St. Germain - Day 7

It was my morning to get up with Quin. He didn’t go to bed until 10:00 last night, so it was a bit of a surprise when he got up at 6:00 like normal. Luckily I just convinced him to lay down and within about 10 seconds he fell back to sleep until 8:00. By that time his diaper was a wreck! I was changing the mess that had accumulated saying something about “stinky poop” or something, and Quin said “I poop potty.” I asked him, “really?” Quoting a perfect Donkey from Shrek he said, “Really, really.” Chalk another one up to nurture.

It was looking to be windy and warm today, so we decided to go take in a game of mini golf before it got too hot. We played at a nice course called the 19th hole, or something equally as cleverly named. Ethan had a blast and Quin even tried to join in much to Jenny’s and my chagrin. He played my ball for the first 7 holes and Jenny’s for the remaining 11.

After golf and some lunch, Quin took a nap and the rest of the kids went swimming. I was actually afforded some time to read my book which I had ignored to this point in the trip. It’s not a bad book if you are able to read more than like 2 pages at a time! After about 90 minutes of reading, though, Quin woke up and I was taxed with taking him swimming. This time, however, we just kind of let him go himself. He had no problem just getting into the water with his life jacket on and swimming out to the raft where he joined the rest of the kids and swam for almost 2 hours! I can’t imagine Ethan ever doing that at that age, but then again, we were pretty guarded parents with him.

At some point, just jumping off the raft and swimming got boring for the bigger kids - one of them had the bright idea that they would sink the paddle boat! It was pretty hilarious! They worked on sinking that thing for over an hour and had a blast doing it. I think Ethan said at one point, “we should have been doing this all week!”

When swimming was complete we gathered around and did a little fishing. Quin put a pole in and actually caught a decent size perch! He told me he wanted to kiss it before I put him in with the rest of the fish we were going to eat, but got scared at the last minute and decided not to go through with it. He did make friends with some dead minnows, however. While I was cooking the meat on the grill, Quin took a dead minnow over to the canoe, gently set him in the front seat, then walked to the middle of the canoe and said, “ready fishy?” I’m pretty sure he was going to take the minnow for a ride.

Dinner, and pretty much the whole afternoon was dedicated to mass consumption of all the stuff we hadn’t yet eaten or drank from the week. Matt fried up all the week’s fish, we put some ribs on the grill, Tim and Laura sauteed some mushrooms that they had found in the woods, and we had a big, delicious meal. After the kids went to bed, we continued on the same theme but with the remaining beer. Matt, Tim Z., and I all managed to complete all of our beer before we left the fire that evening. I’m pretty sure Tim A. would have as well had we not almost blown ourselves up. Tim Z. was digging through his cooler to bring out the dregs of his drinks and came upon an O’Dools. Nobody really wanted to drink it, so he placed it, unopened in the fire. After a couple of minutes it started to whine. After a few more, it started to whine louder, which prompted all of us to get up and vacate the immediate area around the fire. It couldn’t have been 10 seconds too soon because as soon as we cleared about a 10 foot radius the bottle blew! It was quite impressive - a large crater had formed at the center of the fire, firewood had been thrown in all directions (luckily it was a small fire), and burning embers surrounded the fire-ring for around 10 feet. There was no sign of the bottle that I could see, though the color-sighted people said they did find shards of it in the ground around the fire. After that episode, Tim A. wisely decided it was time for bed. The rest of the guys made a huge fire and talked smartly about how we should do that again - we didn’t…