Aunt and Uncle Monkeyshines

All in all, this week's episode of Monkeyshines was generally a mellow one, with the exception of a special guest appearance by Aunt Leslie and Uncle Warren - but we'll get to that in a minute. The first thing we did was marvel at the beautiful pottery that we had created in our last episode of Monkeyshines (pictured). Miranda's plate adorns the kids' play table and the car-shaped piggy bank that Daddy and Zach made has a place of honor on our bookshelf in the living room.

The weather this weekend was just amazing - hot in the sun, cool in the shade, low humidity, incredibly blue sky - amazing! And, because of this, we spent most of the weekend either outside or inside taking naps, which when you think about it is not a bad way to live.

We did the usual Sensory Gym thing Saturday morning and while Zach was doing that Miranda and Daddy went to Daddy's "cookie meeting." Our big friend Mr. Rich asked Daddy to read the group's secretary notes so Miranda helped out by standing on the table in the front of the room (with Daddy's arm around her waist) in front of a hundred people, smiling and clapping and waving a small baseball bat that serves as the group's gavel (wielding it at Daddy's head) and generally enjoying being the center of attention, while Daddy read the notes. She was soooo incredibly cute and charming!

We did our usual park tour on Saturday afternoon then went back to Daddy's house for a nice long nap. After some food, we went back out for a long walk, stopping at playgrounds and horsey-rides, and gumball machines all along the way. Because of the naps, both children were up very late - Zach especially, who was up until midnight.

Not surprisingly, we all slept late Sunday morning, then had a nice breakfast together. We did a little cleanup work to get ready for our guests who arrived by cab: Aunt Leslie and Uncle Warren of the Carolina Millers! We all had a great time playing basketball, showing off our mouse, making PlayDo alligators, etc. It was a short but vigorous visit, and a good time was had by all. We Brooklyn Millers really appreciated the effort that Warren and Leslie went to to make the visit happen - Thanks Guys!

One note: during the visit, I asked whether Zach was bigger or smaller than his cousin Alexis and Warren said that he thought Zach was bigger and said that Alexis weighed about 40lbs and asked what Zach weighs. Daddy had no clue so in the process of giving the bumble-bee a piggy back ride, Daddy stood on the scale with the bumble on his back. Together we weighed 222lbs, but when Daddy weighed himself right afterwards, he only weighed 167lbs. We did the math and reckoned that we had a 55lb bumble-bee on our hands - that's one BIG Bumble!


All good things must come to an end and eventually the Carolinians had to depart. We saw them off into a car-service Town Car and headed out on our own. We decided to explore parts of the promenade that we had never explored and found some really cool wild and shady places. Miranda is very into bugs and pointed excitedly whenever she saw one, exclaiming "there's a bug! A buggy BUG!" They are also both very excited by butterflies and we saw plenty of them as well.

It hardly seemed as though we had started our weekend of joy before it came to an end, but in an effort to squeeze out just a little more fun, we hit the Fort Hamilton High School park on our way back to Monkey-Central and did some swinging and sprinkler running. It was two very wet but happy monkeys that Daddy returned to Mommy at 5pm Sunday night. We said our farewells and exchanged big kisses to hold us over until our next installment of Monkeyshines.