mind this year…

My favorite food is…pasta for lunch or dinner and crepes for breakfast (sounds familiar)

When I grow up I want to be a…scientist (again). He’s still not sure what kind of scientist (he says he’ll decide what kind when he grows up).

My favorite restaurant is…Noodles & Co (yuck)

My favorite stuffed animal is…Floppy the bunny

My favorite color is…blue, red, and green

My favorite song is…I’ve Got a Feeling (by the Black-Eyed Peas)

My favorite holiday is…Christmas (because he gets tons of presents and because it is the day that Jesus was born – yes he said that – without prompting – but presents come first)

My favorite season is…winter (because it is fun to play in the snow and ice)

My favorite thing to do is…play computer and Nintendo DS

If I could do anything tomorrow I would…go to the Wisconsin Dells (that’s what he said last year – I guess some things never change)

So…my ducks have been slow to come back this year. I’ve only seen momma and poppa a few times in the backyard. Mr. Ducks have come by a few times – and I’ve seen a few daddies on the roof (I think they spend the night there sometimes)…but Orca seems to be scaring them away. Grrrrrr. Bad dog. I have yet to see any fish yet either…keep your fingers crossed (Beth has given up and is ready to buy new ones…I’m giving them another week and keeping my fingers crossed).

Instead of ducks we have monkeys in our trees…not sure which I prefer 🙂

I ran 8 miles Saturday in my annual 50K team event through the dirt and mulched paths of a very hilly park. It went great – beat my time from last year so I haven’t peaked yet. Can’t wait to see everybody in a few days – the weather has been perfect for days and days but now they’re saying rain Friday and Saturday – figures.

Colleen comes home every day now from school and begs for an email address. I still haven’t figured out how to handle that one…but I’m wearing down. She’s fine if I can read everything she sends and receives…that’s a start. Mom and Dad didn’t have a tv until they were over 10, I didn’t have a computer until I was over 10, and Colleen’s sob story is that she didn’t have an email account until she was over 9 – I wonder if her kids will be able to believe that!!!

Well…we survived Colleen’s birthday weekend. Barely. We ended up with 7 out of 10 girls spending the night on Friday. The quote of the night came at precisely 8:24 p.m. when Beth turned to me and said “this is way crazier than I expected.” Ha!

I think that was right after Orca had been let out by one of the girls for the 2nd or 3rd time to freely roam the neighborhood.

It rained most of the evening and we had planned to do s’mores and a scavenger hunt. I still managed to light a fire with the wet wood and the girls had fun running through the muddy yard and trails, but we delayed the scavenger hunt until morning.

We tie-dyed in the garage – two days later my fingers are still not quite back to the color they should be – but the girls had a lot of fun making those – and they turned out awesome.

While we opened the presents Colleen had been prepped to thank people even if she already had what they gave her – but I guess we forgot to tell Megan the same thing. For a few presents Colleen would be saying “thank you” and then Megan would chime in, in a loud sing-songy voice “but we already have that.”

We handed out glow necklaces at some point, and as the girls were finally settling in to go to bed after their movie we heard some shrieks – one of them had ripped their necklace and it shot the glowy liquid stuff across several sleeping bags, pillows and pj’s. We soon found out the glow stuff doesn’t come out of anything that it touches no matter how hard you scrub – so thankfully it all loses its glow after a few hours.

We had the girls sleep on the main floor in the family room and we slept upstairs. At about 3:00 a.m. I heard some rustling in our bedroom, followed by a small hand brushing across the end of our bed and squeezing me toes 🙂 I asked “who’s there?” and I got back a “me”, to which I asked (to Beth’s amusement) “me who?”. One of the girls was walking in her sleep and managed to get all the way upstairs and into our bedroom – what fun!

At any rate, we survived and Colleen had a great birthday!

Here’s what’s on Colleen’s mind this year on her birthday…

My favorite food is…chocolate ice cream and pasta

When I grow up I want to be an…artist (and doesn’t care what medium she works in)

My favorite restaurant is…Subway

My favorite toy is…my friendship bracelet kit

My favorite color is…green

My favorite song or band…(doesn’t have one)

My favorite holiday is…Christmas

My favorite season is…fall (because that’s when her birthday is)

If I could do anything tomorrow I would…not have school (and she would go swimming)

My favorite subject in school is…English (because she can talk in English)

If I could travel anywhere in the world…I would go to all of the Great Wolf Lodges all over the world

Third graders at our church get a Bible – that special day for Colleen was today. Here’s our big nine year old with her new Bible!

This summer is still going by crazy fast. How can it be so long between posts?!?!? Busy times. Last Saturday one of my co-workers had an open house. He’s the one on my links with the house he built last year that is as green as green can be (solar panels, geothermal heating, steel roof, let’s his yard go wild, etc). His house is almost an hour away so we made a day trip out of it. We started by following the Mississippi south to Wabasha – home of the National Eagle Center. They have several live eagles that you can get right up to and more facts about eagles than your brain can store in one sitting. Glad we saw it but I’m even more glad we never planned a trip to Wabasha just to see this center.

After that we hit Red Wing’s River City Days (a small town fair and art festival). We’d never been to Red Wing before – it seemed like a nice place to drive through 🙂 After that we hit Paul’s house which was way cool to see. He has a beautiful house and it’s great to see people take the initiative to protect the environment. As we left his house, driving down a gravel road, we saw a red fox sitting by the road before it slipped into a corn field. And then on Sunday Beth’s company had their picnic at the Minnesota Zoo. Check out the tongue on this beast – the zoo keeper better start brushing that tongue! Nasty. Megan was the only adventurous one to help with the feeding. It was a beautiful day and it was nice to finally meet Beth’s co-workers.

I have a box of old computer paper – you know, the kind with the holes going down both sides that you have to tear off, and all the sheets are also all connected so you have to tear them apart. So…I told Colleen this was her new drawing paper (actually I wrote a note on the top sheet letting her know that). And she wrote me back that day saying “no”. So I wrote back “why not?” and she wrote back “it takes a lot more time to get a piece and it’s not even white”. I laughed because it looked white to me until she got a piece of our new printer paper and put them side-by-side and she’s right – twenty years in a box, traveling from New Hampshire, to Purdue, to Chicago, to Minnesota has somehow turned it to a shade of something that isn’t quite white anymore. We agreed that as long as I tear the paper then she’ll use it…deal. I’m really trying to go through stuff that’s been just laying around forever…wish me luck!

Megan has taken over the role of being my biggest helper. She will spend (what feels like) hours helping me in the yard…picking things up and doing exactly what I’m doing…she is prone to spells of non-stop energy, so this if fun for both of us.

I heard something picking at my window screen the other day…glad it wasn’t a squirrel or chipmonk…

A few weeks ago when Colleen and Christopher were with Beth’s parents in St. Louis, one afternoon Beth and I went out on the town with the credit card…we bought a new oven (5 years of not knowing if 350 = 350 or 500 finally got to us), another set of bunk beds and mattresses. The idea was to get the kids to start sleeping in different rooms…oh well, maybe that will happen in a few years…(I took this picture in the dark – and captured the animals moving about)…

Guess who turned four???

Here’s what’s on Megan’s mind this year on her birthday…

My favorite food is…mommy’s macaroni and cheese

When I grow up I want to be a…firefighter (she tells Beth this all the time too – that’s my girl!)

My favorite restaurant is…Culvers

My favorite toy is…my baby dolls (all of them)

My favorite color is…blue and purple

My favorite song is…I’ve been workin’ on the railroad. This is her favorite because it is the longest song that she knows and that means mommy or daddy will stay in her room longer at night singing it to her. Stinker.

My favorite holiday is…Christmas, Easter, and 4th of July

My favorite season is…winter (because I “can go whee down the hill”)

My absolute favorite thing to do in the world is…play baby dolls

If I could do anything tomorrow I would…eat birthday cake

<><><> Warning – long post – lots of pics <><><>

Whew – busy week packed full of good times. It’s hard to leave for a week when the yard and garden are showing off and growing like crazy. It’s been a great year for both flowers (plus the new path I’m building this year) and veggies…

First stop on the roadtrip was Chicago to get some quick pizza at Giordano’s for lunch. I called ahead as we left Wisconsin since stuffed pizza takes 45 minutes to bake. It was awesome as always (spinach, mushroom and sausage – yah)! Then we were off to Rochester, In. Grandma T was doing great – we talked a lot, ran over to the dam, got some pizza and saw many other Thompson’s and a couple of Biggs’. It’s always good to see everyone but there’s just never enough time to stay long enough.

We left Rochester early the next day and zipped to Lafayette. We made a few stops on campus…the fountain…the Union…and t-shirts for me…and then saw Wendy and her kids (and a few of her sister’s kids). Again, the trip was great but WAY too quick…

From Purdue we headed to the Great Wolf Lodge in Cincinnati for the Percy family reunion. We stayed there for 3 nights and apparently didn’t take any pictures (lucky for you). One day we went to King’s Island which was right next door to “the lodge” (so close that we could walk there). It was kind of a chilly day which meant that we could ride the river raft ride as much as we wanted to – we didn’t even have to get off of it, we could just keep looping. This was the best river raft ride I’ve been on – and typically the line can be over an hour…so we started and ended our day riding this…and walked around with soggy britches in between…

We also went to the Hofbrauhaus in Newport, Kentucky. It was a German restaurant where you were strongly encouraged to dance on the benches (but not the tables – we watched a group get thrown out for dancing on the table…seems like a fine line to cross). It was fun but the food convinced me that I never want to travel to Germany. Not my cup of Kartoffelpfannkuchen. My stomach ached the entire next day.

From Cincinnati we drove to St. Louis were we stayed for two nights before coming back to Minnesota (with just Megan). While in St. Louis we went to the coolest place downtown called the City Museum. Their tag line is “where the imagination runs wild” – this place was out of control. So many places you go to these days go overboard in terms of safety and not letting kids explore and play…this place was the exact opposite. I left there bleeding and bruised in several spots (seriously) – and I couldn’t have been happier. You could climb, crawl, hang, slide, you name it – EVERYWHERE in this place – under the floor, in the walls, overhead, behind the exhibits, indoors, outdoors, and they built this place with any material they could find – which was largely cement and metal (and of course no foam or anything to protect sharp edges, etc). When is the last time you slid down a cement slide? Or a slide made of rebar? This place is impossible to describe and words wouldn’t do it justice…so here are a bunch of pictures. In the outdoor pictures just look for Christopher in the green shirt. I definitely recommend this place to anyone visiting St. Louis – your kids will LOVE it!

The sign above this slide just said to keep your arms raised in the air…because if your fingers got caught while sliding down a slide made or rollers…well…let’s not think about that…

If your child got trapped or hurt in many of these places there is no way you could even get them…I was in some spots where I seriously had to go through spaces one arm at a time or I wouldn’t fit. Fun fact, on Friday nights they let the alcohol flow and open this place up to the college kids…so cool.

And a train to ride…kids can climb underneath the center area where you see the red bars in the back…

Cousin Matthew way up top…

Christopher underneath the walkway…

This is a 7-story slide that spirals the entire way down. This building used to be a shoe factory and this slide was used to slide shoes from the top floor to the bottom of the buildling…and we slid down the actual slides from way back when.

And…another highlight of the trip…Megan turned 4!!! Our little baby is 4 years old – hard to believe, huh?

The laundry chute never gets old. Here is Megan dropping her baby doll down to the basement. Grandma’s only rule (learned by experience) is “no spitting”. Yuck. This time the kids would send one kid to the basement armed with a mop. They would hold that up to block the chute at which point the kid up top would jam it full of stuff. Then another kid in the basement would put a plastic tub over their head and would proceed to have an avalanche of junk pour onto them. Oh, to be a kid again.

Colleen and Christopher stayed in St. Louis with Beth’s parents for a few days. Here’s Megan entertaining herself outside with all of her baby dolls. She still LOVES those dolls. She would take them one by one and hook them up to the dog’s chain outside and take them each for a walk…hee hee…

Ok, enough for now.

Once again Christopher chose McDonald’s and ice cream sandwiches for his birthday meal. He knows what he likes.

We survived having 15 kids at Chuck E. Cheese today. The party went great. And we didn’t lose a single kid! I don’t know how that place can stay in business – I felt like I was robbing them blind with all of the plastic spiders we left there with!

Hey buddy, you chose this place, suck it up and smile with the 6 foot rat…

Beth outdid herself again…

Here’s what’s on Christopher’s mind this year…

My favorite food is…crepes for breakfast; pancakes for dinner; and popsicles for dessert! I think his breakfast answer was a ploy to get me to make crepes today for breakfast – it worked…

When I grow up I want to be a…scientist. Before he answered this one he said, “Daddy, can I like change my mind later?”. I assured him whatever he told me wouldn’t be set in stone for the rest of his life!

My favorite restaurant is…Culvers

My favorite stuffed animal is…Eli the elephant

My favorite color is…red (this one surprised me – I would have gone with blue all the way)

My favorite song is…Going to the garden to eat worms

My favorite holiday is…4th of July (because we get to do our own fire works and we get to go see fire works)

My favorite season is…winter (because it is fun to play in the snow and sled and throw snow balls)

My favorite thing to do is…make airplanes (paper, rocket, punch-out kits, legos) and trade pokemon cards and play with bakugons

If I could do anything tomorrow I would…go to the Wisconsin Dells

Enough talk about Christopher…time for me. I ran 8 miles yesterday. 2nd time in my life I’ve ran that far. It was on grass and dirt trails and included running up and down a ski hill. It felt good…makes me ponder running a 1/2 marathon…somebody talk me out of it quick. Before the marathon I got to see wood ducks in our backyard again. All four ducks were out there – mallards and wood ducks. Momma mallard now has 10 eggs in her nest but she isn’t sitting on them round-the-clock yet…that should start happening any day now. Here’s daddy wood duck: