Sometimes Parker and I like to play around and make faces and create voices. Quasi-modo had us laughing pretty hard one night on the trampoline.
Category: Random
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Random summer 2022
In an effort to get caught up on uploading media which I am roughly 10 months behind on – you are getting some random shots of summer 2022. Enjoy!
Included is a trip to Lake Anna with Uncle Gillette, visiting Lake Fairfax on our bikes, Grandma’s house, and one of our favorite warm weather spots for paddle boarding and rope swinging – Algonkian Park.
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White Oak Falls
We met old with my best friend from Highschool, Mike Heard, and his 3 kids to hike White Oak Falls and explore what I had heard was “Natures water slide”. The water was not what I would call warm! Flowing water never is.
We went down the water slide, then hiked down and then back up to see the falls. We found a way to jump off the rocks and into the water – which was super fun and only slightly dangerous. A butterfly also landed on my shoe – apparently they can’t smell.
We had just watched a Key and Peele episode on “Terries” and Parker was calling everyone Jonathan Livingston the whole day. Funny funny!
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Poppa D’s 90th Birthday
It is hard to believe that Poppa D turned 90 this year. It’s even harder to believe after watching the videos and pictures! He’s in great shape and here’s to celebrating again next year!
Parker was very excited to make Poppa D a paper craft for his birthday.
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Indoor climbing
Our first week of summer break was the only one without out of town travel, but nonetheless action packed. One of our Lax friends invited us to go indoor rock climbing with them at their gym. What better evening activity for 2 monkeys!
I’ve also included a climbing day from Sport Rock in these pics.
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Harris Engineering Camp
The first week of summer was the only week that we didn’t travel somewhere out of town. Instead we had Daddy engineering camp with our friend Abby. The challenge was to create a water craft that could be rowed about 100 yards from a boat put in at Algonkian Park down to a floating dock.
I had saved cardboard from the warehouse and bought 6 rolls of duct tape. I had no idea how much duct tape one could use in making a cardboard boat. I think I ended up buying around $75 of duct tape.
We learned about water displacement – in order for the boat to float it must be able to carry as much weight as the boat itself and it’s passengers. A quick eyeball test was to figure out how many gallon jugs would fit inside the boat. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, if we could fit more gallon jugs inside the boat then weight of the passengers, then we knew it would float.
Both boats had plenty of water displacement, but Skylar and Abby’s boat suffered a critical failure when Abby put too much weight on one foot to adjust herself, thereby poking a hole in the side of the raft where the sidewall met the floor. It wasn’t long until they were under water 🙁
Nevertheless, we had a ton of fun and maybe we learned a little something as well. Parker’s boat on the other hand made it all the way to the dock, and then the rowed it all the way back to the boat launch. Nice job Parky!
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Back yard slip and slide
The back yard at Glencroft is mostly steep hill and one day I was inspired to carve out a slip and slide path with a berm that would keep you from impaling your self against the fence. Whee!
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Early dismissal hike
When school lets out early, we go outside to play.
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Wolftrap sledding
We got a couple massive snow storms and decided to go sledding at Wolftrap. If you don’t have a sled prior to snow coming you can forget about buying one at the store – the closest sled for sale was over 80 miles away, so we improvised.
The mattress and gymnastics jumper are surprisingly fast on the snow!
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Parker’s armory
When I moved into the Glencroft house I had scoured Facebook marketplace for bulk nerf guns because every boy needs lots of nerf guns 🙂
He had well over a dozen and we needed some organization. I can’t remember if Parker had found nerf walls or if I had, but I put my own spin on it and built our spare bedroom into an armory, complete with light controller to set the right mood prior to going into battle.
