July 1, 2025
Ollie woke up early with me and had the pleasure of watching me finish a prior day blog post. He was not too excited but it was chilly in the morning and I was using the blanket which he wanted to get under.
We had a light breakfast and Grandma came over to have her morning with Lenny as the rest of us were headed to the Anne Frank house. Kayleen, Bri, Ollie, and I took the bikes to meet my Dad there. The tickets sell out quickly and we missed them originally but were able to snag some off a ticket exchange site after a few weeks of daily monitoring.
There are no photos allowed inside so we walked through getting to focus on what we were seeing and hearing. The audio guides were helpful and easy to use, it was nice they had no headphones so we just held the little speaker close to our ear. All the information and stories were both sad and shocking. Ollie paid attention but by the end was ready to be done.
We headed back to the park near our boat. We passed Grandma and Lenny on our bikes as we got close to the park and Lenny was very excited by our surprise arrival. We hung around at the park for about an hour, enough to time play and let Ollie capture a Pokemon gym. Then it started getting hot and everyone started getting hungry.
Grandma took Lenny home to continue their morning together. Bri, Kayleen, Ollie and I headed to a nearby restaurant to get a quick lunch. It was fine but probably a bit of a tourist place as the building had an old castle look to it.
Once we got home I quickly fell asleep for a long nap, around 3 hours! I felt exhausted at lunch so knew a big one was coming. Everyone else had quiet time on the boat with the boys happy to get some screen time.
We headed out on our little boat around 5PM, hottest point of the day today, in search of a place that boat owner told us people swim. My parents stayed behind to enjoy the boat deck and A/C inside. We had to take the boat out into the more open bay area where it easily got pushed around by other boats wakes since we only have a little 5 horsepower motor. Luckily all the little rush holes didn’t cause us any issues.
We arrived at the area people were swimming but with swimmers everywhere, no ladder, no anchor, and only one long rope to try and tie up to any dock with we decided against it. Also the boys not having kids life jackets, just giant adult ones, made us uneasy about letting them jump into the dark water. We continued on our ride further out and eventually got to a bridge called Pythonbrug. People were jump off, 30 feet into the water. It was fun to watch them build up the courage to jump. The boys got hot so we put them in the water and let them hold onto the side of the boat until they were sufficiently cooled off and requested to be pulled up.
We headed back to do a short canal cruise before docking. On the way back in we encountered some boat traffic and had a near miss with a long sight seeing tour boat. We moved over so they could pass us and waved to each other as they went by but suddenly after that I could not steer. After almost hitting the back of their long boat and getting tossed around in their wake we realized that it was because the engine propeller was no longer in the water! The boys, Bri, and Kayleen had made their way to the front of the boat and the weight shift had lifted the prop out of the water. After a quick reshuffling we were off.
Kayleen made pesto pasta with sausage and garlic bread for dinner. It was good and most enjoyed the lemonyness of the pesto pasta. Ollie, very carefully, told Kayleen it was good but not his favorite and that he actually didn’t like the taste very much. A very careful expression of his feeling for diner after he said “worst dinner ever” one night in Seville and got the wrath from both Kayleen and I.
I pinky promised Ollie we would start a game of Risk before bed but everyone was tired. Luckily he agreed to only setting up the game tonight; assigning countries and deploying you starting armies to those countries. That process takes 30 minutes which was enough for tonight. Having a board game covered with little pieces on the low coffee table next to the couch seems like a disaster waiting to happen, fingers crossed!
