Last Hurrah

This past weekend we kind of had a Wuest family Summer 08 last hurrah with a trip up north. Our real intention of going up was for Jason to put together a play set, but the weather was beautiful so we got a chance to enjoy some sun and swimming. Words can't describe how excited Alex was to jump off the pier and have his dad all to himself, but these pictures might help:



Laura hasn't really developed much of a love for the water, but she can still give me a nice pose:


Lastly, the weekend ended with a little excitement for us. We gave Alex a Gator for his 2nd birthday, it is one of his prized possessions and one of the few toys we can probably say we've gotten our money's worth. Jason has helped him deck it out w/ conveyor belts on the back wheels to help w/ traction, and an empty peanut butter jar screwed to the front counsel-to act as his cup holder. A day doesn't go by that he isn't on that thing, if only for a few minutes; he's even to the point where he enjoys taking his sister for rides. Well you can imagine my horror while driving southbound on Hwy 51, Jason's tailgate falls open, and the gator falls out at about 75 mph-luckily nobody was behind us, and it went directly into the center median. We pulled off to the right to collect a few other Tonka trucks that fell out while we were slowing down, and just about then Alex was waking from a nice nap. I could tell by the tone in Jason's voice that for a split second, he contemplated just leaving the gator behind-until a little voice said "what doing?". We quickly responded that we were going to get his gator, just then we saw a police car in the northbound lane but didn't think much of it.
So we turned around at our first opportunity, and it didn't take long to notice the police lights flashing and car pulled into the center median in the southbound lane-Jason and I immediately thought that we caused some kind of accident. In the 3 minutes it took us to come back to it, someone has pulled over and contemplated taking it! Luckily the police officer had noticed we were slowed down on the other side, and told the people that they had to wait and see if someone came back for it. It was Alex's source of conversation the entire way home-things like "dad not letting guy take gator, police lady told that man he couldn't have my gator, and wheels broke off" were just a few of the things that came to Alex's mind.
The gator was actually in fine shape-has a few more scuffs to add to it's collection and it needed a small alignment, but it's back in working order. The things we do for our kids:).