a friday night party

 Here's an uncle and his nephew.   The t.c. person, the nephew was SO excited about this gift he could not wait to give it to Tim.

Lots of the pictures are blurry, like this one of Heidi:

 Here's my mom. She agreed to cooperate for exactly ONE picture, and even that wasn't certain.

Yes, my twin:

 A nice, blurry picture of Dan and Lydia on the left:

 It's a tackle box, complete with his own personal tackle.  Pretty darn nice.

And then in here, during gifts, the little wisecracks started flowing about how which one has the most blog posts of mine to their name?

I didn't know.  I tag them accordingly, if I think of it.

Unaware of any contest.

So we went and looked and it proved, maybe something?  Or nothing?

Tim had 103 posts tagged. Dan had 50.  His grown sisters were in that range too.

I don't live with them. I have only occasional glimpses into the weirdness of their days.

Plus they also have a right to some privacy, that I do try to respect.  

Sigh.

How does an affectionate, uncontroversial Mommy Blog become anything?

We had chicken divan for supper, not necessarily a summer meal, but it's traditional at this point for their birthdays.   And there was watermelon and chips, and Dannell baked rolls, and there was the usual chocolate cake.

 The two birthday kids, smiling nicely.

Back when he was about five and she was an unruly toddler, he was taking revenge on her in the living room, and I sent him to his room to "think about it."

She still could not leave him alone and went into his time-out to pester him some more.  I overheard him growl, "Heidi, get out or I'm going to do the same thing to you what I did in the livingroom."

I said, "Daaaan."

Then I heard this exhausted tone, "Oh Heidi.  Lay down your sweet head."

That was too much. I removed her from him.

A year or two later she went at him with two slapping hands during Mr. Rogers.

"You can't look at him!  Stop LOOKING AT HIM!  He's MY NEIGHBOR!"

She's nothing but reasonable now, and so is he.   Woo Hoo.

 The little ones were so on top of those candles.

It was a great night for a party, and we even planned ahead to have the air conditioner going.

August has been an interesting month, but we'll take it.

Love you guys so much, MOM