The Davis Family Blog

Noah and I were playing Super Mario 3 on the Wii this afternoon.  He likes to play the head to head old school Mario Bros game.  His main purpose seems to be stealing cards from me and this time I stole a card from him.  He got mad and said, "Daddy!  You're not one of the cool kids anymore!"  Poor guy, doesn't know that I've NEVER been one of the cool kids.  :)

We've drummed the importance of seatbelts into our kids from day one.  It seems they've been listening.  This morning, on our way to the grocery store, Noah decided that we have been overlooking an important member of the family.  His Thomas the Tank Engine needed to belt up to be safe.  He reached over and buckled him in telling him, "Thomas, you gotta be safe!"

Last weekend, we attended a birthday party for Myra's pal Abraham.  Saginaw built a sweet little city water park last year and we've gone before, but this time was a lot more fun.  Why?  Because SOMEBODY is tall enough to ride the big slide now!


Last year, she was an inch too short, but this year she is just right.  I even went down it a couple of times.  I got a nasty wedgie and about a gallon of water up my nose.  I guess I'm too old for waterslides or something.  Noah had a great time in their water playground.  They have a fort with a little slide and a MASSIVE bucket that dumps a tsunami of water every minute or so. 


They also have water cannons which Noah showed me more than once.  There's just something funny about blasting Daddy in the face with water.

Monday morning, I was lucky enough to be able to attend Myra's awards ceremony. (Thank you, Anna and Tara!)  It was a very quick seeing as how they were trying to get 130 first graders across the stage in less than hour.  One at a time the teachers presented each student with a folder containing their awards.  They would only mention two of those awards to save time ... and keep it fair. After watching most of the first graders cross the stage, it was finally Myra's turn.


"Myra Davis: 'A' Honor Roll, Attendance."

Besides her 'A' Honor Roll and Perfect Attendance, she also received a Citizenship Certificate.  Our award winning daughter has done it again.  

Jump forward to Tuesday evening ... In the mail, a letter stating that Myra has made it into the PACE program!  ("The goal of the PACE program is to identify those children who have intellectual abilities and academic skills considerably above what is expected for their age level.")  Myra begins her PACE program (and 2nd Grade) journey next fall.

Myra's worked hard this year and it shows.  We're so very proud of our "baby girl".

(I do have pictures and will post them soon.  I just couldn't wait to share this exciting news.)

Today Myra and Emily were hounding me about shooting videos of them playing so it got me interested in trying out Kino which is a free video editor for Linux.  After playing with it for a couple of hours, I've decided that Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro have NOTHING to worry about.  Even Windows Movie Maker works better.  But it's always fun to try out new things and I love it even more when that new thing is Open Source.  So here is the first in what I hope will be a long running series on the Davis Blog:  Funny Jokes With Myra!

Something happened to this entry and it never got posted.  I just now happened across it so I thought I'd toss it up on the net.  These are some pics from Myra's Field Day a couple of weeks ago.

More pics here.

WARNING: Toilet humor ahead:

Driving down the road the other day, we got behind this "environmental services" truck.  That's a nice way of saying it's a porta-potty sucker-outer.  I got a kick out of the words painted on the back of it.

As you can see, it has hand painted warnings telling you which pipes are for sucking poo and which pipes are for blowing it out. Obviously, the only reason to paint these warnings on there is because some goober has hooked them up backwards at some time or another. I can only imagine that fateful day at work when Bubba, or whatever his name was, accidentally hooked up the hose to the blower and forced 1000 psi of air pressure into a full porta-potty. Needless to say, we didn't follow this guy too close.

We've come up with a new rule this summer ... "Do NOT ask us repeatedly if we can go swimming."  Myra's gotten into the habit already of asking first thing in the morning if we can go swimming.  Sometimes we tell her "not today", sometimes it's "we'll have to see", and other times it's "we'll go after [whatever]".  That doesn't stop her from asking (or reminding us) about it later.  "Remember how you said we could go swimming after ..."  It's getting old.  Back to the rule.

If Myra asks after we've already answered whether we can go swimming or not, we stay home one day for every time she asks or reminds us.  In other words, once we've answered, there's NO MORE talk about going swimming.  We started the new rule this morning after telling her we would go swimming this afternoon.  Apparently, we underestimated her intelligence ...

NOAH (this afternoon when coming out of our room where he and Myra were watching cartoons): "Mommy, are we going to go swimming?"
MOMMY (knowing Noah's not one to ask): "Did Myra send you out here?"
NOAH (in his best girl voice):  "She said go ask Mommy when we get to go swimming."

I guess we're going to have to twique the rule a bit.

While driving past 24 Hour Fitness today, Noah says excitedly ...

"I see Kids' Club!  Look!  There's the sign!  It says 'Kids' Club!' "

THIS is the sign he saw ...

Today we had our 1st annual Faculty/Student Tennis tournament.  The kids on the tennis team all got to choose teachers to play doubles with them.  Apparently, I was highly sought after in the geek crowd.  My partner was an 8th Grader named Zach who is the number 3 player on the team.  I had played a couple of times in the last week in order to get back in the groove.  I forgot how much RUNNING there is in tennis!  Our strategy was to get me up at the net as fast and as much as possible.  It turns out, I'm kinda good at playing the net.  I really like slamming the ball on them. 

We played a team of 7th graders first round and we had a really hard time putting them away.  We were definitely better, but it took us 16 games to finally beat them.  Everyone else's matches were decided in 9-10 games.  Our win meant we were pitted against the School Police Officer and his partner, the number 2 man on the 8th grade team.  Officer Andy has a wicked 1st serve that I just could NOT return.  Luckily, he didn't land it in very often.  This was a really even match.  we kept going back and forth.  By the time we were finishing up, everyone else was done with their matches and we had a little crowd watching ours.  They kept hitting it cross court on us in an effort to run us into the ground.  I thought I was gonna throw up twice.  I think I strained a glute chasing down a ball, but I didn't want to let the Zach-man down.  I jumped up close to the net and punished them with hard shots directly at them.  It was really cool having everyone cheering us on.  This match went 14 games and we finally went down 6-8.  I know I'm gonna be sore tomorrow.  I think I'm gonna have to hit the court some this summer.  I can't believe how much fun it was!