We made one with toppings the boys picked out – ham and pineapple. This is the first one off the grill 🙂

We had a pretty quiet weekend, mostly hanging around home and gardening interspersed with a soccer game and a night out with friends to see a concert (gypsy jazz music by Ranger and the Rearrangers). It was very good! So a late night but fun. Sunday we closed out the weekend with some laundry, chicken happy hour, and wood chopping followed by fire and homemade pizzas.

Looks good! That’s dough I made, too. It behaved well despite not having much time to proof.

On to the second pie.

Toppings from the garden – kale, yellow tomatoes, onion and leftover bacon from breakfast. Nice combo! So tasty.

This was REALLY good! Nice job, Dave!

Here they are after their first day of school! Handsome guys getting very tall! Sam is an inch from 5 ft tall and Ben is 4 ft 2 in.

At home we had fun hanging out with our neighbors and friends as the kids trickled off the bus and walked home. The middle school kids get home about an hour after the elementary kids. I might possibly have hid in the salmonberry and jumped out to scare two such boys 😉
This is Sam’s robot who doesn’t have a name, actually, just a slogan: “Meant to Dent!”

It was the first day of school! A great day and a great start to the year. We are thrilled to be a part of the Wilkes family again.

Regarding the robot pictured above…Sam came up with that slogan himself. He’s developing a great wit.  This robot has an ultrasonic sensor in the front. When it senses your hand or foot there (or another robot because the boys battle them with neighbors), it comes SMASHING down! It dents the wood floors! Our friends are surprised we let this go on, but I am thinking it’s just a floor, and there are many scratches already. When I’m 65 and still living here (IF I am), then I will see those dents and fondly recall Sam’s crazy robot! I will miss these boys horribly! If we have to sell the house, well, there are several big projects. We will also need a bulldozer to fill in the large mine in the back…so it really is no big deal.

Sam is reading Sherlock Holmes now. Yesterday I was trying to piece together something that had happened, talking about a few little signs. I forget what it was. But Sam said “Way to put together the evidence, Sherlock.” It was so funny!

OK – summer keywords – these are the things that remind me of summer with the boys, in no particular order:

• JavaScript code
• Roller hockey, and now ice hockey – vigorous street hockey on our cement pad, hockey balls in the gutters, the sound of hockey balls smacking the garage door
• Mountain biking
• Robot battles with friends
• Khan Academy for learning in astronomy, biology, cryptography, and more
• Rock hounding, Rock Candy Mine road trip
• Stairway to Heaven (Sam is learning this)
• Endurance (Shackleton’s incredible voyage, which Sam read)
• Cream Soda Crew jobs and service projects with friends!
• Soccer – Ben kicks the ball constantly up against the garage door (how that garage door isn’t peeling or dented I don’t know!)
• Slack line – they use it to balance AND bounced up and down, trying to shake each other off the “roost”