How Poppop spends his beach weekends

With Bree on one side and Daisy on the other.

xoxo

Deb

Wow.

I really have no words of explanation or description. Just going to let the picture speak for itself.

xoxo

Deb

Parks & Wreck

It's been a busy couple of months for Chaos & Mayhem. We've had holidays (Happy Easter!), birthday parties (Happy Birthday to cousin Alex, Nana, Finley, Justin, Nick and Taryn) and several trips to local parks, specifically Bellvue State Park and Paper Mill Park.

Our two trips to Bellvue State Park included the Autism Walk (Go Team T-Dog!) in April and most recently for our friend Taryn's second birthday. The kids recognized the park from the Autism walk as soon as we pulled into the parking lot. They can't remember to tell me about needing to go to the bathroom, but they can remember a parking lot from almost a month ago. Yup, that's the legendary Tokarski memory skills at work there.

Taryn's party was very low-key and relaxing, just what this portion of the Tokarski clan needed. Jason taught Bree the finer points of horseshoes and prepped her for the summer season by spending a fair amount of time shoeless in the sand on the volleyball court, much to the chagrin of the people actually trying to play volleyball. Nick, meanwhile, spent the afternoon following after Justin, his godfather Mike's son. They climbed trees, kicked balls and spent a fair amount of time trying to convince Mike to let them go fishing, despite not having fishing rods, line or bait. Kim, if you're reading this, Mike said "No" and at no point did it seem like they were going to dangle Nick in the water in place of a fishing rod.


Our next trip to the park was to one of my personal favorites, Paper Mill Park
in Newark. Nick's pre-school hosted a family field-trip which meant that the teachers, for once, got to serenely walk around chatting with the parents as the parents scrambled after the kids, trying to stop them from killing themselves and each other. After having watched the teachers with the kids in the playground at school, I can say that Nick's teachers earned their morning of serenity. The school also tricked Jungle John into bringing several of his critters to amaze and entertain our own little critters. The snakes, the turtle, the ginormous icky frog and the alligator were big hits. I swear the alligator kept looking at the adults in his/her audience and was thinking "please, God, help me" as he (or she) was overenthusiastically patted by dozens of sweaty, sticky, dirty hands. And in case Daisy ever becomes lonely and decides that she needs company (and I lose what's left of my tiny mind) and we add another pet to Tokarski household, Chaos & Mayhem discovered an animal that's big enough for them to share. The catch here is that it's a python.

xoxo
Deb