Family Weekend


Family Weekend
By Allan Olson
It was a family affair for us last weekend; we spent the time together cleaning and going to town, with no extra company.
We decided it was time for the kids to clean their rooms on Saturday; it had been too long of a hiatus. In the end we helped them a little, putting on the finishing touches. While they were hard at it, we did some cleaning throughout the rest of the house, too. Of course, there were the usual fights about someone not helping, and so some kids were assigned to different parts of the house in order to get some work done. The boys’ room was finished first, and since Alivia wasn’t making much progress in the girls’ room, the rest of the kids had to help her finish.
Next up, we decided to go to the Festival of Nations in Bemidji, hoping for a multi-cultural experience for the kids to learn more about their nationalities. What we found was a loosely organized event that we found difficult to understand. Even though we had paid an entry fee, we decided to leave. The kids, surprisingly, were pretty well behaved and all in good moods. We discussed going to the Home, Sport and Travel Show, but opted instead to get a pizza and rent a movie for the kids from pay-per-view.
After a meal of pizza plus a couple of dessert pizzas, we all lounged in the living room and watched a movie – well, the kids watched the movie, mom and I mostly read our books.
We relaxed some more on Sunday. We did go shoe shopping – I know, how boring. The wife and I both need different footwear for traipsing through the woods and on the trails while searching for those geocaches, so we visited a couple of stores looking for some suitable footwear. My wife found something that will work for her, but I’m still looking – in part due to the price range of the footwear I was looking at.
We dined on one of our final packages of venison steaks (we really need to get more deer this year) and enjoyed a quiet evening at home. Earlier in the day I had plans to get ambitious and tackle the unorganized files on my computer, sorting the thousands of photos that could be arranged better, and the word documents that should be stored in a different location on the computer. However, when I looked at the computer, I decided that I spend enough time on it during the week and I didn’t feel like doing any re-arranging or spending time on it on Sunday; in reality, it was just another excuse to put that “necessary housecleaning” off a little while longer.
We also experienced two small but very heavy and wet snowstorms over the weekend, and while it would have been ideal for snowman-making or a snowball fight, it was way too wet out, and besides – I’m way done with snow for this season! The kids are anxiously awaiting the snow to be melted for good so they can get on their bikes, and we are also waiting for more of the snow to be gone so we can find some geocaches.
To my knowledge, the coming weekend looks to be a quiet one, which is fine with us. Perhaps I will finally take the time to organize my computer files or, more likely, I might find a reason to procrastinate once again and read a good book.
Thanks for reading, and remember to watch out for school buses on the roads; they are carrying a precious cargo – our children. Also please exercise caution when venturing out on the lakes. Thanks for reading, and have a great and safe weekend. For more of my columns visit: http://allan-crazykids.blogspot.com.

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