Marvelous Memorial Day

Having three of our six siblings together is a pretty big feat and we did it this past Monday. Emily is visiting since my parents are in Hawaii (yeah, poor things). On Memorial day we decided to take the kids to a near-by park which has a great kids swimming pool to swim and grill out. Joel was free so we all went together. We were pleasantly surprised when we got there how nice the pool/water slides/kiddie area were considering it is a public park. Just another reminder of what a wealthy area we live in and all of the tax money they have to spend :-) Anyway, unfortunately, we couldn't find any available grills. I guess Memorial is a pretty big holiday...On a side note, I was thinking about how much we don't truly celebrate these federal holidays. How silly it is that we so lightly take a day to "memorialize" brave people who have given their lives for our country. Of course, I'm no different than anyone else, but for some reason I was a little convicted at how we cook out and party on a day we are supposed to be contemplating such a serious sacrifice. Anyway, of course it took us an hour to get out of the house with everything we needed to swim. We made the mistake of telling Orin that we were going to go swimming and for an hour all we heard was "I wanna go schwimming" over and over. We stopped at the grocery store to pick up some food and grilling supplies and headed to the park. Unfortunately there were no grills open so we decided to go to the pool first. Orin could barely contain himself when he saw the pool. It was nice to have the extra hands of an Aunt and Uncle. The weather was beautiful so the pool was a little cold. Orin walked around the shallow area and shivered, of course with a smile on his face every minute. He is actually beginning to get a little cautious with things he does. He wasn't fond of the slide after going down with uncle Joel and landing under water. It didn't help any when I convinced him to go down with me and we ended up under water as well. My big surprise was how much Micaiah loved the water. We just sat together in about 6inches of water. Micaiah splashed and just watched all of the kids. After swimming for about 3 hours, we left to try to find an open grill to no avail. So we decided to head to another park where we found plenty of grills and ate some wonder food cooked by "Uncle Jew" (Joel). What a nice day!