Grampa watches the grandkids (and all survive!)

This has been a busy day. We got up at 6 AM to load up the minivan with all the tables and garage sale stuff. A friend who lives in Fremont had a garage sale today and Mrs Notthat could not resist.

Once she left, I headed over to get the grandkids. Today is kindergarten sign-up day here in Redwood City, and WHM needed to be kid-free while she risked life and limb getting Darci into a school this fall. (Two co-workers are also going through this. It's amazing how competitive the process is if you want to go to an alternative school. In some cases people line up at 5 AM. All of this to sort out which teacher gets to try to keep the kid from eating paste.)

Once we got to the house, we started by making pancakes. (Darci did not want the kind of pancakes with holes in them. After quizzing her about this for a bit, I worked out that it was waffles she didn't want.)


Mrs Notthat had bought some high fiber pancake mix, so I made it a bit kid friendly by adding some mini-chocolate chips. I got them to eat these the low-mess way by rolling them up and dipping them in the syrup. Great fun!


After breakfast, we headed out to the deck to paint. Riley was determined to use up the paint as fast as possible, while Darci was determined to mix them all together and create gray as fast as possible. (Those are a couple of my old shirts they are wearing - they worked great and kept their clothes clean. ish.)


They took breaks from painting to pick weeds and point out IDT poop that I missed picking up.

Much time was also spent on the swing. The weather was amazing for the last day of January. We are back in a dry mode and the threats of extreme water rationing are becoming louder and more worrisome. Hopefully more rain is on its way. A lot more rain.

In any case, we enjoyed the weather and played for several hours out in the backyard. Darci made me a chocolate cherry cake in the sandbox.







For lunch we had hotdogs and cheese sticks. Nobody wanted buns, just a bowl of ketchup to dip the dogs in. (My approach to feeding them is to make the food as finger-friendly as possible. And yes, we were out of Pringles or you would have seen some of those too.)


The grand finale of the day was when they pulled apart a wishbone I'd saved back in November and kept forgetting about. Darci was keen on making a wish (she wants another teddy bear - she's got to be kidding) and, especially, on winning. Riley was just keen on breaking the thing.


Riley certainly understood though that he had gotten the bigger piece once it snapped. And Darci certainly understood that her wish wouldn't come true.

In the end, WHM came by and picked up the kids and I got to kick back and relax a bit, wondering if Mrs Notthat sold enough at the garage sale for me to retire.

Oh, and there's some sort of sporting event tomorrow that I need to start focusing on. More on that in a later post.

That's it - move along...