where I talk with my inside voice
My wonderful family indulges me every year with a day trip somewhere that they might not otherwise have gone. Whether it’s to visit an alpaca farm or to climb around on the trains, they always seem to enjoy themselves. Or they do a good job of faking it. This year it was the AB brewery tour downtown, followed by lunch...
Alas, poor Yorick, even though the Shakespeare Festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary year, we have never been to a performance – until today. I was offered seats through ECF, so we saw a modern reimagination of Hamlet and it was really good. I was getting a little tired by the end – it’s hell getting old – but I...
Just a couple of years after Noah took it, we signed Josie up for the BRAKES defensive driving school. This is a really cool professional driving course that is designed for kids to learn some valuable techniques behind the wheel and, as the name says, Be Responsible and Keep Everyone Safe. She got to learn how to recover from a...
Last week we took Josie to SEMO, and this week was Mizzou. We recently learned that she got a 36 on her ACT, which is amazing (though not surprising), but that means she has some great options. I don’t think she has made a final decision yet, but the Environmental Science program at Mizzou is going to be hard to...
Seventeen years ago the Lord blessed us with a baby girl, and we planned it so that her birthday would coincide with her older brother’s spring break from college. Now that’s planning ahead! Noah is home this week for a visit and it was nice having the whole family together for the birthday celebration, which included presents and cheesecake! In...
When we heard that Alan Walker was coming to St. Louis, we decided to get tickets and give them to Josie for Christmas. This was her first concert, and my first time at The Factory. It was a really good show – although we were both glad we brought our earplugs. There’s a short video below.
Josie has taken an interest in musical theater recently, and one of her favorites is Six – a fun romp through the history of the wives of Henry VIII. It seems unlikely subject for a Broadway musical, but no more outlandish than Hamilton I suppose. The music is really good, and the show, albeit short, is very entertaining. As a...
We got back last night from a 10-day vacation that included a 7-day cruise aboard the Norwegian Getaway. We stayed a couple of extra nights in New Orleans to explore the French Quarter. Honestly, the trip was exhausting, and I need a vacation to recover from my vacation, but we had fun and made lots of memories. Photos from the...
This is the time of year when I normally start looking ahead at a potential family vacation in the spring or the summer. The scheduling has been complicated by the fact that Noah is off at college now, but this is the new reality, so we just have to roll with it. He is applying to be a summer welcome...
Josie took the test and got her driver’s license today! Way to go, bitty! This is almost a year earlier than Noah got his license, so she’ll have plenty of time to build up her skills behind the wheel. And because she’s decided she wants to drive the Element, I thought it was time for an update. So I got...
Homecoming has certainly become a bigger deal now that Noah is in college. I headed down to Columbia to hangout with my friend Troy (Carlton was sick or he would have come too) and watch the game against Auburn (which Mizzou just barely managed to win in the last minute of the game). I had never been to a homecoming...
I took Josie to the St. Louis Art Fair in Clayton today. I think she was surprised at the scale of it – about six city blocks filled with booths selling every kind of art imaginable. We also had some good food – street corn from one of the food trucks and we had a late lunch at a place...
I took the kids to the History Museum to see the new and improved exhibit on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. They did a great job putting it together and there are a ton of interesting artifacts on display, including a lead crystal punchbowl very similar to my grandmother Ellen’s. This might be our last homeschool “field trip” since...
Josie has been wanting to paint a mural on her bedroom wall for a while now, and she finally bought the acrylic paint that she needed and moved all of her furniture out of the way. Her room was torn up for a couple of weeks, but it’s complete now and she did such a good job! I’m proud of...
Josie and I went to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Muny. She remembered a couple of the songs from when we watched the movie a while back. If I were a rich man, I would get season tickets so we could make this a family tradition.
