"My Crazy Kids"

Road Trip – early spring adventure By Allan Olson We took another one-day road trip on Sunday, heading over to Thief River Falls – this time for the girls to attend a baby shower. The young girls were excited; they had been asking all week how many days until the baby shower (sometimes they got confused and said bridal shower). I think they were just excited about getting some “girl time.” For us boys, it just meant some more time to get outside and play in the snow – geocaching! Thankfully, this weekend was much warmer than last - just in regular temperature about 30 degrees warmer! Another bonus was the roads were much, much better, too. We left home shortly after 11 a.m. on Sunday and arrived at our destination with plenty of time to spare – even enough time for the whole gang to go on one geocache run – even if I was the only one to get out of the vehicle. We dropped the ladies off at their party headquarters a little before 2 p.m., and proceeded onward to the ...

Winter Road Trip By Allan Olson I’m seriously beginning to wonder if this winter will ever be done. Will we even have a spring and summer, or just skip them both and go right back to winter? Oh well, we’re Minnesotans. Despite the bad roads and cold temperatures, we still manage to have lots of fun. On Thursday night a nephew arrived for the weekend. Nikolai was pretty excited, since the two of them are virtually the same age; the others were happy for his company as well. All the kids played hard after school on Friday. We got up early on Saturday morning and left in just over an hour’s time. A college friend had her baby, and since she was pretty good at spoiling our kids for several years, it was time to return the favor. We packed sack lunches for everyone and loaded five kids and two adults and headed out on the snowy road. The two inches or so of snow that had fallen overnight was enough to make the roads “interesting.” We were in no hurry to get in a coll...

Hanging Out By Allan Olson Hanging at home is what we did last weekend. We were given some more fresh white stuff, so the kids and I enjoyed some time playing in the snow. Saturday morning was the only time I left the house – for a garbage run a few miles away. It also ended up being a photo op; Nikolai and I took a few moments to click the shutters of our cameras, capturing the beauty of the winter-scape. With the snow falling and the roads once again turning treacherous, we figured it would be a good weekend to just hang close to home. We talked about venturing out a few times, but thought better of it. The kids played outside in the fresh snow on Saturday afternoon and worked on building a snowman. After watching them from the comfort of the warm house for a while, I decided that they looked like they were having too much fun – without me, so I joined them. I bundled up and headed out, and grabbed my camera on the way out the door, deciding that some pictures of their...

Road Trip – sans kids By Allan Olson Go west, young man ... or go east? That was the decision of the weekend for me and my wife. We haven’t gone west to shop in a long time, and a nephew was playing hockey at a town in that direction, so we could kill two birds with one stone, or we could skip it all and go east. I let my wife decide, since I was driving I would just go wherever she told me (like any good husband). We ended up going east, to the city on the hill. Grandma arrived early on Saturday morning to watch the twerps, and we hit the road, just the two of us – NO KIDS! We didn’t have to worry about entertaining them in the mall (I remember playing UNO last year), or feeding them, or losing them. We just got our stuff and leisurely took our time without being pestered. When are we going to eat? When are we going to get something? Every parent is well aware of the whole litany of things kids feel a need to ask about. We found ourselves rolling into Duluth just...