You had me going there, Annie! Right about at the sugar cookies I was ready to yell at you "didn't we all tell you to take it easy????!!!"

Teresa

That's the way to enjoy a holiday, spend it with your family. Sounds like everyone had a great time.

Food was wonderful, but not perfect. Needed some cannelloni. LOL

dcarch

Looks like fun. Wish I was there. I noticed your granddaughter's name because my daughter's name is McClain and everyone always calls her McKayla.

Lucky you to have the grands for the 4th; thanks for sharing. Mine were camping and boating in the Gulf all weekend. Even though Lily (4 years old) crossed her arms across her chest and said "I don't camp!".

Annie, thanks for sharing your 4th of July family get together.

As always it looks like everyone is having a good time and is very well fed.

I'm glad that you took it easy (at least a little bit).

How is your knee?

"I don't camp!!"

Cathy, I'm with you on that one.

Ann

wait....my invite must've been lost in the mail????
So jealous!! Good food and pool fun with the kiddos!
Happy times!

We had a ball, Ashley brought the Wonderdoodle and he fell in the pool and couldn't figure out how to swim. He's such a putz, LOL.

Cathy, I love to camp, my girls love to camp, the grandkids love to camp. Elery? Not so much.....

Teresa, I did take it sort of easy. I thought of adding a couple of things to the menu and it got hot and I just didn't. The guys were happy, they had beer. The kids were happy, they had the pool. Mother was happy, she was taking pictures right and left. The dogs were happy because they mooched a bite of something from everyone. So, it was a perfect day.

AnnT, my knee is doing pretty well, I drove the Jeep Saturday for the first time since surgery and I walked the fence today, so right now I have ice on it, but it's coming along really well, I'm going to walk to work tomorrow, get back into the habit of doing that, I've goofed off long enough!

dcarch, I still have cannelloni in the freezer and I hope I never eat pasta again in my life, I keep giving it to the kids, a little at a time.

sumnerfan, hardly anyone actually calls Makayla that, in our family she is known as The Monkey Princess. (grin) McClain is an unusual name, I like that.

sissy, I was wondering where you were...

Annie

Look at all that grilled goodness, I'm so proud of you! You'll be a Steven Raichlen yet. Um I think Wonderdoodle is a 'klutz' not 'putz' - that is something else, entirely, LOL. Everything looks great and fun. Sounds like that knee is coming right along and I'm not a bit surprised.

(Cathy, get Lily something from this collection next time she goes camping - one of the bags filled with anti-camping goodies?)

Sumnerfan, I'm just curious if anyone come out with 'yippee ki-yay' after being introduced to your daughter, grin.

OMG, I've got to get those "not camping" items for my friend who just had a nightmare float/camping trip in Utah. Freezing cold rain the whole time and a tent that leaked. Her idea of roughing it is the Holiday Inn.

Annie, looks like fun with the fam. I remember days like that when my kids were little and before my mom's pool became a frog pond. Please don't take your eye off the kids for even I minute (I know you know this). There was a terrible tragedy near me at a swim club recently. Happened in the blink of an eye. Sorry to be a downer but that scares me. Looks like Makayla is a confident swimmer. That's the best safety net!

Love your patriotic cookies!

Looks like everyone is having a great time and the food looks yummy! What's not to like???

Glad you didn't overdo it, Annie!

Looks like good food and a fun time for all. Glad you let everyone help. It won't be long until the girls start wanting to share hosting duties.

It's nice that the weather cooperated here in Michigan for a change. Even the lake here is pretty comfortable.

Nancy

Jessica, I was going with "putz" defined as "a fool or an idiot", both of which Buster is. I wasn't going with #2, which is the vulgar definition. As for the grilling, even Elery chuckled, he couldn't believe I had the patience to stand by the grill and turn things so they didn't burn. Really, now that I think about it, I can't believe it either!

Nancy, the weather was very cooperative all weekend, I was astounded. Elery and I took his grandson Dylan to Ludington on Thursday and the water temperature was 64, very nice for Lake Michigan the end of June!

Pam, I know about the pool, believe me. Amanda drowned in tht pool when she was 15. The neighbor boy, who was 16, was there and so I walked to the mailbox and got the paper. That's the amount of time it took, less than 2 minutes and the neighbor was standing there like a doofus, not knowing what to do. Ashley (who was 9 and weighed a little less than 50 pounds) dove to the bottom of that 8 1/2 foot pool and pulled her up, then screamed for me. I gave her CPR, she was not breathing and had no heart beat. There's nothing quite like seeing your child dead at your feet, trust me. Fortunately, I'm one of those very lucky people whom God saw fit to give the same child to twice, because we managed to recussitate her. She now has seizures as the result of that accident and she'll be on meds for the rest of her life, but no other apparent ill effects.

So, yes, I know, and I'm careful, but I also believe that every child should know how to swim and have respect for the water but not be afraid.

Annie

'Putz' is pretty much understood to have derogatory meaning above and beyond 'idiot/fool', as in "to describe a nasty, unlikable man. A putz generally has no real power, except to make your life miserable or at least unpleasant, often in a passive-aggressive way." More like an @sshole.

Happy reading - there are some gems in here that I am adding!

Here is a link that might be useful: Fun page Yiddish dictionary

Annie, I knew that story but, even so, reading it again gave me chills. Did you ever find out what caused it?
The picnic look like lots of fun. I'm so glad you had help making the food.
The kids are getting so big! Makayla is looking a lot like Amanda, especially in the photo where she's standing in the pool with her eyes looking down.

cc, the doctors "think" that she had a heat stroke of some type. She was lying on the concrete pool deck, sunbathing and got really hot. She said she didn't feel good, so she jumped into the pool to cool off. She promptly sank to the bottom, so they think it was a combination of the very hot concrete and the sudden coolness of the pool water. My pool is not heated. And that's the best guess.

Jessica, I got the term from my Grandmother, who always used that my entire life to describe someone clumsy and stupid. Elery's Jewish DIL, Sorah, has a grandmother who used it at a family gathering while talking about a family member. The first time she used the term "schmuck" I about cracked up too, we have a family here whose last name really is Schmuck, Ashley dated one for about a second and a half. Buster is kind of an @sshole too, he counter surfs, gets in the garbage and goes outsides, digs big holes, eats dirt and then comes inside an pukes on the rug.

Just for you, though, I won't say it any more, Sorah's grandmother told me that definition #2 was p@nis, as in "what a d*ck". Sorah blushed but her sister Tovah sure didn't, she was busy laughing at her 80 something year old grandmother saying that "p" word. :-)

Annie

LOL Annie!

Yeah, I had to explain gently to a co-worker years ago what "schmuck" means (same as "putz"). He just thought it meant "poor soul," because people do use it that way -- comparable to the way people say "the poor b*****d never saw it coming." But you wouldn't say, "He tripped over his own feet and fell in the pool -- what a b*****d." Similarly, both schmuck and putz, standing alone, have derogatory connotations -- literally, calling someone a d**k.

Besides, Yiddish is so rich with terms for losers, poor souls, and doofuses, there's really no need to risk schmuck and putz (and there are more like them, too). Go with shlemiel, shmendrick, shlemazel, klutz, nebbish, potzer, schlepper, tzeklungene, and so many more .... each with its own nuanced connotation. And then of course there's ironic Yiddish --calling someone who just made an idiotic mistake "chochem" (genius) or "Einstein." Really, you can go on all day without needing "putz" -- then it will be fresh when you're really ticked off at someone and nothing but "putz" will do. :-)

Thanks, Gellchom, I'll be singing the Laverne & Shirley theme song all day.

Annie, that's a scary story. I'm so glad it had a happy ending. I fished my kids out of the pool a number of times, like when one little idiot just calmly walked off the edge into the water. Nevertheless, I wish I had a backyard pool now. I can't stand swimming in a public place. I need my own pool!

OK, gellchom, but we really do have a family here whose last name is Schmuck. Ashley dated Cody Schmuck for less than a day, LOL, but I don't think the very large family of them are going to change their name, no matter the Yiddish connotations. Of course, they are mostly in jail, so it gives a whole 'nother level of meaning to "schmuck" here where I live!

Of course, they live right next door to the Hunsuckers. Yeah, I know.....

Pam, come swim in my pool, it's always open for you! And I have a valid CPR card, so you're safe. (grin)

Annie

I had to explain gently to a co-worker years ago what "schmuck" means
LOL - so did I!! I work on a trading floor, long rows of desks all open - no dividers or cubicals. So you can sort of stand up and yell across the room if you need to.

So there I was one day, not terribly long after I'd started working here, and someone from two rows over stands up and yells to me, May! What does "schmuck" mean?

Well, I gotta yell the definition back across the open room! I just replied, "It's a part of the male anatomy!" Everyone laughed. It was a pretty raucus group at that time.

And yeah, they really had no idea. They just thought it meant a jerk. So I had to explain that "jerk" was just the connotation.

I meant to add, looks like a great party! It's always fun to see the pix of these events! Thanks for sharing Annie!

Looks like fun Annie, glad to see you took it easy! ;)

Not to bring up unpleasant stuff....but why did Amanda "drown"? Wasn't she a swimmer? The thought occurred to me that perhaps she had a seizure in the pool?
My grand son with the seizure disorder had never had a seizure while swimming....but last year he did...at age 20....very scary. Took in water and had to be pulled out. Maybe the seizure was the cause of the pool accident rather than the result....not that it really matters.

LindaC, that may be, and we'll never actually know. She said she was lying on a towel on the cement pool deck and got really hot, and started feeling sick to her stomach so she jumped into the pool to cool off. That's all she remembers.

However, Amanda has grand mal seizures, the kind with a lot of involuntary muscular movements. Ashley has been present since that time when Amanda has had a seizure and says that she didn't have a seizure in the pool, she just jumped in and suddenly sank to the bottom with no thrashing or flailing. Amanda had never had a seizure before that incident.

Since Ashley was there and described it to the neurologist, and it didn't appear that she had a seizure in the pool because the type of seizures she now experiences is very noticeable, the doctors all agree that they think she had some type of physical reaction going from so hot to so cool so quickly and passed out.

I guess, at this point, the cause doesn't matter, only the effect. I do know that I'm darned lucky to still have her and equally lucky that her seizures are very well controlled with medication. She has had four that we know of in her lifetime, and none in the last five years, but she tried to go off her medication when she was 24 and that's when she had the last one.

Annie