Weekend Highlights

In all the years that 7-11 has given away free slurpees, I’ve never been able to get one. I’d always be told that they were sold out. What that meant was that they were out of the “Free Slurpee” cups. To me, this never made sense. The free slurpee is a small slurpee. If the free cups are gone, let folks use the regular small cups. I guess that isn’t the way it works, though.

Anyway, I decided to take a shot and see if we could get one on Saturday. To my surprise, there was a guy standing next to the “Free Slurpee” display stacking new cups on there. There were many folks in line with us, but we each were able to get ours! They kids, who are always scheming, said that we should go back a bit later and get another one!

On Monday morning, the school district’s “Book Bus” made a stop at Ella’s school. They’ve taken a bis and removed seats and replaced them with shelves. On the shelves are a ton of books. It makes 5-6 stops around the district during the summer. At each stop, the kids can go up on the bus and pick a book to take home for free. This was the first stop that I was able to take them to.

I loved watching how my daughter looks through the various books and thinks about which book will be the right one. She is the total opposite of my son, who walked in and picked a book in about 3 minutes. I’m totally fine with this, though, because I know they are reading!

On Monday night, my daughter had gymnastics. My son and I got to hang out for a bit. He wanted to go to the baseball diamond behind our house to “practice” T-ball. So we grabbed his equipment and hopped the fence. It was really pretty hot, so we were out for about 30 minutes and then he was ready to go back inside. It was nice to have some time tossing the ball around and helping him with his stance at the plate.

We had to take my wife’s car into the shop on Monday night. The power locks have been acting funky. Sometimes the remote unlocks her door and sometimes it doesn’t. She has the button on the handle that if you have the key near it, all you have to do is press the button and it unlocks. That wasn’t working either. She said she had to crawl in from the passenger side and open the door. So, her car is there.

Last night, she drove me to work. My daughter has an appointment in the morning, so my son is at Nana’s. After the dropped me off, they went to the book store to look at books. My wife told my daughter she could pick a book. My daughter is going to have a very hard time picking just one. As a matter of fact, she talked my wife into getting about 8!

Speaking of my daughter and her love of reading, here are two funny stories to share from her reading this week.

Not too long ago, my aunt got her a book of bedtime bible stories. They are told in rhyme, so they are easy for kids to understand.

She was reading it in the car on our way to drop me off at work. I asked her what story she was reading. She said that she was reading about Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. We had read about creation and then Adam and Eve the night before at bedtime. So I asked if she read about Noah’s ark yet. She said she did. She then said, “You know what, daddy? Noah brought all these animals on the boat. He brought two huge elephants – and they didn’t even break the boat!”

She knows I am reading my bible, too. So she asked me what I was reading about. I told her that I am currently reading in Matthew about Jesus. So she says, “What page is that?” I told her I wasn’t sure. She said, “Well, my book has 200 pages. How many pages does your Bible have?” I told her mine has “a lot more pages than yours.” She told me to let her know what page I was on when I started reading last night!

The other story we had read last night was Archibald and the Furry Dinosaurs.

The story is about how all the dinosaurs were furry and hairy. They spent all this time washing and fixing their hair, etc… Someone questions Archibald about where his hair is.

He then begins a search for his hair. Throughout the book, my daughter and my son were keen to notice how much like Archibald I am. “He has no hair like you, Daddy!” “Did you lose your hair like him, too!” “Were you not able to find your hair either, Dad?”

The book was actually a very good book in teaching that it is ok to be different. At the end of the story, he still hasn’t found his hair. What he does begin to see that his life is wonderful as it is, with or without hair. As he discovers, it’s better to focus on what you do have, not on what you don’t.

That is a lesson we all can learn from!