Dandy's Family: 2014

So today kicked off another season of soccer for the boys. Ben is at the age where the kids are really starting to separate out according to ability and talent. Andrew is at the age where we are still playing “magnet ball.” It sure makes refereeing Andrew’s games easy ;).

Zack loves it too. He has suddenly inherited all of the older boys old soccer equipment and he is ready to play! He entertains and amazes the other parents on the sidelines with his ball handling skills and his energy. Frankly, he’s better than about half the kids on Andrew’s team and a couple of the kids on Ben’s team. If only he wasn’t so short…

I was getting really frustrated with Ben at his game today because the coach kept yelling at him to do stuff and he wasn’t listening. In reality there are actually 2 Bens on the team and coach was yelling at the other one. The ref was getting frustrated with the kids too, but he couldn’t seem to remember that he had a whistle so he was yelling at them – A LOT . This didn’t sit well with the parents who also weren’t very impressed with his first time refereeing skills. Lucky for him, the head ref for the division has a son on the team and took him aside for some private tutelage after the game.

I got to ref Andrew’s game and I’m sure there were plenty of parent’s upset with me because if I had called everything you should call there would not have been a game. If you’ve ever watched “magnet ball” soccer you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t know “magnet ball” soccer consists of a magnetic monopole soccer pole that behaves like the North end of a magnet and the kids act like South magnetic monopoles. Occasionally, the South poles converge on the North pole in such a way that it squirts out of the group and the mob shifts one way or another down the field. The strategy is to place the one kid on your team who can outrun everybody at the edge of the group so that when the ball squirts out he can take it and score. Practice is harder than theory.

It’s kind of funny because in the mob around the ball there is a lot of jockeying for position. It’s not uncommon for a kid to come up to me and complain that he was “pushed.” Often I happen to have witnessed that it was his own teammate that shoved him to the ground. Se la vie.

We’ll see what the season brings but I sense a shift in the boys interest trending from soccer to baseball.

So after a long hiatus I’m going to attempt to keep a semi-regular presence on the blog. Fankly, we just don’t remember enough stuff if we don’t write it down. Even if we never go back and read it, the act of writing for me strongly solidifies memories in my mind. Also, as Katie comes through to put together our family history it helps A LOT to at least have something written. SO. On that note, don’t always expect to find fully fleshed out, well written accounts and stories here. Sometimes it will be like that and other times it might just be bulleted points that make no sense to anyone but us. As it is, we’re probably the only people reading this given the time lapse… Well, I guess there are some people being tortured by a forwarding list that got set up at some point long ago.

Over the Labor Day weekend we took the kids to Las Vegas. That kids friendly mecca where nothing questionable could possibly pass before them. While it is not generally our first choice location for a family vacation we had the opportunity to meet up with Grandparents, Uncles/Aunts, and cousins there. And of course, it was more than worth the drive just for that.

Of course, these trips always start off with trying to convince the children that we will disown them if they don’t obey us and help get out the door. In my grandparent’s time this problem was handled much more efficiently thanks to the widespread acceptance of corporal punishment. However, our neighbors live close and our children scream loudly. So the best we can do is psychologically torment them through the discontinued use of electronics and the denial of funds.

Once on the road things tend to smooth out usually. That was the case for the kids on this trip but not the car. It started vibrating at highway speeds. After paying some careful attention to it I turned to K and said “ I think your driver’s side tire is unbalanced.” She goes, “oh yeah, it is!” I’d repeat the remainder of the conversation, but I’d probably get in trouble again.

Also of note is the fact that when I pulled out my cell phone about 10 minutes into the drive to find out that it had managed to magically transform into a brick. It had been getting pretty slow over time but I didn’t really think anything of it. Eventually I guess it arrived at the point where it actually couldn’t process anything I guess. Luckily Katie’s phone still worked.

Despite the rumble of the tire we made it our first destination without incident. I knew we were in Nevada because when I opened the car door at midnight it felt like stepping into an oven. Seriously, Nevada? There are a LOT of more pleasant places people can go to sin. Why is that hole so popular?

Anyways, the next morning Katie took the kids swimming while I went to get the tire rebalanced. This, of course, was not the simple chore that it should have been. The tires were getting low but were still fine. However, when they were pulled off to rotate it was easy to see that on a couple of them the inside of the treads were completely worn down. So the first major vacation purchase ended up being a new set of tires.

While enjoying some down time Andrew learned of the frustrations of normal broadcast media. I walked into the kid’s hotel room to find Andrew very frustrated and whacking the remote on the bed. He explained that he kept trying to pause his show but it just wouldn’t work! I had to explain to him that “normal” TV didn’t work that way to which he replied, “Then why is there a ‘pause’ button on the remote?!”

After that we spent a little bit more time swimming before heading off to the AT&T store to replace my cell phone and make the next major purchase of the trip. We didn’t want to spend all day there so we let the kids run free amongst the expensive electronics and effectively inspired the salesmen to attend to us quickly. I think it worked well.

After that we made it over to our next location of the trip and met up with Aunt Shelley and Uncle Jacob. K and Shelley went to work and Jacob and I took the kids swimming. I got the better end of the deal except for “the kid.”

For some reason quite frequently at public places there is always someone’s kid that latches onto us. This kid inevitably wants my attention and seems to think he has a right to it over my own children. The child knows no bounds, is unaware of social conventions, and assumes an attitude as if they were also my child. I want to strangle them.

This child was constantly in my face, chattered incessantly, wanted to play with my water-proof camera to take pictures all over the pool, and probably smelt bad. Somehow I managed to give him the hint that I didn’t really care for his presence. So he retaliated by grabbing the lifesaving ring from the side of the pool and convinced Ben to play with it also. *sigh*

The Utah clan arrived later and we joined them for dinner at Chilli’s before hitting the mall next door to find Kallie a belt. As is characteristic of our other adventures we didn’t actually get Kallie a belt then. We did manage to hit up a sale at the Under Armor store and then drag the kids through the rest of the mall in order to drive all of them into a melt down before bedtime.

In order to find Chilli’s we used the map function on my new phone and heard “her” voice for the first time. Let’s just say that my new phone has a female voice that ummmmmm gets your attention. It’s a little breathy and very pleasant to listen to. Katie HATES it. I think she’s a little jealous of it, and I actually REALLY like it when she tries to mimic it. Anyways, she protested and made fun of it in the wrong way and now the kids think it’s really funny and beg to hear my phone speak ALL the time. He he he.

Since the Utah clan was staying at the hotel we had just left and the breakfast spread had been pretty good and it hadn’t been very busy I took the kids over to breakfast with them Sunday morning. Thankfully a church group had checked in with Grandma and Grandpa and getting your breakfast more or less amounted to stealing it from someone else and harassing the overwhelmed hotel attendant for the condiments. Surprisingly, the church group wasn’t very forgiving…

After that we reconfirmed that corporal punishment is a better motivator when we discovered that the child who was tasked with assembling church clothes didn’t pack Andrew’s. A quick stop by Burlington Coat Factory on the way to the chapel solved that problem and also turned up a belt for Kallie.

In order eat lunch all together we commandeered the central lodge at the resort and spread out tacos, burritos, tater tots, and children. I was waiting for management to approach us and complain so that I could point out that they weren’t doing a very good job of policing music and smoking in their pool area too, but they never did; which is probably why the pool situation existed in the first place.

So after lunch we swam again and this time “the kid” kept his distance, but his parents were still smoking and playing their Mexican cumbia too loud. If you’re going to play cumbia at least play it from Brazil or Argentina or someplace where it is decent.

After that we thought we’d enjoy a quiet moment in the apartment. However, Andrew thought that was a little bland. So in the second bedroom with a scary movie on the TV and his cousins jumping off the bed and screaming all the time he took the liberty to dial and hang up on the 911 operator… twice. Where are these kid’s parents?!

That got us a visit from the property manager, which was good because we had a bone to pick with her over them not having some of the rooms ready by check-in time. Katie managed to make them feel bad enough that they even threw in a bottle of Martinelli’s . I don’t know how she pulled off that reversal.

On Monday morning we drove out to Ethel M’s chocolate factory. Since they were bothering to be open for “tours” on Labor Day AT ALL I figured they’d be making chocolate. NOPE. It was a tour of an empty chocolate making line and the gift shop. We did still get a free sample luckily.

That part was exciting because they have a cactus garden right next to the chocolate factory. Since we didn’t beat the kids with Kallie’s belt when we laid down the “no touch” rule Andrew managed to get a couple needles in his finger. There is a point in parenthood where you stop having sympathy for your children. It’s a weird feeling because you still love them, but you wonder if they’ve somehow made you less humane.

Anyways, we grabbed lunch at KFC on the way back to the rooms and then everybody with younger kids got ditched while the rest of us hit the strip. First up was Coca-Cola world where Zack freaked out during pictures after the giant polar bear pretended to eat someone’s head. We also tried the “around the world Coke sampler.” It consisted of sixteen flavors of Coke products from other countries. It was a lot of fun but I’d say only about 30% of the rest of the world has decent taste buds.

Next we entered M&M world. This trip always involves buying way more overpriced M&M’s than we normally eat. What am I talking about? Normal means vacuum-consuming every M&M in sight. But the expensive part is still true. Luckily, we were able to watch the 3D M&M movie again – the same one they’ve been showing for a decade now. I think I can almost quote it…

After that we thought we’d hit up the new Hershey’s World. Yeah, it sucked. It’s got NOTHING on M&M World. That is, unless you like buying Hershey products at 4 times the price as the Walmart that is just a couple blocks away. At least you can buy exclusive M&M flavors and products across the street.

After that we spent an hour in the arcade under the Excalibur. The kids LOVE this place and I have to admit so do I. We had minor drama when Kallie spent 40% of her coins on a giant claw machine that didn'tJ. Thankfully, Zack slept through this experience.

pay out, and then again when she couldn’t decide on the best way to spend the last two. Andrew first scavenged the entire arcade for loose and unclaimed coins and prize tickets. After that he strategized about how to maximize his ticket per coin ratio. Ben was normal and simply enjoyed playing in an arcade. Of course, after they ran out of their initial coin allotment Grandpa supplemented it

We then joined everybody for dinner at the Rainforest Café and afterwards hit the Blue Man Group. Dinner felt more like being in a zoo than a forest because we were sat right at the edge of the restaurant and people walking by kept taking pictures of the restaurant and therefore us. The Blue Man Group was a lot of fun and the kids loved it. I originally saw Blue Man Group in the early 90’s when it was an off-Broadway show and while the show itself is completely different than that one, the feel of it hasn't changed in almost 20 years which is pretty impressive.

After that we took the kids shopping under the MGM Grand, which for some reason is their favorite shopping place in all of Vegas. After purchasing some magic tricks and some abnormally colored monkeys we headed back to go to bed.

The next day Katie woke up super sick. So I got everything packed up and we headed out as soon as we could to try to get her home. The drive home was VERY smooth thanks to some new tires and a new navigation assistant ANYBODY could listen too (except Katie).

Dandy's Family

Friday, December 12, 2014

Andrew and underwear problems

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Blue McQueen

::Update::

Zack and Andrew….

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Another Soccer Season

Vegas, Baby