EMP in the US

We have a bank holiday weekend this weekend, so we decided to have a barbeque.

I got some photo evidence that Ollie and Zebaba do play nicely – Ollie doesn’t always run away!

The kids all piled into the boys room to play – and STILL didn’t fight!

Alisa got to try David’s hat:

We then went to a Bluegrass festival on Sunday. The tickets were supposed to be $22 each for adults, and kids under 5 were free. We thought that was too expensive, and as it happened we didn’t have much cash when we turned up there. The kind lady who organised it let us in for $20! We would have given her all our cash, but she took pity on us and said to keep our last dollar to buy a soda! The weather was great, and the music was pretty good too!

For a nice surprise on Sunday evening, some people turned up to our barbeque, which had happened the day before (I blame David’s unclear invite…). This turned into another great evening, and the boys and I made some new friends, and it meant we didn’t have to tackle the washing up just yet!

However, Monday morning dawned on a kitchen piled to the ceiling with washing-up from 2 days of barbequeing. Thankfully, it was David’s washing-up day, so I quickly escaped with the boys to the play park. This was a good thing too, as we found Ollie’s “puppy” (stuffed toy) waiting for us on a table there. (People just don’t steal here!?) Thomas has a new trick:

…and Ollie is gradually becoming less scared of the swings. I still don’t know why he is terrified of sitting in a swing: he has never, to my knowledge, had a bad experience with one, but every time I try to swing him in one he goes stiff with fear, so I don’t try any more. Now he has at least found a way to enjoy the swings, so maybe he’ll overcome his fear before it becomes a problem when he’s older!

So in continuing to find fun things to do with the kids, we are lucky that the weather has been brilliant. I’ve been enjoying the 35 minute walk into town, so the other day, we packed a picnic to eat “on the green”. This place is actually a tourist attraction, I must point out, as the college is so “old” it was founded before the declaration of independence was signed. Anyway, I tried to get the famous clock in, for posterity!

It was improved further when David came out of his office and took us for dessert. We went to the student diner where the boys got ice cream and I got coffee and a cookie. It was really great, and really cheap, and the ceiling was pretty too!

Afterwards, the boys got to run around outside, and I got to ponder a tree, which had what looked like acorns, but the leaves weren’t oak leaves. Any ideas?

Here are the boys having fun:

[And, just a note to self, I figured out that video-posting all by my little self. Firstly, I trimmed it in QuicktimePro. Then I pulled it into Video2SWF by Vertical Moon, which didn't work, as I have a new hard drive since I last used it. I found the email with the serial number and got the activation code. Then I tried to upload it into the post, which I couldn't do because the file size was too big. I spent several minutes trying to find out how to increase the maximum file upload size (it was easy in an older version of Wordpress) and then gave up. I instead used Filezilla to ftp it straight to where I thought it should go. Then I used an old post from my old blog to get the [SWF] tag and edited it to suit the new blog and picture size. Then, when I posted… it still didn’t work. I went back to my old blog to check out the plugins, and sure enough, there was a wp-swfobject I didn’t have in my new blog. So I downloaded the latest version of it from a website that was, incidentally, in Spanish, un-zipped it, and uploaded it (using Filezilla again) back to my new blog, and HEY PRESTO! ]

I actually am feeling a little sorry for myself just now, as I had a Tet-Dap vaccination this morning, and now my arm and neck are sore, and I even feel feverish! Needless to say the boys got more TV time than usual this evening, though I think “Little Einsteins” is reasonably educational. I’ll do a whole post about my experiences with the U.S. healthcare system – now there’s a cliffhanger to make you want to read more!