Pirate Day!!!

 Ahoy landlubbers!!  Yesterday we had ourselves a piratey day!  (well it wasn't yesterday anymore)

 A local pool was having a Shipwreck Lagoon day, with anyone in pirate costume getting free admission.  We had been wanting to visit this pool, as this pool has extras like waterslides and such, but it's hard to pay $6/person when we already have two pools in our apartment complex and a family pool pass to two other community pools.  So when I found out they were having a pirate day (and I was already planning a pirate themed date that would have required a pool anyway) I couldn't pass it up.

Above is Peter going down one of the smaller slides.  They had several slides of varying sizes so that everyone from a baby who could barely walk to adults could have fun.  Our boys liked going down different slides and practicing their new swimming skills.  

Below is Rachel trying to cross the Lily Pad Walk.

 Here's me in my pirate get up.

Here's the boys nicely sharing their snowcones (though they balked when we wanted more than our initial momma tax and dadda tax)

For dinner we had steak shiskabobs called Tsire (marinated with peanut butter, red pepper and ginger based on a recipe pirates might have picked up from Africa), grilled onions (to ward off scurvy), hard tack, some pirate themed cheese puffs, and root beer.  The hard tack was mostly cooked in the car while we were at the pool, because I didn't want to have the oven on for hours with triple digit temperatures.   They still had to be cooked a bit in the oven and wound up more tough than stale.  But they weren't intended to be that great tasting and made a starchy contrast to the savory meat.

After dinner, we were going to watch the old Disney classic "Blackbeard's Ghost"  Unfortunately we couldn't find the rent button on the Amazon page.  Instead the boys watched a pirate themed episode of Inspector Gadget on Hulu.  They also built a pirate ship from a book I picked up for a dollar at the half-price bookstore.

The movie/shipbuilding kept them busy while I made some final preparations.  Inside an old book on pirates (also from Half Price Books) they found a treasure map.

The treasure map was made on translucent drafting paper (I think that's what it was--I got it years ago and hoped it would be useful for something).  The translucent maps the treasure hunt to cover multiple locations without having the location marked on the original map.  Each piece could be aligned with the compass and overlayed on the original map to find the location of the next clue.

 Buried in a corner of the volleyball court was a treasure chest!!

Jon carries the loot home to be divided up.

The treasure consisted of jewelry (some which already belonged to Rachel and some which were new surprises), plastic beads, coins, and a big diamond looking thing.  There were some Hersheys chocolates that looked like gold bars (if gold bars oozed brown stuff when squeezed).  I originally got them for Rachel and me since chocolate coins aren't usually that great.  But I had used up my stash of chocolate coins for a church primary lesson a few weeks ago and couldn't find any more at the three or four stores I checked.  Rachel and the boys were all excited about the treasure they had found.

Captain America Date

While the rest of the country has already seen the movie Avengers a couple of times, my wife had not yet seen Captain America (imdb link).  I wanted to  keep the movie part of this date a secret, so I just advertised it as a red-white-and-blue night and had the family dress accordingly.

 I used some comic books from the half-price bookstore for a centerpiece, with another Superhero Squad comic for my boys to read.  I had the boys decorate some white plates with colored electric tape to make Captain America shields for table decorations or to use as their actual plate.  For dinner I made good ole American hamburgers. Dessert was plain white and blue colored whipped cream with strawberries.  Simple but yummy.

We let the boys start a different movie in another room so we could start watching Captain America a little earlier.  I really liked the movie (I had seen it previously in the movie theater).  I like how it's the little guy with the right attitude and determination who gets the power to do what he knows is right.  I like it when an action movie has a good moral.  Great movie!

Pure Country

Howdy y'all!!

This here was a date I'd been wanting to take my purty lit'l lady on since moving to Texas.  Maybe it was just an excuse to have me some yummy barbeque. So a country theme seemed appropriate, with a country music movie from a while back that I'd never gotten around to seeing.

I bought a couple cowboy hats at the dollar store.  I also bought one of them "hair volumizers", as we've sometimes joked about big Texas hair.  I pushed this date up on the calendar as my purty lit'l lady has been complaining about how hot her hair gets and that she just wants to chop it all off, so I wanted to do this date while she could still pull off the big hair look. She did a great job dolling herself up for the date. So here we are:

I picked up a nice variety of food from C&J Barbeque :  smoked sausage, brisket, pork loin, and half a chicken.  Fried okra and potatoe salad.  I also picked up some jalepenos and some other kind of pepper, but they were a wee bit strong for us city folk.  We went to a park for a picnic.  I picked a park with horse trails, hoping we'd see some, but we didn't.  Here's a picture of our picnic, and my sweetie eating some fried okra:

On our way home we stopped to see some longhorns up close (but safely behind a fence).

After we put the yungins to bed, my lady and I cuddled up to watch Pure Country (Internet Movie Datebase Link).  George Straight's "I Cross My Heart" was one of my favorite songs when I first started liking country music.  I had never seen the movie before, and I enjoyed watching it with my girl.