Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

Does it ever happen to you that you're driving along listening to the oldies station (What? The oldies are awesome!) and are transported back to a time and place so vivid it practically brings tears to your eyes?

This afternoon Bad, Bad Leroy Brown came on and in an instant I was just little playing that song on the jukebox at The Pastime. My little sister and I would get to hang out there with my grandpa and his cronies. They'd give us Cokes and money for the jukebox. Harry, the bartender, would call us little boys. I probably have the story all wrong - I'm sure there were other people there, maybe my mom or my other siblings - I don't really remember all the details. But I was little - was I even 5? But I do 100% remember always playing Bad, Bad Leroy Brown and Most Beautiful Girl on the jukebox. Man, that was a long time ago. I loved those songs.

Listening to the lyrics now ... not so much kid appropriate although significantly tamer than what kids there days listen to. Some kids - not my kids. Not yet anyway.

Run, Troy. Run!

Troy will running the Twin Cities Marathon this Sunday. I'm really proud of him - he's worked incredibly hard and has been super diligent with his training. I hope that if you're local you'll consider coming out and cheering him on.

So, if you're interested ... here's a list of all the mile-marker cross streets on the route with a time range of when he should be there.

And here's the actual route map.

Hiking Pictures

Here are some pictures from our hike yesterday at Interstate Park in Taylors Falls.

Henry took the camera reins for a little bit.

A perfect representation of Henry & Eli's personalities!

Love! this picture of Troy & Eli.

Henry & Eli sharing a glacial pothole!!

Are we home yet?

We may have taken a wrong turn & gotten off the trail but at least we got a little beach time in.

City boys

As heard on our drive to Taylors Falls yesterday morning:

"Look - hay loafs! Now that's something you don't see everyday!!"

That, right there, epitomizes the difference between my childhood and my boys'. Such little city boys.

In honor of the last official day of summer

I present to you - our 2 lonely but huge and lovely sunflowers. One bloomed yesterday and one is just starting to bloom today. Perfect timing! We planted about 2 dozen but all but these 2 either drowned or were eaten by squirrels or we thought they were weeds and pulled them. But look. Look what we did!! The boys are very proud.

Next year we're going to try for an actual garden with food-type things and other "stuff." Wish us luck because clearly farmers we are not.

Summer wrap-up (a little late)

Even though we're now fully entrenched in fall-type activities - what with school starting, football season in full swing, chillier weather, leaves changing - I thought maybe I'd write a little about what a great summer we had. It really was pretty terrific! The list we put together in June has every activity minus one - Canterbury Park - checked off. Truthfully I don't think we should have to shoulder all the blame for not getting to the race track where we fully intended to teach our kids to gamble. When the MN gov't shut down they closed Canterbury Park so many of the available weekends were off the table. We were really hoping to go to some of the funny races - camels, wiener dogs, ostriches - not the horses and not to gamble ... much. Whatever. It's not a huge loss and we can always go next year. It just would have been nice to see every box checked off, ya know? But, we added some stuff to the list and we did a bunch of them more than once so I think we're all good. Plus the boys have tangible evidence that we had fun and that we did cool stuff with them. So now when they're all like "you never let us do anything fun" we can just march them to the list and show them. Maybe I'll leave the list up forever. What do ya think about that?

Really though, they had a great summer. They LOVED the camps they were in. They LOVED spending a bunch of time with G&G Schally. They LOVED the trips to Iowa to see their cousins and Grandma Becky and everyone. Camping was great. Records for s'more eating were set. Eli mastered bike riding. They both swim like little fish. They learned to golf ... kinda. They made new friends. Almost every day was spent outside. They were dirty and exhausted and super happy. Exactly what summer should be all about.

Vincent Price vs. James Earl Jones

The boys had a pretty long week. They were up early, to bed late, at school and before school care all day. They are tired. I'm tired. Troy's never tired.

Anyway, Eli's been having nightmares. It took a while but I finally got him to give me some hints about his dreams. I don't know why but I was so worried that his dreams were a deeper sign of some horrible thing that's happening in his real life that I don't know about so I really tried hard to get some info out of him.

I told him about the recurring nightmare I had as a kid, which was terrifying!! Really, so terrifying. Here's how it always went: I would get stuck in the bathroom at a family friend's house (the bathroom right off the kitchen at the Dickmans for those of you in the know). Then I would realize there was a tunnel off one side and I would walk down it and it turned into a cave. In the cave I would encounter Vincent Price - as in the Tiki Cave scene from "The Brady Bunch: Hawaii Bound." It played out from there ... it was super scary.

It turns out that Eli's nightmare was about a cave too. The clues he gave me was that it was about a guy he kinda knew, from a movie that started with "S." Well, if you know anything about Eli you know that it was Darth Vader from Star Wars. As soon as I guessed he immediately started crying and was so scared. He told me that he was Luke and it was in the cave where Yoda lives and he had to fight Darth Vader except he didn't even have a "lifesaver." Poor little guy - that is scary!

So, who do you think is scarier - a bean-making cave-bound Vincent Price who talks to a Tiki named Oliver or Darth Vader trying to kill you with a lifesaver? Eli wins. Hands down.

Well, that's weird ...

As it turns out, blogs do not actually write themselves.

When I was little I used to think turning on the cruise control meant the car totally drove itself. I thought it was weird! I mean, how does the car know where we're going? But, I was a kid and there was tons of stuff I didn't know so I never asked about it - I didn't want to look stupid! Eventually I figured it out, of course.

Anyway. I'm going to try to write posts again.

Six!

Look at our boy - he turned 6 this week!! Can you believe it? I was going to pick a couple of my favorite pictures to show how he's grown but a couple turned into like 40 or some crazy amount like that. Anyway, I decided to make a little video of them instead of posting each picture. (Don't read too much into the music - we just picked Eli's favorite song.)

Edited to add: OK, so I guess there's nothing at all to read into... apparently YouTube/REM/the powers that be took offense at me using Night Swimming on this little video of Eli so they disabled the audio on it. So be it. Still cute pictures of Eli :-)

Success!

I'm sure by now you've realized that we're well into 2011 and the holidays are a dream of the past but I still wanted to post a quick little wrap-up with some fun pictures.

I honestly think this was one of the most fun holiday seasons we've ever had! I'm not sure what tipped the scales but I hope for many repeat performances in the years to come. We definitely packed it all in and tried our best to keep the stress to a minimum.

We survived many big snow falls/storms, celebrated a big birthday (my 40th!), made gingerbread houses, picked out/bought/wrapped all our gifts, baked cookies (but skipped the truffles this year), got together with friends old & new, saw Santa, celebrated with both of our families and had just the best time ever!! And in between all that Eli had his first visit from the Tooth Fairy, we got the exciting new the Troy's brother and his wife are expecting their first baby (a boy!!), Eli had his Festival of Lights at school, Henry went to his first Vikings game (thanks for the tickets Curt!), Henry went to his first Timberwolves game, all of the boys went ice fishing for the first time courtesy of Uncle Tyler, there was sledding/tubing/snow fort building, Troy went to the historic Vikings game that was played in the new Gopher FB stadium during a blizzard (thanks again to Curt!) and Henry started basketball again and this year he's playing for the Hawkeyes!

We had so much fun!

Look how cute! Here's Eli with his teacher, Mrs Fox, at his Festival of Lights. Eli totally loved all of the other holidays that he learned about in school - Hanukkah, Diwali, Christmas, and Ramadan. I overheard him and his friend Teshe "arguing" about which of them celebrates Hanukkah better. Nice.

The classic first missing tooth picture.

Christmas Eve at Uncles Wade and Aunt Tanya's house - wearing their new jackets... aka button down shirts. We're pretty fancy, ya know.

All the Tuttle grandkids with Grandma Becky at Aunt Heid's house.

Troy & Henry at the Vikings game - little did they know this would be the last game played in the dome this year thanks to the roof collapse.

Henry's first fish! They had so much fun ice fishing. Eli caught a fish too so total success!

Bring on 2011.