In summary, before edit 1 there were nearly 6,000 frames.

With the initial cut, I deleted the frames that weren’t QUITE there. This included strobes that didn’t fire, focus points being wrong, or not seeing anything worthwhile at all.

That left me with over 4,000 frames.

You wondered why nothing was posted. Choosing from that selection isn’t easy. Tagging that many isn’t easy. And then, once you’ve done that, and you think you have your selections, you actually can start to WORK on them.

Historically, I’ve put these up chronologically. This year, we’ll try grouping them by subject.

Sunrise: As I’ve said earlier, it’s a miracle that these even were taken.

Sunset: What’s stranger, in most cases, I have frames from BOTH sunrise and sunset.

McGuires: Chronicled here, some of these you’ve already seen.

Fudpuckers: Fishing for Alligators. Need I say more?

Crabs: Mary still declares this to be one of her favorite activities. I think the idea of pulling a live crab from the ocean, and putting it in a bucket is her idea of heaven. The child IS weird.

Bird Feeding: The idea is to feed to Gulls so they come closer. THEN, you chase them down. One of these days they are going to get one, and then it’s going to get REAL interesting.

Beach: Yeah, we were at the beach. If it’s not in one of the above catagories, chances are, it’s here.

Everything else: Ok, there were some that didn’t fit. The experiment with the REALLY CHEAP and BAD underwater camera. William telling Papa exactly HOW he needed to make the ice cream. These went into the root folder.

That being said, Having a two year old and a four year old under foot certainly makes you feel old and young again at the same time.

We’ve basically been celebrating all weekend, which is fine, as Mary Vic got to run around all weekend singing happy birthday and making birthday cards.

It’s been a good weekend. There has been so much going on, it’s hard to hit all the high points. The pool opened at Polk Place, so we spent several hours over there during the weekend. It was nice to be able to walk down there, but I have to say, it needs a bit more warming before that water is going to be really good. The kids pool was a bit chilly. The Main pool was downright cold. IF you jumped in, and stayed in, you’d be ok. You couldn’t ease in however… You’d never make it all the way. The kids, of course, were completely oblivious to the temperature. We need about a week of 85+ to get it nicer.

Papa has spent the last few months re-working our grill, and that hard work finally came to a close. Wrestling with mail order grill fulfillment has been the order of the day, complete with multiple shipments and broken grids. The supplier obviously isn’t used to drop shipments, as their packaging was completely inadequate for UPS (or Fedex for that matter). If I can’t ship servers that have been packed well without having UPS take pleasure in disassembly via tow motor and other abuses, there is no way the grids were going to make it with a single piece of Bubble wrap.

But it all came together in the end, and we cooked some burgers and hot dogs to start it up with. I managed to sear a temperature probe wire across my index finger and thumb. The wire braid over the sensor wire conducts heats ALL too well. That sucked pretty badly, but it was pretty much alright the next morning. Neither Mary or William would have anything to do with the cooking…. If they weren’t picky over everything right now, I’d take it personally. We did some trimming of the trees and bushes earlier in the day, which also allowed us to find that we have another family at the house…

They are hard to see, but there are a couple of grey little heads right at her feet. I don’t believe that she was overly happy about our discovery of them.

Mary was able to finally get a Rose bush. We waited until it was slightly cooler and less humid to plant it, but it was done. Mary dug some of the hole herself, and replaced almost ALL of the dirt herself. She was VERY proud of her gardening skills, complete with her own wheelbarrow and tools.

Papa picked up some crickets, so we had to find time to go and retrieve the smallest fishes capable of actually bitting the hook. More than a few hits on the lure and hook weren’t large enough to even think about getting the hook in their mouth. Mary and William didn’t care. I think they enjoyed the smallness of the fish, and the ability to torment them while hanging on the hook.

Monday was a bit of a washout in the afternoon, so no pool, but we did have a Birthday party. Mary acted as the officiator of presents, and William acted as the official Cake icing removal expert. Jeff has the pictures from that, so maybe they’ll come later.

The Grandparents looked after Mary and William while Jeff and I went to dinner and a movie (Indy 4). One of the high lights of the meal was the server coming by to check on us after our food was brought out. We went to a place that we had been going to since I moved to Tennessee. They have been revamping their service, definitely trying to push into the ‘upper level’ of service and food. For the most part they succeed, but it doesn’t feel the same for us anymore. The waitress was fresh from training, VERY nice, but unfortunately, we are definitely in the south. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but in order to place our expectations in line, the phrasing of her inquiry into the preparation of our meal was toward the exemplary. “Is everything with YALL’s dinner excellent?” was the question. The dichotomy of the word choice was wonderful. And while the dinner was good, I can’t say that it was Excellent. It used to be. I want it to be. Heck, I proposed to Jeff in this place. We used to think very highly of it. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s also not as good as we remembered. They want to play in the bigger leagues, but they just aren’t there, and frankly, their metamorphosis hasn’t been the best for them in my opinion. Trying to be everything to everyone rarely works well. We’ll probably try there again in a while…. as I said, it’s not BAD, just expensive and not as good as it used to be. And we’ve got great memories there.

Indy 4 was entertaining. Suspension of Disbelief was a bit harder to come by with this movie as opposed to Raiders or Indy 3, but it was eventually fun enough that you stopped thinking about how insanely bad the realism isn’t.

Of course, one of the best gifts I could have had for my Birthday was William’s followup examination from his femur break and subsequent Spica cast. He did super well in the Xray room (for the FIRST time), and the Xray’s came out wonderfully. You can barely tell where the break occurred now on either angle, and he’s set for a followup in Six months. Unless something really drastic happens, we won’t even need to xray then. Dr. Martus was pleased with his recovery. Seeing that nearly clean Xray, especially in comparison to the previously broken shots was a wonderful gift. It’s amazing how well the body heals at this age. Dr. Martus told us in the beginning that they don’t try to match the ends of a break together, but just get them in the general area and pointing in the same direction. It’s strange to hear when they tell you that, but it does look like it’s true. He says that there isn’t much point in a followup xray after this, as it will look identical to the other bone.

Of course, that has to be peppered with a little additional ‘lookout’. Because the bone is going to heal faster and grow to match the other, it’s possible that the accelerated growth will cause the OTHER leg to be a little shorter. Of course, it’s also likely that over the next 20 years the two bones will leapfrog each other, eventually closing the gap to nothing, or effectively nothing.

Whew. That’s enough for now.

He still continues to improve despite the hesitancy on Wednesday.

Wednesday overall was an interesting day. William was a little fussy but calmed down during an outing to the grocery story. We tried Publix which has the carts with the kid seats up where you push the buggy. You can see and talk to your kids. A plus and a minus as it means your four-year old can see the stuffed penguin with the baby on the counter. I don’t have one of those. No you don’t. I want it. That’s nice, today we are buying food. But… you got brother something! Brother had a .99 package of SpongeBob mac and cheese mix. I kind of doubted the penguin was on sale for 99 cents but I admit to not looking. NO! I did some sort of distraction tap dance and the issue was avoided. She did point it out again at checkout without fussing.

We came home and unloaded. I was needed at the library that afternoon so I called Greg. While he was seeing if he could come home, I put William in a warm bath which he really loved. I tried to get him down for nap but he was clingy, not going to sleep enough for me to get away. Greg came in and said he could work from home for a bit so I was able to get ready to go to the library. I put a show on for the kids and made lunches before leaving.

I was gone 3 hours and came back to the kids playing around the kitchen table while Greg worked. I was out longer than expected but they seemed okay. Greg told me that William had been kind of fussy. I took them for a walk to give Greg a break although he did come out and join us. MaryVic was hungry after a block or so and we headed back.

William started to melt down while he and MaryVic ate and I started cooking dinner. I don’t know what triggered it or if it was a culmination of the day with him being fussy and suddenly maxing out. He cried non-stop and wouldn’t really eat. He wanted to be held by momma. There was a slight break during the wild rabbit chase but I couldn’t put him down. I tried to get him to take a little nap even though it was late but again he didn’t want me to leave him. I finally got him to watch a show with sister while Greg and I ate dinner. He was just miserable.

After dinner, I put him in another warm bath. I gave him some pain medicine afterwards. I don’t know if it was the pain medicine or just the day but he had night terror symptoms twice before falling asleep for the evening. He went down between 8 and 8:30. I thought good, he was just exhausted, no real nap. Then he woke up at 9:30 and 10:30 thrashing around and screaming. He’d cry for Momma but not seem to recognize me while I talked to him. I sat up reading and watching him until 12:30 making sure he didn’t have another episode.

Thankfully Thursday was a better day for him. He crawled around most of the morning. He played ball with me while I cleaned up in the kitchen. We ran a few errands which included stopping at and joining the County Parks and Recreation Center in Franklin. It was suggested to me by co-workers as the indoor pool might be good for William’s legs and fun. We had 4 other stops total which included a hunt for MaryVic a swimsuit and trekking the Big K-Mart for swimmies and water wings. We have some from last summer but who knows where they were stored in the fall?

William fell asleep on the way home so he got a good nap in. After lunch and nap / quiet time, the whole family trekked to the Rec Center indoor pool. MaryVic got her water wings and was in the pool and halfway across it between the time I got the last one on her and started working on William’s water wings. Greg worked from the bleachers for a while before getting in.

William would not wear his water wings at first. He didn’t want to get in and refused to let go of me. He did like sitting on the side and before long was kicking up a storm in the water. I alternated between letting him do that and then pulling him in and floating him around. He eventually did put on his water wings and got to liking the water some.

After an hour in the water, we headed home. Greg ordered a pizza and cheese sticks for dinner. The funny thing is he ordered it via his laptop as we were leaving the Rec Center. There was just enough time for me to run a warm bath for the kids and get them in, when the pizza arrived. MaryVic cleaned up and was out to eat with Daddy. William stayed in the tub for 30 minutes playing.

We had a nice dinner and played the Wii afterwards before bedtime. No bedtime issues last night, just the storms that came through early Friday morning.

There were 4 times that William pushed himself up to lean on a counter, table or the bathtub edge using his left leg. He would push some with the right foot. The first time was when taking my id picture at the rec center. I looked down and he was up, with his nose on the counter looking at me. He had to do it twice in the tub and the Wii golf game was so interesting that he got up and leaned on the coffee table to watch.

I did stretch his legs out after the bath and compare the lengths. The bone at the inside of the left ankle kind of fits under the one on the inside of is right ankle. It isn’t really much or noticeable as he crawls around. I’ve had a few people tell me about other adults who had similar accidents so I know he’ll be alright. It was just a little sad to see. If I can get him to be still long enough, I’ll post a picture one day. Maybe it won’t take that many growth spurts to even out though!

I think the rec center membership is good at all the county facilities so the plan is to take the kids to the Brentwood facility which has a larger indoor pool with a connected ‘shallow water lap / teaching pool.’ The only concern is MaryVic taking off in the big pool. She knows no fear as long as she had water wings on.

And now it’s waffle time!