After spending a week up at Lake Erie this summer (we’ve got a serious backlog of posts to work through here — Julie took the kids up to Middlebass Island so that Alana and Carson could attend a camp there while Julie hung out with several of the ladies from the ‘hood), Julie announced that it sure would be nice to have a TV in our kitchen that she could flip on in the morning to catch a morning news show while she was working on breakfast, scrubbing the floor, dusting the light fixtures, and all those other homemaker-ly things that keep her tethered (barefoot, of course) to the hub of our domesticity.
That gave me the opportunity to do three of my favorite things:
Keep my eyes peeled for a good deal on a piece of electronic equipment
Cut holes in the wall
Make Julie happy
Within a month, I’d found a great deal online on a refurbished Westinghouse TV (who knew that Westinghouse still existed as a brand…and a brand that makes decent TVs?!) and had ordered both the TV and a mounting bracket. When Julie headed to the Jersey Shore (<sigh> another post not yet written), I had a weekend to actually pull the cable (TV and electrical) to the designated spot. When the bracket arrived the following Friday, I got it mounted, and, Saturday morning, Alana watched cartoons…while perched on the island. The TV was positioned to allow Julie to easily see it from the sink/stove/oven/fridge — not from kids’ preferred cereal-eating spots.
By Sunday afternoon, when Alana and a couple of her friends came into the kitchen looking for a snack, Alana announced: “We can sit up here!” I took a break from making the pizza dough to document the result.
To their credit, as soon as their tummies were full, they climbed down and headed off (of course, I think I had a PGA tournament on, which is hardly engrossing material for girls at that age!).
We’re officially one week into the 2010-11 school year! Benton’s in 6th grade, so he’s now officially in middle school (although he started his day at the middle school all year last year for math class), Carson is in 3rd grade…and at a new school (a remnant of goofy school assignments when we first moved to Ohio), and Alana just started kindergarten. So, it was really newness all around for the Wilson kiddos.
Benton was the first to head out on Monday morning for the middle school bus.
He was really looking forward to middle school for a number of reasons, but he wound up having a shaky start due to some scheduling mix-ups. Super Mom swooped in to the rescue, and all was right with the world by mid-week.
Alana didn’t actually start school until Wednesday — kindergarten has a rolling start to, presumably, maintain the sanity of the teachers, as kindergarten in these parts is only half a day, so each teacher has a morning session and an afternoon session, which seems like a ridiculous number of kids to be managing, much less teaching! I didn’t find out until I went through the pictures that, apparently, Alana went ahead and dressed up for a dry run on Monday. This is a picture of her heading to the bus stop…two days before she was actually starting school
For a variety of reasons (new additions to the neighborhood, kids getting old enough to attend school, consolidation of the destination elementary school), the number of kids waiting to get on the bus at the stop on our street has exploded since last year:
Carson had surprisingly few reservations about heading off to school and got himself situated on the bus like it was old hat:
I think our final tally for the week was only 2 days out of 5 when he declared that he wasn’t going to school the next day, so we’re considering that a positive start!
On Wednesday, it was Alana’s turn for real. She got to pose with some of her friends:
And…on to the bus:
Day 1 had mixed results for Alana. She loved school, but she had some trials on the bus ride. By Day 2, she was rarin’ to go!
This past Friday was the start of high school football season in central Ohio. More importantly, it was gorgeous weather, the first weekend of school had been successfully navigated, and pretty much the entire ‘hood was in town. The result: 20 kids, 17 adults, and 4 dogs in and around our driveway eating burgers, pizza, and wings. With football in the air, Barrett and Bill got a game of street ball going, which the kids loved. And, shockingly, despite the size disparity across the teams, the prevalence of bare torsos AND bare feet, and the fact that half of the play occurred when it was dark enough that a couple of halogen work lights were turned on to light the “field,” there were no skinned body parts.
It’s been a while — almost a month, actually — since I’ve managed to get an updated post. It’s been a busy summer with lots of travel, both for work (me) and for pleasure (the rest of the family). I did manage to download the newest version of Google Picasa and crank out a quick video montage of Carson’s summer. Enjoy!
I suck at remembering birthdays. Hell, I barely know what day of the week it is sometimes.
But, early last year, I had a long and rambling post whereby I tried to nail down the exact date that Julie and I met each other. That date, it turns out, was March 23, 1990. Given that, I calculated that, as of today, Julie has hit one of those completely arbitrary milestones in her life: her husband has been in it for as much of her life as he was not in it. Or, to put it another way, she’s now been on a never-ending downhill slide relationship-wise for half of her existence.
With three functioning cameras floating around, we occasionally find pictures that are a bit dated. This one isn’t that bad — it’s from June 24th when my parents treated Carson, Julie, and Alana to lobster in Dripping Springs.
Due to early summer travel and vacations running rampant through the neighborhood, we hadn’t had a Friday evening cookout/hangout in our driveway for what seemed like ages. To make up for it, we took things up a notch last night by introducing homemade buffalo wings to the menu for the evening! We fired up a couple of burners and then Chef Bill went to town.
The Setup (It Had Been Raining, So We Set Up the Canopy)
The Scene
The Wingmeister and His Assistant
Some of the Kids Chose Alternative Seating
The Real Housewives of Springburn Drive
Everyone agreed it had been too long, and we still were missing a few of the regular families, so we’re looking forward to a number of repeat performances over the remainder of the summer!
For chuckles, I took a crack at mapping our travels between June 9th and July 4th of this year:
Tallying that up:
June 9-10: Julie, Tim, Benton, Carson, and Alana drive from Columbus to Dallas for the Love reunion (1,040 miles)
June 13: Julie, Tim, Benton, Carson, and Alana drive from Dallas to Lake Whitney, TX (100 miles)
June 15: Julie, Tim, Benton, and Alana drive from Lake Whitney to Columbus (1,150 miles — 19 hours!)
June 16: Carson drives (rides) from Lake Whitney to Austin (150 miles)
June 21: Tim flies from Columbus to New York City for a conference
June 23: Tim flies from New York City to Columbus
June 25: Julie and Alana fly from Columbus to Austin
July 1: Tim and Benton drive from Columbus to Richmond (500 miles), where they meet up with Julie, Carson, and Alana, who flew there from Austin; all five then drive on to Newport News, Virginia for the Lydle reunion (80 miles)
July 4: Julie, Tim, Benton, Carson, and Alana drive from Newport News back to Columbus (580 miles)
Adding that up, the total number of people-miles driven/ridden by the Wilsons over the course of the month: 14,750!
Number of miles logged on the new minivan for these trips alone: 3,600
Number of hours Tim and Benton each spent in the car: 60.
We’ve logged around 60 hours in the car as a family over the past month, and that’s not counting various travels by plane, so I’ve been falling behind on the blog front.
Alana’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago. And she had a party. And she had a good time. And it would be truly awful if she looked back in 20 years and thought her dad wasn’t sufficiently engaged to document the event. So, here goes!
There were games:
There was a spinning chair-swing:
…which could even handle the big kids, like Benton:
Benton’s friend, Nick, took a turn in the spinning swing, too…and was woozy all the way through the pizza and cake:
Did I say cake?!
And, any party that wraps up with a zip line (which the birthday girl gets to go on TWICE) has to be a winner, right?!
September 1, 2010 by Tim 
Posted in Alana 
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