Labor Day Party

Among all the soccer events of the weekend, I managed to go to a Labor Day party at my mom's house. My sister, her friend, my brother Ryan, and Peter were all there, with lots of other people. We spent a lot of time at the big pond swimming and canoeing. Ryan's girlfriend has two kids and they came too. The top picture shows the youngest, Ezra, who is 4. He was waiting patiently for a ride in the canoe. Kathryn had taken his brother Nolan out and they were coming back. You can see them in the distance. The next picture is of me, Kathryn, and Ryan.

After Ryan and his whole crew left, Kathryn, her friend, me, and Peter all wanted to get in the canoe together. We set up chairs in it, and rowed out. Then my stepdad, Mike, dove in the water to try to tip us over. (He does that sort of thing.) For a moment fear of getting my David Beckham shirt wet in the pond water paralyzed me, but then Mike realized that he had jumped in the water with his cellphone still in his pocket, which was now soaking wet. So he got out to dry his phone off without tipping us over.

When we finished swimming, we decided to play "ring the innertubes around Peter". It was a delightful game and we got all three rings around him!

We ate s'mores and roasted strawberries on graham crackers (sounds disgusting, but it's really not! It tastes like strawberry pie!) over a fire after dark.

Then it was such a clear night that we climbed up on the roof of the shed to look at stars. We took pillows and blankets up with us and a stuffed dragon for protection from swooping bats and other such creatures. I figured a dragon could be kind of like a scarecrow. We saw a ton of constellations, Venus, and some of the clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. If only we had had a telescope...