4-21-12

Zach knocked on his bedroom door and yelled “Come In!”  Then, “Daddy! Daaaday!” the other morning when he woke up. 

He walked along side of the cart for my entire Wal-Mart trip and was able to help pick things out.

He has been saying, “Oh my gosh!” in a surprised tone and holding his hands up to the sides of his mouth. 

Despite playing with Easter eggs all year long, he was very surprised when the Easter bunny delivered eggs to the ranch. The older boys were kind of acing him out and he got upset, but Dale, Warren and Steve told them to follow behind Zach. The boys did a really good job with that. 

Zach liked the ranch, but not for the livestock or the gun shooting. He liked the swing set and Little Tikes slides, exploring around the pond with Daddy and climbing the “mountains,” which were steep dirt hillsides. I have been looking for some used playground pieces ever since.  There is a lot of expensive new crap and a lot of expensive old crap.  I’m going to find some slightly less expensive, not-crap, used stuff. 

I have a bumper crop of Yukon Gold potatoes growing, and all I did was put the pieces in the ground and water once or twice. The onions and lettuce are ok too.  It is strange when you think about all the bacteria and manure in a garden, how we don’t worry that any of it seeps into the vegetable (well, I guess I do now).  Mike said he’d help me weed the damn thing today.

Don sent us another email to say that he didn’t know how much notice he could give us about when they would cut us off from the driveway.  We have decided to just not reply. We’ve been over this stuff a million times with him.  He is the only one worrying about the 1-inch difference in the property line and the imaginary lawsuits in his head.  Our neighbor George Dunning said, “I bet he got beat up a lot when he was a kid.”  Rumor also has it that Don brought some of their eggs to George and George told him to, ”Get out of here. I don’t want you coming around here.” George is known for embellishment, and he told me a slightly nicer version, but I like the first one.

We have 2 blue jay pairs and 2 cardinal pairs that fight over the bird food. A blue bird family moved into the blue bird house, but the other day I found Speedy had climbed up to look in the hole. Hopefully she didn’t hurt one.

I guess I like St. Mary’s. I am getting better at knowing the patient population and physicians. I can’t imagine the drive to KUMed now that I am not doing it.  It was really neat to be around all the smart people doing cutting edge research at KU, but that was sort of remote anyway.  

Mike is getting over his sinus infection. He had trained up to running 3-4 miles every other day, prior to getting sick.  He is anxious to get back to it.  He has $44,000 in orders to process at the office this weekend.  All of his compost is gone, so he is using fertilizer to help process the existing leaf pile.  We are sort of lost without it.

Tonight is parents’ night out at Kidz Kabana. Zach’s friend Hudson is going. So we are going to do something. We decided not to plan what though, because these nights are sort like New Years eve, in that you feel forced to feel like you are having a good time for the time you have.  Hopefully spontaneity will be fun.