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My day started out with grilling the ribs for lunch. Papa's first job was to fix a minor problem with the grill. Ben knew what the problem was and explained it to Papa. |
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Papa's solution was to heat the grill to 500 degrees, which ultimately worked. While they waited, Ben counted to 500 by tens. |
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William and Annika showed up early to help Melanie build the rockets. While Melanie ate breakfast, they worked on the Lego stegosaurus. |
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When they learned I had thought we might begin shooting the rockets at 10, they jumped in to help build them. I took over building the stegosaurus. |
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The sad truth is that not many of us had experience with model rockets. Ben was not impatient, but he was not interested in helping. Will took him outside to get him going on a bike. |
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One of my favorite things is to tell a grandchild that their parent used to play with a particular toy. Today, for the first time, I said, "Ben, I bought this bike for your cousin Will." |
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Since Annika is skilled at reading instructions, she took over building one of the rockets. |
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The rockets were finished at noon. I declared that the ribs were ready to come out of the warming oven. |
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We enjoyed a fun lunch on the deck. |
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Along with the ribs, we had potato salad, beans and watermelon. |
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We needed a lot of space, so we moved to a nearby park. |
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Ben is so good with dogs. He always asks the owner if he can pet the dog, and then he gives the dog a chance to smell him. |
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Turns out Annika is a dog-lover, too. This Australian Shephard is named Alpine. |
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Matt's band members dropped him off. Unfortunately, he'd missed lunch. Fortunately, I had brought banana bread for him. He is taking instruction from Melanie on setting up the rail on the launcher. |
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Alpine's family was delighted to join the fun. |
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While I tried to figure out how to take pictures of rockets. the kids all took turns. |
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Matt was pretty excited when Melanie invited him to take a turn. |
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This was maybe the fifth launch. You'd think I just needed to push the button at the end of the countdown. Ya, I thought that at first, too. |
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Most of my pictures looked just like this one. |
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This was a learning curve for the rocket team, too. Mel had a concern about the packing of the parachutes, which was Will's job. |
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I loved how she handled this. They studied the parachute. which hadn't opened properly. |
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Will had indeed packed the parachute correctly, but Mel showed him a few tricks. |
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Back to my trials. I felt like this was a great shot. |
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It's obvious how well that parachute deployed. |
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The kids ran all over the park retrieving rockets. |
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I did spy a little horsing around between flights. |
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At one point Matt simply jumped into a tree. It was pretty hilarious. |
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We decided to call it quits when our favorite rocket ended twenty-five feet up in a tree in a private yard. Papa is in charge of finding a bigger park for next time. |
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Back at the ranch, Matt got a real lunch. |
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Then we were off to the pool. |
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My camera does much better with water than it does with rockets. |
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Pretty much this is what every picture I took of Ben looked like. |
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I thought we'd left Papa home about ready to have a lie down. Nope. |
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This dinosaur is addictive. |