Picnic in the Park: thank goodness for geese

As I've probably mentioned here (once or twenty times), we have a Friday night ritual: pizza-movie-picnic night.  The girls and I make up a batch of pizza dough, top it with some tasty cheese (sometimes veggies, when I can get away with it), throw it in the oven, and then sit on a blanket on the living room floor to watch a family movie and eat our homemade pizza.  Daddy joins us when he can.  And though John David's a little small to be much help in the kitchen, he certainly eats pizza with as much gusto as his sisters do.

Pizza-movie-picnic night is a beloved tradition, but we've decided to trade it in for the summer.  It'll return when the days get shorter and cooler.  For now we've been capitalizing on the longer, sunny days and have made Friday nights picnic in the park nights.  Rest assured: no one's missing the television.

For our inaugural picnic in the park (two weeks ago now -- I'm running a bit behind, blogwise), we headed to a nearby park that has a lake and borders the bay.  We'd intended to test out the remote-controlled helicopter Auntie Caroline and Uncle Craig gave Daddy for his birthday, but the gusty wind made that impossible.  Our girls were mightily disappointed at first, but recovered when they saw...

geese.

No kidding.  The geese saved the day.

The one most enamored of the geese, though, was clearly John David.  He was completely fascinated.  He loved wandering about after them and would have followed them anywhere.  In fact, he very nearly followed them into the little lake.  Fortunately, Daddy's been working on his speed drills.  Jim managed to snatch our boy moments before he'd have been swimming (unsuccessfully) with the geese.

Given our success with teaching John David to sign "fish" at the aquarium, he gaggle of geese seemed like the perfect opportunity to work on the sign for "bird."  John David caught on immediately!  His sign isn't exactly right (he doesn't hold his hand at all near his mouth), but it's still reasonably comprehensible and pretty darn cute.  He uses the sign all the time now, birds being a more common sight in these parts than, well, fish.  It's not his favorite sign (that would still be "eat" or maybe "fan"), but it's close.

Eventually we tired of trying to prevent our boisterous boy from swimming with the geese and decided some distraction was in order.  We moved our crew to the park's play structure, which is cleverly designed to look like a sailing ship.  The distraction proved successful.  John David loved being able to climb around like the big kids.

And Madeline didn't mind hanging around, either.

Kathleen, of course, was the ship's captain.  She used the spyglass to chart the ship's course.  It was bound for Hawaii, she told us.  (If only!)

After the ship had arrived in Hawaii and then set off for a variety of other destinations (including Illinois -- we clearly haven't worked on geography yet), we packed up our things, bade the geese farewell, and headed home, tired, dirty, and very happy.

We love this summer tradition already...