As part of yesterday's adventures (the first post of which is HERE), we had dinner with my mom and two brothers. Mark's wife, Heather, was there and all the kids were present. Cory's wife, Risa, was at work because they do a similar things as my wife and I, working opposite shifts to tag-team on the kid.
Cory has a son that's about a month younger than Trey and Mark has 3 boys and a girl. The youngest of the boys is about a year older than Trey and the daughter is a couple years younger. We put all the boys at one end of the table so that the adults could visit. 5 boys, ages 3-9, all sitting together with an amount of freedom that was roughly the equivalent of "do what you want as long as a parent doesn't have to step in."
Heather is a stay at home mom with the 4 kids and I have to say that my brother has got the easy job. It wouldn't matter what his job was, he would have the easy side. She's like supermom and makes it all look very easy. We asked her if she would help us with Trey if we ended up moving into town and my wife and I ended up on same or similar shifts. She said that she would be happy to do that. My wife asked if she was sure and if it wouldn't be too much work.
I looked down at the boys' end of the table. Trey was at the very end, sitting there quietly watching the other boys. Jaxon, Cory's son, was sitting even more quietly if that's possible. He wasn't really paying attention to what the other boys were doing. My wife said that she thought it would be good for Trey to play with other boys and that it would be good if it was with a family with similar standards.
I laughed.
Heather and Tia looked down the table at what I was watching. Nate was sipping on diet coach and then belching as loud as he could. Chip was putting straws on all the tines of his fork to make a super-duper drink mixer. Jay was sticking rolls to the ceiling. I made the last one up. I couldn't see what Jay was doing but I could hear him. He is the loudest of the three and actually blocks out most other noise. We were at the end of the Hill Air Force Base runway and the F-16s were doing drills. I could see the jets flying by but I couldn't hear them.
"You might not want him learning from them," Heather said.
We finished dinner and Tia and I finished off some errands before we stopped back in at Mark's house. Trey was already there, having ridden with grandma, and was outside playing with the boys. That house has more bikes, trikes, scooters, skateboards, and other wheeled kid transportation than Toys R Us. Trey was in heaven.
We went inside. Tia visited with my mom and I looked around for my brothers. Neither one of them was in sight but there was a Wii sitting out with Tiger Woods on the screen waiting for some assistance. He was on the green with about a 10 foot putt in front of him. It took me a couple of minutes of button pushing to find one that did anything. It helped when I picked up the right controller. I pulled the trigger and putt and the ball went in. Hell, this is too easy, I thought.
Tiger teed up for the next shot which was an enormously long Par 5. I pulled the trigger to swing but nothing happened. I had to switch controllers again. It was on two player and if you haven't spent all day like I had completely draining yourself, you can see that one Tiger is wearing a red shirt and one was wearing a blue shirt. Ah ha, a clue.
I took a big swing and hooked that ball out into the desert. Okay, so maybe it's not quite that easy. Not only is it not that easy, I didn't get to finish the hole. Apparently there is a limit to how many times it will let you try before it says that you're too uncoordinated to even try. After about the 12th shot over the green, the caddy walked over to my Tiger Woods, took the wedge out of his hand, slapped him in the back of the head, and told him to change sports to something like maybe beer darts.
I couldn't seem to get the hang of the power thing in one hole and I didn't try any further. Mark had showed up to see the spectacle and said that there was a funner game. Great, because this one seems to be broken or something.
He put in this tank game that requires you to drive a tank with a controller in your left hand and aim and shoot the cannon with a controller in your right hand. I don't want to say that I'm not tech savvy but where are the good old days of Atari 2600 with a joystick and one red button? I very rarely played the Playstation because it had a joystick on the left, two triggers on the left, two triggers on the right, and four buttons on the right with Lucky Charms symbols.
"What do I do next?"
"Push up, down, triangle, circle, triangle, left, square, right, X, circle, and then X again."
"I'm sorry, I thought this was a game. I didn't know that I had to be qualified for brain surgery."
So, I'm standing there with two controllers in hands that never speak to each other, trying to drive a tank and shoot at the same time. It's not like walking and chewing game if that's what you're thinking unless you usually walk on your hands and chew gum with your ass (let's not talk about blowing bubbles). What I found in the three minutes that I spent playing the game is that I can drive my tank OR I can shoot. I did kill the enemy in round one on accident. Just like the Tiger Woods game, it gave me false hope. From round two until the point when Tiger Woods' Caddy jumped out of the opposing tank and ran over and smacked my driver in the back of the head, it was all down hill.
We had to leave to start for home or I would probably have kicked the caddy in the shin and tried again but when you live two hours across the wasteland and it's starting to get dark, it's way passed time to get on the road.
We are planning on going back in a couple of weeks to take Trey to a military plane museum and will be taking all the cousins with us. If we have time after that, I may have to give the game another try. Thinking this might be the case, my tank driver wearing a red shirt and a Nike baseball hat, stopped walking away with drooping head and turned around. He stood a little taller and pointed at the caddy and said, "I'll be back."
The caddy fell to the ground laughing uncontrollably. I wanted to get in the tank and run over him but we had to go home.
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