Yes, you read that title right. Father's Day. I have good intentions of sitting down at my little laptop at the end of each day and cataloging all of the wonderful things (and some of the not so great stuff too) that are going on in our lives. But with all of the irons in the fire lately, I'm lucky I have the energy to climb the stairs to our bedroom at the end of each day.
So I figured my blog, my rules. I'm going to post about Father's Day in July because someday I may want to look back on that day and remember it. And by now we're so far out from Father's Day that I'm sure no one is sick of reading their 300th Father's Day post (right? Riiiiight...).
Joe was actually out of town for most of Father's Day weekend for a bachelor party. On Sunday morning he met us at a local country store (that was so freaking packed I thought the kids might stroke out from over stimulus) for breakfast. After breakfast we drove past the new house which had just completed it's first week of framing and toured our new digs. Then we headed home to give Daddy his gifts and get ready to go to the zoo.
The kids and I originally got Joe a hammock. It's a beautiful
soft-weave hammock that is so ridiculously comfortable. We decided this would be his gift after we hung out in hammocks by the lake earlier this year. Except that when the kids and I went to watch Baby Einstein on Daddy's iPad one morning we saw that he was shopping for lacrosse rebounder walls and decided that was probably a better present for him. I decided to keep the hammock as his birthday present since I'm due with Lola a few days before his birthday and shopping for a present while moving, and closing on a house, and delivering a child would maybe, kind of, sort of be inconvenient. In my head this was a perfect solution.
Unfortunately the hammock arrived in the mail in two ginormous, total dead giveaway boxes weighing approximately 72 pounds each. Oh, and they arrived simultaneously as Joe was pulling in the driveway from work. So I did what any good wife would do. I made him carry his "this-was-your-father's-day-present-but-is-now-your-birthday-present" down to the basement and promise not to peek in the box until I said so.
So back to the rebounder wall. I must have a thing for giving my husband gifts that weigh 72 pounds. Because this friggin' thing was heavy. And since I'm already carrying a human, and there's usually another one or two humans that want to be carried as well, lugging this thing into the car with three kids attached to me was a process. But we got the rebounder wall and brought it home and I somehow managed to get it into the garage without killing myself or crushing one of the twins.
Joe was ecstatic over his present (the rebounder wall) and immediately set it up. And that's when I realized that I did something dreadfully wrong. And it had to go back. You see, I wanted a plain black wall. But all they had at our local lacrosse store were university walls. Joe played lacrosse at Syracuse so I figured sure, why not? And I got him a Syracuse wall. And it was roughly 3' x 4' and bright goddamned orange. And it could not live in my backyard.
So he ended up getting the hammock for Father's Day anyway.
After I gave and ungave him his gift, we loaded the kids into the car and took them up to the Adirondack Animal Farm which is our version of a zoo. There are lots of free roaming animals, a safari tour and a bunch of animals you can feed. The kids got to feed giraffes, monkeys, camels, llamas, deer, and billy goats.
The kids are super into "ah-mals" right now and they were going nuts pointing, shaking fences, running from pen to pen. I was shocked at how completely brave (almost too brave for this mama) they were. Feeding animals 100x their size.
Ryan is a natural when it comes to animal feeding. He grabbed handfuls of pellets (or, for the monkeys, fruit loops -- no joke, the "special" monkey food is fruit loops) and shoved his hands toward the animals' mouths opening his palm once they started eating. He giggled as they tickled his hand with their ah-mal mouths.
His sister watched from afar with most of the feedings. But somewhere between the second tour by Geoffrey the giraffe and the billy goats, she decided that she was going to feed the animals too.
Except when the billy goat (and it was a itty bitty baby billy) came to eat the pellets out of her hand, she tensed up and tightened her little fist around that handful of goat food. And that little goat was hungry and he kept pushing at her hand with his little, wet nose. And she tightened her little hand in an even smaller ball. And you know what that billy goat did? He bit her. And you know what her momma was doing while this was happening? She was trying to take a picture of her kid feeding the goats. FAIL.
Reese lost her goddamned mind. She didn't have a mark on her, but she cried and hooted like that goat took a finger. Forty minutes, she cried with brief hiatuses to laugh at her brother or point at a monkey before remembering she was very upset about something (...what was that again?...) and cried some more. Thus ending our time at Animal Land.
We took the kids to an outdoor BBQ place for dinner, which is phenomenal because they can throw food and you don't even have to feel bad. And there is live music and hula hoops and bubbles everywhere. Super stuff. The kids were enamored with the hula hoops and each grabbed a hoop and tried to imitate the big kids. I tried to show them how to hula, but considering I no longer have a waist it was a fruitless effort.
Reese got to dance with her Daddy to some old blues music and Ryan wilded out all over the grass. The kid was a dancing machine.
They loved having the ability to run to our picnic table and grab a bite of food and then run off to dance or hula or pop bubbles. I loved having the ability to eat while the food was hot and actually have (and finish) a conversation with my husband. It was honestly a great day. I don't know how we'll top it next year, but I have a funny feeling that these kids will find a way to keep days like this fun for years to come.
