Dads' Day

It's been said many times that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. My mom and I kept that in mind, and fed our men well today.

I'm not a great early morning person, but I dragged myself out of bed and made breakfast for everyone. Darius was expecting to get called in to work today, so I wanted to start his day on a good note. Lucky for him he never got that dreaded call. Instead he was able to relax and enjoy time with the boys.

My dad invited some people over to have pizza for lunch. We had pizza the night before, so I had put aside some dough at his request to make it again for our guests. As good as it was we didn't indulge too much. We had lots of room we needed to save up for dinner.

Mom and I made a great spread for dinner. Steaks, King Crab legs, homemade rolls, twice baked potatoes and green salad. Darius claims that it was the best meal he's had since our wedding night, which bumps our recent meal in Seattle down a notch.

Darius' mom sent a package to him last week for Father's Day. She included lots of his favorites: Slap Ya Mama spices, Monjunis pasta sauce, Mt. Olive sour pickles, and fresh blueberries from her yard. We used the blueberries to top off a homemade cheesecake for dessert...yummy! Thanks Margaret!

It's no easy task to be a father. I have a great deal of respect for my dad and how far he's come in his life. I'm so lucky to be his daughter and have this opportunity to live with him and my mom. They're the most selfless people I know, and I love and appreciate them so much!

Darius has only been a dad for a little over a year, but I think Ben & Zach have a great bond with him. I think ahead to all the things he'll do with them and I smile. You're a good dad Darius! Thank you for working so hard to provide for us.

To all our family and friends out there that are fathers....Happy Father's Day!

For Alfred

We're sorry we didn't get a Father's Day card sent off to you! We hope you had a good day! Since you and Margaret enjoyed the recent blog, we thought you would enjoy more photos of the boys playing in the "fish puddle".

Pyornkrachzark

If you know who Pyornkrachzark is give yourself a gold star. For those of you that are familiar with The Neverending Story you probably know Pyornkrachzark as the Rockbiter character.

So what does Pyornkrachzark have to do with anything? Well, this is the character I think of when I watch Ben & Zach shoving rocks into their mouths. Remember the video clip a while back of Zach grinding his teeth? Well, listening to him and his brother gnawing on rocks isn't much better!

If it's not rocks then it's dirt, sticks, flowers, or whatever else they can get their mouths around. I was confident that after sampling these goodies a couple of times, they would decide it was all yucky and stop. I was so wrong. I guess I have a lot to learn about palates of the young.

While playing outside today, my boys found the lone puddle leftover from yesterday's rain. They walked through it, sat in it, splashed in it, threw rocks in it, and sampled many of the wet rocks from it. It was great to see how much they enjoyed themselves. I had fun taking pictures of them.

Darius was out fishing while all this was going on (caught two more halibut and one earlier in the day). I told him about the fun Ben & Zach had playing in the puddle. He looks at me and tells me that the puddle they were playing in wasn't leftover from the rain....it was the puddle he made when cleaning the fish he caught from this morning. How gross is that!? My stomach curls every time I think about. If I could barf on behalf of my boys, I gladly would. From now on I'll be sniffing all the puddles around the house before they play in them.

Fishing

Sunday night Darius and I went fishing for halibut in Prince William Sound. We left the harbor around 9PM and arrived in our fishing spot about an hour later. Darius spent another hour trying to find a certain spot for us to fish. After dropping our lines we waited and when it looked like we weren't going to have any luck, Darius suggested we leave. As soon as the words left his mouth, we had a fish on line.

If you've ever fished for halibut, you understand how fun it is to reel one in! It took me holding the rod, and Darius gaffing the fish to get it in the boat. Within the next 45 minutes we caught another three and had our limit.

On our way back we hit a sandbar and got stuck. Darius thought we could possibly be stuck there until high tide around 5AM, but we got lucky and manged to get home by 4:00. Only a couple days earlier the same thing happened to my dad, so he was able to sympathize with us when we called to tell him we were stuck.

Darius took advantage of the time we were there to clean all the fish. I can't say that I was any help as I huddled under a couple of coats and stuffed hand warmers in my socks to try and keep warm.

There aren't too many places you can fish during the wee hours of the morning and still have enough natural light. Right now we've been enjoying around 18 hours of daylight. Although the sun does set, it never gets completely dark. Good thing...otherwise we would have been waiting around even longer on that sandbar.

Here are a couple of shots Darius took on his fishing trip earlier the same day...

Childs Glacier

About 50 miles outside of Cordova in the Chugach National Forest is Childs Glacier. Cordova's only road doesn't go much further than the glacier and the Miles Glacier Bridge aka the Million Dollar Bridge. The drive out to the glacier is beautiful and a little bumpy. If you're lucky you may see wildlife along the way.

Childs Glacier is about 12 miles long, 7 miles wide and has a face about 3o0 feet high. The viewing area is about 400 yards from the glacier and when the glacier is calving, icebergs may send 10+ foot waves across the river.

Darius, Joy, Ben, Zach, and I took advantage of the beautiful weather today (it was 69 degrees!!) and made the drive out to the glacier. We didn't see much calving activity, but we enjoyed ourselves. Joy was nice enough to take pictures for us while we were there...thanks Joy!