Moision Madness

Two weeks after his birthday, we finally had Ezra’s birthday sleepover this past weekend. He invited his two best friends — Henry and Emerson — and planned an entire day of activities. As you might expect, there were a few glitches, some additions and subtractions to the activity list, and one superdad who had to leave for a conference, but it was a fun day.

Ezra wanted the boys to sleep in the tent, so Bruce enlisted their help to set it up.

Our first glitch was an all-too-normal visit from Palo Alto’s finest for a “wellness check” on our neighbor.

This was the scene when Emerson arrived. Always fun to explain that situation to a parent you don’t know very well who is dropping off their kid for the night. Luckily things remained calm on the street and the police soon left.

The first main activity on Ezra’s list was a Google X tour, so Bruce and the three boys headed out for that. I stayed behind with Finn to give Ezra a little big kid time. The result is that there aren’t any pictures from X. But the boys came back with pockets of Google candy and I think they had a good time.

Next up was supposed to be lunch at Five Guys, but the boys weren’t hungry yet (see above reference to candy) so they got started on another activity on the list — making tin soldiers. The kids love this activity. What’s not to love? Fire, melting metal, toy soldiers. It’s all good. Bruce set it up in the backyard with the camping stove this time which was great.

After they’d used the soldier molds, Bruce had the idea that they could make coins. So, he brought out the drill, some old wood, and carving tools.

They turned out pretty cool. Here’s Ezra’s.

Because the molten metal was such a hit and the activity was taking longer than we planned, we scrapped the Five Guys idea and ordered some pizza. After a late lunch, Ezra asked if we could do cake. Why not?

Wishes were made, cake was eaten, and the boys got back to their regular programming. Namely, more nerf battles.

It turned out that not everyone wanted to do archery, so instead of going to the range, Bruce set up the target he’d recently made for the backyard.

After shooting at the regular target for a while, they started adding balloons to it and shooting at the balloons. That led to water balloons. Which led to this …

Super fun, totally irresponsible use of water.

As evening came, we got going with Ezra’s choice of dinner — hotdogs roasted over the fire in the backyard. By this time Bruce had left for the airport, and I was too busy managing the chaos to take any pictures. The boys had their dogs and then roasted marshmallows for dessert, and headed back inside for a little more Minecraft time before bed. I was left with a quiet moment to roast a marshmallow over these beautiful coals.

There were a few tense moments over screen time conflicts, but about 9:00 I sent the boys out to the tent. I attempted to take a nice picture of the three of them. Here’s what I got.

Ezra thought it was very funny to be flipping the wrong finger. They stayed up for about an hour and just about the time I was going to go out and tell them to quiet down, they were already quiet.

I think they slept pretty well, although they were up very early. I plied them with pancakes, sausage, and bacon for breakfast.

After everyone left, the boys and I had a relatively quiet day. When I asked Ezra if he had a good time at his party, he said, “It was awesome.” You can’t ask for much more than that.

Somehow, my first born is now 11 years old; I’m not sure how that happened. At any rate, we had several celebrations for him on his actual birthday, and he’s having a small sleepover birthday party a couple of weeks late due to scheduling conflicts. Since that hasn’t happened yet, we’ll stick to the family celebration on the actual day. It started with cake. Coffee cake seemed like a good choice since it was breakfast after all.

He enjoyed the candles.

He had a good day at school, and for dinner we had a taco fest.

Tacos are one of his favorites.

We had the good fortune that the movie Zootopia arrived in theaters that day, so we had family movie night. Of course, we also had all the candy and popcorn he could possibly desire. And the theater has giant reclining seats. He was pleased.

The movie was great! All in all, a wonderful birthday celebration.

Fifth graders at Fairmeadow participate in an overnight field trip called Age of Sail. The idea is that they are sailers on a ship (the Balclutha) in 1906. They all have jobs and are put into teams ahead of time to practice. Ezra was on the rigger crew. Bruce went along on the trip as a chaperone, but the whole idea of the trip is to have the kids be independent and solve problems on their own, so there is very little interaction with the chaperones. The ship is staffed with actors playing the parts of captain, first mate, etc., all with distinct personalities. Some are mean, some are silly.

The trip is a big deal at school and a bit of a rite of passage as they gain independence before entering middle school next year. I took a couple pictures while we waited for the bus to pick up Ezra’s class. Here are Ezra and Henry milling around.

And here’s Ezra with his giant pack heading to the bus.

Luckily one of the chaperones was tasked with photographing the trip, so I have some pictures. Here’s the Balclutha.

Here are the chaperones being shown to their bunks.

Here are the kids being introduced to the ship and getting some preliminary instructions. As I understand it, the captain had asked one of the crew to find ten 20-year-olds to hire, but he had come back with twenty 10-year-olds instead.

Here’s Ezra and the rigger crew.

Here’s the group with the captain.

Sleeping quarters:

All the groups had to do a night watch, which was probably one of the hardest things of the trip. Ezra’s shift was from 2:30 to 3:45 so he went to sleep and woke up to do watch with his group. Luckily he was able to go back to sleep afterwards. Here’s a shot of his friend Emerson on night watch.

Here’s the rigger crew at dawn hoisting someone up in the bosun chair.

This one is the teacher in the bosun chair. Apparently the class was negotiating for better conditions (less homework, more iPad time). Bruce said she was a really good sport.

And one last shot of the crew taking down the Fairmeadow flag before heading back home.

Ezra loved the trip even though he got in trouble a few times for stepping over the lines (ropes) on the ship. We’d heard ahead of time that there would be yelling and that kids and chaperones would get in trouble. It didn’t seem to bother Ezra at all.