Man Training

Amy and Sadie went to Utah for the weekend, leaving James and I to fend for ourselves. I thought it an appropriate time to do some man training, and hereby report my progress on several fronts.

1)Wood foraging and stacking. James successfully found, gathered, and stacked wood that was lying around our complex due to the fence construction. Note the ingenious shingling system that protects the wood from rain. Every man needs to know how to make a good wood pile.


2)Civil Engineering. We turned a pile of sand in the playground into 4 tracks for golf balls, complete with retaining walls, banked turns, ramps, jumps, and a wooden bridge over the bottom of the track. James destroyed more feet of track than he built, but was very successful at sending the ball down the track and retrieving it.


3)In-N-Out burger. Every man knows that when Mom is gone the best bet for lunch is to head over to the famous burger joint. However, James failed this portion of the training by falling asleep just as we arrived, and as punishment had to eat cold fries when he awoke.

4)Heavy Machinery Appreciation. James fancies a career operating machinery. We watched a few videos demonstrating the finer points of operating the king of machines, the Caterpillar D-10.

5)Cooking. I know, I know, you feminists thought I was being discriminatory by having man training at all. But this is the 21st century, so we did some cooking and cleaning as well.

6)Baseball. As you can see we have some work to do on the swing. The boy's skills are slowly improving, however--at least his feet are pointing the right way, which was a major victory.