Mini Golf Marathon

So you can see here above that the Hoth playset is coming along fine.  We'll have more pictures in a bit, but for the time being this one was a teaser to the actors and volunteers to let them know what we've got in store for this weekend.  It was a day of work for Mommy and Daddy and the others, setting things up with costuming, editing video and sound, and more.  Meanwhile, Madison was working with integers, and practicing her typing.  We know this because we can follow some of her progress in a limited sort of way online.  She did well on her first vocabulary test of sixth grade - she believes she got a 100, although we have to wait on that.  And once again, she came home first of all talking about PE of all things.  This is the favorite class right now, a true turnaround, a comeback for PE, which until now has been a least favorite thing to do.

Speaking of "sport," tonight we went to the local mini-golf course once again, this time to celebrate Nana's birthday!

Nana is taking this picture, and you're seeing one of the things she wanted most for her birthday:  everyone all together, having a great time.  That indeed happened tonight, as we hit the links for nearly three hours.  It took a long time to get through this course with nine players!

In the end, it didn't matter who won at all really.  Mommy and Daddy both got two hole-in-ones though, which is amazing.  Daddy noticed a thing on the wall that showed the course record, and guess who has that course record?  Daddy got a 34 on this course a few years ago, and still have the marker to prove it.  For some reason, this course is good to me.

But obviously, the night was not about playing to win.  It was about playing together, and as we went from hole to hole, it was a lot of fun.

You can see Madison having a rest, waiting for her turn to hit the ball.  She just had to wait for eight other players to go, and then it would be her turn next.  We played the usual way, but with nine people on one hole, it made things pretty interesting with nine balls all in the same proximity.

There were times it became like croquet, as one cousin with crash his golfball into a swarm of others, scattering them like pool balls.  With this sort of game play going on, you can imagine that low scores were not necessarily a goal.

Anyway, this course is fun.  It's also more affordable, and it's in the shaded woods so the heat wasn't so bad.  And can we talk about the weather a bit?  It was a dry day today, which in itself was remarkable because of all the persistent rain we've had the past few days.  It seemed like this event would have been cancelled, based on the recent pattern of weather.  Yet here we all were, and it was a nice present for Nana indeed.

Afterwards, it's an important tradition to sit on the rocking chairs out on the deck overlooking the golf course.  There are nine of us, and nine chairs, and we all sat there rocking and eating ice cream together.  We gave Nana her birthday gifts, in this case maple nut goodies and a Blu-Ray copy of "Princess Mononoke."  She's been doing a Miyazaki marathon lately too.

So we said good night when all was said and done.  Like I said earlier, we were there for three hours. It took forever for us to get through the course, but that wasn't a bad thing at all.  It was a perfectly pleasant evening together, and we were grateful to have this family time with one another.