The Casanova Family: First Half of Summer

This is going to be a long one! It seems like forever since our last post. So much has happened. COVID seems to have died out and for us pretty much everything is back to normal. School finished up, softball and baseball are over, Memorial Day, Father's Day and 4th of July happened, and Owen and I just got back from 3 days of Webelos Camp at Camp Naish.

END OF SCHOOL

For class awards, Owen won the Optimist Award. I think he deserves it because he's always in a good mood and looking at the bright side.

There was field day too...

Since Elsie is a "big girl" in Middle School now, parents didn't get to attend field day, but I could see them out the window playing at the school.

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

The kids and I went to Boonville for Memorial Day weekend. We helped Grandma with her chore list by tearing dead branches out of trees and cleaning out her gutters. The kids love it!

I went for a ride on the MKT Trail. It goes from Huntsdale to downtown Columbia. Never ridden it before so it was fun to explore.

We rode go karts and played mini golf too.

On Memorial Day we did our usual scout ceremony at the Spring Hill Cemetery.

TYREEK HILL FOOTBALL CAMP

We signed up for this way back in December and had been looking forward to it ever since. It got delayed once for rain, but finally happened in June, at the Scheel's Soccer Complex. The package that we purchased got us a picture of Owen with Tyreek. SO COOL!!!

There were TONS of kids there ranging in age from about 6 to 18. They divided the field into about 20 stations and the kids rotated all the way around.

It was a warm day and I was worried about Owen getting sunburnt, so I made him wear his hat. He might have been the only one. :)

Here's the man of the hour!

Tyreek came right down to the corner that us Dad's were sitting in and worked with some of the littler kids.

I got the video above and while I was shooting it his photographer got this one. I love it! It's awesome how the kid and coach on the left are in awe.

This is Mack, one of Owen's baseball teammates. He upgraded his package so he got to "run a route" against Tyreek.

We also got an autographed photo of Tyreek that we need to frame. All in all, it was pretty fun. I'm not sure how much Owen "learned" but he had fun being part of it.

SOFTBALL & BASEBALL

The 2nd half of Elsie's softball season went really good. She started getting hits and was really seeing the ball well. She's hard to pitch to also, so she can draw walks when she needs to.

We took "baseball card" pictures in the backyard one night. :)

The Bombers ended up winning the Hawaiian Hitfest which had gotten rained out. They were the top seed before the rainout so technically they won!

Baseball card picture

Owen's coach only gives game balls when they win, and this year was rough, but they did win their next to last league game. Owen made an awesome catch in LF and had a nice stop at SS to ice the game.

The season ended with the Kansas State Tournament and we were excited about our chances to win it. We won the two pool-play games and drew the #1 seed for the tourney portion on Sunday...

...AND GOT UPSET! We lost to a team whose pitcher could not be stopped. He was striking everyone out and we just couldn't score. Finally, in the very last inning he was replaced and we had a huge 2 out rally only to come up 1 run short. Owen represented the tying run at the plate. He hit it to the shortstop who made a great play and threw him out at first...but it was SO close. Owen thought he was safe and was really bummed, but that's how it goes sometimes. For the record, I think he was just barely out.

FATHER'S DAY

Elsie had a softball tournament on Father's Day weekend, and there's no place I'd rather be! It started on Friday and Grandma Cas came up to watch the Friday games. The Bolts won the first game and in the 2nd game Elsie got 2 hits, one of which got the 5th run across. The tournament started on Sunday and the first game was at 8AM. The Bolts won the first game. Elsie had an RBI. For the 2nd game, Elsie got promoted to lead off because she'd been making such good contact the last few games. She struck out, then popped out, then got a DOUBLE and the Bolts won to clinch a spot in the semi-final. In the semi-final we just couldn't pull away from the other team and let them stay in the game. Elsie played well and had two hits and a really nice play where she stole home, but the Bolts lost. They did finish 3rd place in their flight, so that was great!

Father's Day evening I took the kids up to the pool after dinner. We were the only ones there for a little while. It was nice and a great way to end a special day.

FOURTH OF JULY

We went down to Boonville to celebrate the 4th of July. It's become sort of a tradition. We finally got to try out the big inflatable boats that Grandma Cas got for the kids. They were fun!

Of course we bought fireworks and had to light off a few on the 3rd.

We sat around most of the morning on the 4th and watched the hotdog eating contest. After lunch we went over to Aunt Marilyn's pool for a swim.

As the evening progressed we started working through some of the smaller stuff and daytime stuff.

Then it was time for the fun stuff! :)

The kids got up on the roof and assaulted us with snappers!

There aren't pics of the "good stuff" but they were good and we had some fun. We had sparklers leftover so everyone had to do one at the end of the night. :)

Monday morning I went for a bike ride on the Katy Trail. This time I left from McBaine and went south along the river to Easley and back. (I'm trying to knock out sections of the trail that I've never done to someday complete the whole thing)

This is Cooper's Landing

This giant cottonwood is in the bottoms between Huntsdale and McBaine.

WEBELOS SCOUT CAMP

With one day to pack in between our trip to Boonville, Owen and I headed off to Webelos Camp on Wednesday. It was at Camp Naish in Bonner Springs. I'd been sweating it because the idea of camping for 3 nights in July is pretty horrifying to me. I was however, looking forward to spending time with Owen and the other Leaders and Scouts from our Pack. We arrived about 12:30 on Wednesday. It was hot and humid and rained on and off most of the afternoon.

These are our boys and this is our campsite. It was about a quarter of a mile down the trail from everything, so we got lots of steps!

The boys had some downtime in the afternoon so they played gagaball for a really long time. Owen destroyed his brand new camp shirt. :(

The pool was really nice. We took swim tests and Owen got a blue band! I was so proud of him because he swam 100yds. They had to do 75yds of front stroke and 25yds of backstroke and he did it like a champ!

At the end of the first night there was a campfire ceremony where they took the official camp picture for this session. Our boys wanted to get front row so they went up 20min early and got it.

These kids are addicted to gagaball. This was at like 8AM on day two while we were waiting for the flag ceremony before breakfast.

Owen slept pretty good the first night, but he tapped me about midnight and said "Daddy, there's something weird in my bed!" I turned on the flashlight and it was a giant slug! Eww! It had crawled across Owen's head behind his ear and then down his blanket leaving a trail of slime. I used a sock to pick it up and throw it back in the woods. I'm proud of Owen for shaking it off and not freaking out. After telling the story the following morning, he was awarded the nickname "Slugger" and permanently left his mark in Scouting lore. :)
(BTW, I slept less than an hour the first night, especially after the slug incident. I just could not relax.)

On Thursday afternoon we got to do the climbing wall. Owen wasn't very excited, but once he saw how it worked he wasn't scared.

Our Scoutmaster, Kevin, made it all the way to the top!

This was about as far as Owen got. Think he got the 2nd farthest of our boys.

Heading back to camp with his new friend, Rory.

Friday, it was about 93 degrees, but that didn't stop us from having fun. First activity of the day was Rockets followed by STEM and Engineering before lunch.

There's no picture of it, but each Pack had to nominate someone to do the belly flop contest. Only two of us had blue bands, so I decided to do it. It was right after lunch on Friday. Everyone from the dining hall came out to watch along the hillside. They took us down and explained the rules and then we got in line. There were maybe 15 of us and I was towards the back of the line. There were a few guys ahead of me that did awesome flops so I was pretty sure I wouldn't win, but I gave it my best. I trotted up to the pool and jumped as high as I could and forced myself to not flinch and the next thing I heard was SMACK! My whole front hurt from my nose to my crotch so I figured I nailed it. When I came up I heard the lifeguard say over the megaphone "well we certainly could hear that one!" I didn't win, but it was fun to represent our Pack and the boys all loved it.

After the belly flop contest we walked way over to Shooting Sports for Archery and Pellet Guns. Owen is left eye dominant but has always insisted in shooting right handed. But this time, Rory was the same way, so me and his Dad got them to try shooting lefty. They both did really good and enjoyed it thoroughly.

One of Owen's misses nailed an acorn on the ground. :)

They saved Owen's favorite activity for last. Pellet Guns!

Again, Owen tried going lefty and it worked great! He said he hit a LOT of targets and Stephen (the guy standing with him) confirmed that Owen did great.

There was a free swim in the afternoon and then family night/dinner and the closing campfire ceremony. We decided to leave on Friday night because there were big storms coming overnight (and we made the right choice because there were storms and we'd have been in the shelter much of the night).

Owen got to hold Pumpkin

The campfire ceremony was fun. They had lots of funny skits and talked a lot about the journey from Webelos to Arrow of Light to Boy Scouts.

Here's the reward we got for those front row seats.

Camp was fun. We made some great memories and the boys got along really great the whole time. It was HOT HOT HOT but the nights were ok. You just had to get used to the idea that you'd be sweaty pretty much all of the time.

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