A Day With Great Grandma Peggy

February was a very up and down month for the family. It saw Nick turn 17 and Grandma turn 60 as high points. It also saw a bit of high school angst and some trouble for our resident teen . . . details not to be blogged. Suffice it to say, quite a bit of stress was felt by all and things are definitely much better at the time of this posting. One of the nice high points in February was getting the boys together with their Great Grandma for a picnic and day at the neighborhood park. We all had a great time!


The look says it all . . . Mom, I had a bite of sandwich . . . is it cookie time now? Our skinny little bird of a boy! We constantly wonder where his non-stop energy comes from, certainly NOT from calories. We're pretty sure he's solar powered.




After lunch, Grandma supervised as Xander discovered some park toys to play with . . . never mind all the swings and jungle gym equipment . . . for Xander playing with the park-truck took top priority.





For anyone who thinks 17 is "grown up" HA! Nick spun himself silly on the whirlygig-whatchamacallit. It's'just too bad we didn't get any pictures of him diving head-first down the slides too!






If there's anything that could get Xander away from the truck, it was the sight of a cute little girl having loads of fun spinning on the whirlygig . . . Nick was more than happy to provide a little additional oomph to the spin to ensure maximum laughter and dizziness of his little brother . . .




Climb? Climb? Who needs to climb? Xander had fun impressing Great Grandma with his ability to "walk" up the climbing wall portion of the "little kids" area of the park.






Nick demonstrating the fine art of dangling from monkey bars while Xander gets a little boost from dad.


After a couple of hours of excellet cool weather the rain finally arrived to wash out our day. No worries though because it ws then back to Great Grandma's house for ice cream sandwiches and a bit more play-time before we all headed home.

Nick is old enough to appreciate the importance of getting to know a great grand relative like his Grandma Peggy and Xander will understand it too in a few more years. For now it's nice that they can both build some wonderful memories to carry with them for many years to come.

And now for some pics . . .

Somewhere during the ramblings of the last (ahem, January) entry I promised pictures so here they are along with a few comments to help guide viewers along. Enjoy!


These first pictures are from Nick's little family Birthday dinner. Nick insisted over and over that he did NOT want a party with friends or family . . . even when we offerred to pay for a night out for him and a few friends to a location of his choice . . . hey, no worries, it saved us a small fortune. So we had a quite (as quited as TGI Friday's can be) family dinner and invited the Houston-area grandparents along for the meal . . . or did they invite us.

Either way, we had a great time and the Darroh dining out curse did not disappoint - as Nick's grandmother's salmon dish arrived very late . . . and was decidedly NOT salmon. (More on the curse at some later blog, but the curse is that when 3 or more Darroh's join for a meal out one of the orders, without fail, arrives completely wrong . . . and inevitably winds up being free). But here are a few pics of the boys, Grandma and Grandpa.


Happy 17th Nick!!!!

And it should go without saying, but of course we'll say it anyway, YES! Having a 17 year old soon-to-be-senior in High School does make us feel a bit, ahem, middle aged.

Long-time No BLOG

. . . but we're still here. Still doing our Darroh family stuff. But before we get to the catching up -
We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
And now our late breaking . . . err, very late news!
A new year is upon us and with it a new president elect - Amy and I voted together a bit early and although our candidate didn't win . . . okay, so maybe he wasn't our candidate - our candidate wasn't actually in the race, we wish the new Prez good luck. But enough of that ...

Nick, now a junior in high school, took the PSAT test a couple of months ago. We just got his scores and can only say we were a bit disappointed - we THOUGHT we were raising someone we could send out into the world to blend in with the extraordinarily average young schlubs of society. Alas, our Nick has defied our teachings and gone on to be truly exceptional. He scored in the 98th percentile for math . . . only missing 1 question on the entire math portion of the exam, and landed himself in the top 85th percentile for everything else.

And while I joke about our disappointment, Amy and I are counting the moments until the invitations from the very non-average universities start pouring in. It'll be fun to watch his eyes light up at the possibilities that will present themselves . . . and we're sure it'll be fun for him to watch us use his scientific calculator to quantify the $taggering expen$e$ for which good ol' mom and dad will soon be paying.

But it's okay - in the long run we're counting on him for our retirement . . . and longevity runs in both our families. heh, heh, heh!

In other Nick news the science fair is rapidly approaching and Nick and his science partner Quin are busy working on proving over-unity possible by means of magnetic resonant energy. We wish him luck and hope to be posting some pics of the mad scientist at work on his devices soon.

Also, we're told there may be a girlfriend in the mix for Nick, but we won't embarrass him by posting her name - since she's not "officially" his girlfriend. :)

Xander just continues to grow, and unfortunately for us, he seems to be mimicking his brother and stubbornly refuses to blend in and be ordinary. At a little over 4 years old he is beginning to read by sounding out letters - and there are already a lot of words that we the parents of said child are no longer allowed to SPELL in his presence, much less use with the gusto and emotion they rightly deserve.

He continues to impress and charm and flirt the pants off (figuratively speaking) any pretty woman he deems worthy. AND he gets away with it . . . . That's our little extrovert: always talking (even to himself and inanimate objects - sometimes he sings too), he virtually never sits still, and anyone who speaks either to him or to anyone within his earshot, simply MUST be focused on Xander....suffice it to say this provides us hours of entertainment and occasional embarrassment as thoughts do not live in his head more than a wisp of a moment before they emerge in full volume so that the world may partake of their greatness.

He's growing up quickly - a little too quickly for our liking - so as frustrating as life can sometimes be when you have a child of Xander's, shall we say LARGE personality, we try and enjoy the moment.

Santa was wonderful to all, especially so to Nick and Xander and Nick (the brilliant but directionally challenged) found himself the recipient of a GPS, and Xander (the bombastic volumist) found a new "big boy" bed set closely by the tree for him, oh yeah, and both of them got other goodies galore, to numerous to list (Thank you extended family)!

Will post some updated pics soon, that's Amy's department - she's the visualizer, I'm purely textual!

TTFN

FAMTASMS, Darroh Family Blog

Welcome to FAMTASMS, the official blog of Amy & Dorian

We left a lot of friends behind in our move to Houston back in 2006, and while we've tried to keep in touch with everyone the forces of nature have descended to stifle our best efforts, or at least some of our less than best efforts.

We tried calling, but the FCC has us under surveillance, so we try to be brief - why they are concerned with our children, marriage, the weather and careers, is beyond us (we expect they're just tired of listening in on prospective terrorist chatter).

We tried emailing, but that took too long.

Finally, we tried carrier pigeons - I'm betting they never arrived . . . apparently there are a lot of people with guns between Houston and Dallas who are fond of pigeon-based cuisine . . . although we did get some interesting messages from folks claiming to be our friends we became suspicious when the notes were poorly written and printed on the backside of receipts from auto body and bait and tackle shops. OUR friends keep their receipts. So . . .

We have established this little blog in the hopes that our real friends will stop by from time to time, take a look at the photos and maybe send us a note once in a while to say "Hiya."

All the best from Us to You!