Mercedes at Cove Play date May 2012

Every year, Cove School has a Play Day where kids from surrounding schools come together and participate in track events.  I remember participating in it myself, it is a great event that just got better this year with the participation of Mercedes Riggle (Jeremy's daughter).  The kids got a kick out of it and were excited to watch their cousin on the computer.  It shows the progress we have made in how we work with people with disabilities.  What a great memory for Mercedes and an important life lesson for the rest of the kids.  Mercedes will probably never understand how inspiring she is to the rest of us!

Picnic, May 2012

On May 16, 2012 we decided to pack a few things, find a park and have a BBQ.  We decided to head up to Grants Pass to find a place to have some fun.  We spent two hours driving up past Grants Pass to find a place that had a Park and a place to BBQ but we were unable to find anyplace that could meet our needs.  Determined to make this dream a reality on May 17th we headed out earlier and this time headed to the state park 12 miles south of Rogue River and wouldn't you know it, the only place you could BBQ was in the camping side.  In a moment of desperation we decided to head home and try a park in town, figuring that there was no way it would have BBQ pits, but we found an amazing park with everything we wanted and it was only a few blocks away.  We enjoyed the evening with beautiful surrounding for a peaceful night out with the family.

 

Porter and the Remote Control Car, May 2012

It was difficult to get a good picture of one of Porter's first experiences with a remote control car (all other remote control car experiences involved Ryan or Roc tormenting Porter with the car). Some of the neighborhood boys were out playing with remote control cars so Porter, like always, wanted to be involved. We set him up with one of Roc's old cars and put in fresh batteries and away he went. The best part of the whole ordeal was when Porter would fall behind the other kids he would stop and attempted to pick up his car to relocate it closer to everyone else. This created a dilemma for Porter, for some reason the motion of bending at the waste caused an involuntary contraction of his hand muscles which would intern force the car ahead and putting him out of position to pick up the car. We had a great laugh as we watched Porter going down the street a couple feet at a time trying to pick up his car.

Roc trying out a new look, May 2012

During one of our game nights, Roc, for some reason had decided to put this little piece of scratch paper on his upper lip to give himself a Charlie Chaplin Mustache.  Emma and Roc could hardly contain their laughter. 

A funny side note, the game we were playing was Upword (a scrabble like game that allows you  to stack the letters to create new words) and Roc got the notions to spell "SEX" and immediately asked "what is sex?"  He then started laughing (he must have sensed my throat closing).  My first instinct was to redirect a question like this to Stacie but as luck (or in my case "misfortune") would have it Stacie was at the store so I was abandoned to tackle this on my own, I was left with two options: Lie and tell him that it was not a word or do what I had always said I would do and break out the A&P books and give a complete breakdown of the word from a medical perspective.  I decided to go with the Readers Digest option of explaining sex as being the defining characteristics that determines if we are a boy or a girl.  Luckily he accepted my explanation and on my next turn I turned sex into jet, a much more exciting word to talk about with children!

Calvin vs. Peas, May 2012

Calvin is starting to get the whole "eating food" thing down so we have started introducing different foods.  This could be an early indication that we have another Roc on our hands (for those of you who don't know Roc is the pickiest eater ever), Calvin got his first taste of peas and he was not impressed!