Watching the sun rise,

With an upset gut. One of the few times I’m ok seeing the sun rise. Not that I want to be awake before six am, but at least the mess is in the bathroom and not my sheets. Ha! Winning! As far as I can tell the kids are still asleep. Potentially for atleast another hour, perhaps more. I will try to go back to sleep, but this intestinal cramping, bloating, and rumbling may make that a tall order. I don’t think I even ate all that much yesterday, certainly didn’t consume any dairy, so… huh. Not sure what set it off. The stress from a last minute substantial project might have triggered it, but it’s hard to tell. Last few weeks have been emotional & stressful at the same time. Could of been inevitable. The joys of gut health, am I right?

If I recall we might soon be down to a mere three full weeks of summer vacation left. How time flies. Having slightly older kids is great. Still excited for an outing or an activity, but independent enough to occupy their own time for short stints on any given day. I had hoped we could do a few more family outings before school starts up again, but with the scheduled appointments, meetings, dr visits, lunches & dinners planned that could prove a challenging endeavour. Maybe I’ll take the kids to go see the new animated Ninja Turtles movie. Or at least the oldest child. She may get a kick out of that. The youngest is still not too keen on full length feature films. Takes five sittings to watch a single movie with this kid. Bit of an oddity.

Happy Friday though. By all accounts today is in fact Friday. I haven’t completely lost touch with the calendar, though we do, as a family, tend to drift a bit over the summer. Both of my folks worked, so summers were all day camps, or spent at home in front of the tv, feeling like endless years inbetween grades. Not actually the case, but it felt that way. Video games, tv rerun line ups to chew up the restless hours of the midday. Ah… memories. But not my kids, wife is a teacher, so for their lives they’ll have at least one parent home 24/7 all summer long to do stuff with. I work from home part time, so I’m also around a whole lot too. My daughter was complaining about how hard she was trying on a video game she was playing for 45 minute straight on the WII. I laughed, I said when my brother steve and I were little we spent a whole summer in our basement trying to finish a Baldur’s Gate type game on the Atari 1600. Together we put hundreds of hours into that game, and we finished it too. So no, I’m not concerned about your singular 45 minute stretch that did not yield the exact finish you were hoping for. We were too old for camp, and too young to work. The video game sweet spot for the late eighties, and early nineties. I will say this though, the WII is far more interactive than the game we sat still endlessly for. So she’s moving more than I did.

Plus, he says, plus… we didn’t really have any sort of physical media collection when I was a kid. Our house is stacked to the hills with movies, books, and games of all sorts. So we have far more kid friendly stuff to occupy them, than I ever had access to. So not a hardship for them at all. Like – at all.