Guest Post by Jim!

Guest post today by Jim! Jim told me about his day, I laughed and told him he should write a blog post about it. I got to go to church solo (and listen!) and teach. It was awesome. Anyway, back to Jim's day...

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Today, all of our boys were had runny noses, scratchy throats, and mild temperatures, so they didn't go to church. After enough time trashing the house and obviously having nothing to do with their extra energy, I took them to the park.

Yeah, the park instead of church. Because they're sick.

Anyway, I think most people take their kids to the park for the playground. Ours get bored of the playground equipment very quickly and start running off to do other things. Today, we walked right past the playground and kept going to the racquetball court. It has a wall for them to throw tennis balls at and then chase down. It's pretty cool.

It took a while to get them all in the same picture.

After we played there for a while, we went and got some water, then played at the playground until Rae made friends with someone who had a bike. They raced up and down the sidewalk a few times, and then Rae convinced the boy to let him ride the bike, without much in the way of experience or shoes. It did have training wheels, and I did get him to wear the helmet that was swinging on the handlebars. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of that. You'll be glad to know that Rae did not injure himself riding down the hill, though.

Calebinius the Dog Whisperer practicing his arts

More water, running in circles, and petting random dogs that happened to be in the area, all the boys went back to the racquetball court. Rae's new friend Reuben went with them, and playing ball meant that Reuben would throw all three of the tennis balls, and my boys would go chase them down and bring them back to Reuben.

After a setback or two. You see, by this point Rae and Caleb had both taken off their shoes. (Not Joe. Good for him.) Caleb ran about six feet onto the racquetball court, then stopped and wailed, "Daaaad!"

"What is it, Caleb?"

"Feeeeet!" I was halfway to where he was by that point, and could see him trying to stand on his heels and keep all the rest of his feet up off the ground.

"Is the ground really hot?"

"Yes."

I picked him up and explained to him that we wear shoes to protect our feet. After splashing water on the soles of his feet, we put his shoes on his feet and he ran back to the game like nothing had happened.

Rae, of course, was still barefoot, and the pavement was still hot. He just stuck to the ledge on one side of the court and the twelve inches of shade on another. After a few minutes of watching and laughing, I suggested he put his shoes on, too.

"Oh, yeah..."

Because I'm short on pictures for this post, here's the younger two getting some water. They don't want any help at all using the water fountain, thank you very much. Rae gets his water this way, too.

Caleb came home soaked. That was half the fun, I'm sure.

We came home and had some water and cookies, and then Joe put himself to bed. Caleb No-More-Naps also went down pretty easy, and is in fact still asleep as I type this. I guess that was a good trip to the park.

Bean bag chairs for the win.

That, or they're still sick...