"My Crazy Kids"

An Amazing Weekend By Allan Olson The weekend lived up to its expectations and perhaps a bit more – it was amazing. Friday evening, nearly Saturday in terms of time, my cousin arrived with his wife and two children for the weekend of geocaching and we stayed up way past my bedtime until the early hours of Saturday morning visiting. Saturday morning was spent mainly lounging around the house while the kids spent time terrorizing the house. That afternoon I took my cousin on a geocaching run at some nearby caches within 10 miles of my house. Of course since the cell service was poor we relied on my memory to find most of them since we had already logged all of those. That evening was spent relaxing and gorging ourselves on a large meal topped with dessert and a relaxing beverage and we retired several hours early compared to the previous night. Sunday morning after breakfast it was time to pack the kids, the vans along with sandwiches and snacks for the day of geocaching. ...

Adventures in the woods ... By Allan Olson It was another fun-filled weekend for this family. We accomplished not only some work around the place, but also had loads of fun this past weekend. Saturday morning a couple of the kids and I used the wagons and some of the dirt from the old garden spot to fill the holes in the yard that the puppy had dug. It was a job that had been put off for too long. That evening, after the fishing tournament weigh in, I met the rest of the family at the Harlem Ambassadors basketball game in Cass Lake to watch a very entertaining game of buckets. On Sunday morning I asked my wife what she wanted to do ... her reply was “I want to go geocaching.” Okay, I thought. I kind of wanted to as well, but I also was thinking of staying around the house and being lazy. But geocaching sounded like it would be more fun. Before we ventured out on our trip, my wife informed me that I wasn’t going to get to pick the geocaches, that we were...

A weekend at home By Allan Olson By my account it was a largely quiet week and a fairly quiet weekend at home. The week started off with the “meeting of the teachers” on Tuesday and the kids were able to see a few of their friends from last year. New for us this year is Alivia starting pre-school – it’s crazy how time flies. She, of course, was very excited and ready to start school. She came home from her first-day-ever-of-school on Wednesday and immediately went to find mom. “Mom, mom! School was so much fun today!” she said. She told us all about her new friends, which was everybody in her classroom. Unfortunately, she also started her first week of September off with a trip to the emergency room after slamming her finger in the door at the house. So, she started her first day of school with a large bandage on her finger. The first week of school was also remarkably different for Nikolai this year. Of course he has a new teacher but now he knows the staf...

Summer – it’s a wrap! By Allan Olson Just like that, summer as we know it is now over. Maybe not according to the calendar, but by all other standards our lives are now ruled by the SCHOOL calendar. Our summer schedule started out very busy with family reunions, weddings and other events to attend, and the final month was pretty busy, too, even though we mostly stayed at home. We spent our final weekend of the summer with a house full of people – again. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining – we enjoyed our company and had lots of fun. Very early on Saturday morning we ventured off into a new part of Cass County that we had never been to and discovered that it is a very pretty area. The reason for our trek into “unchartered” territory, of course, was a geocache, and this wasn’t just any geocache – it was a brand new geocache, just listed. I got buzzed by an email notifying me of its existence Friday evening, and we almost headed out then, but it was late...

A New Record By Allan Olson As we approach the final days of summer, the weekend fun continues. We started our fun on Thursday evening by seeking out some elusive geocaches which we were previously unable to locate. The first two took us to the Moose Lake area, just a few miles from home (not the town by Duluth). The cell reception was poor, but still enough so we could zoom in on the area of the cache. We stopped, and my wife got out and decided we needed to backtrack a little; we had gone too far. That move took us to a clearing that was full of logging debris. I was on the right track, heading toward the cache with Alivia close behind me when the screaming started. This time it was Abigail swatting the bees away from her. Mom quickly rescued her from peril, and headed back toward the van with the boys trailing. I wasn’t ready to give up the search, and convinced Alivia to stick with dad. We searched and searched, but came up dry. I could get to within a few feet...