Climbing Rope

We put up a climbing rope in our garage yesterday. The rope itself was a lot cheaper than I thought it would be - only $20 for a 13ft x 1.5in rope on Amazon. Then just the hardware to screw it into the ceiling. I wanted to make sure the weight got distributed across a few rafters, but it just took me about an hour to figure that all out and put it up. 

Our children were all excited to give it a try. They all thought they would be able to do it no problem. I also thought that I would be able to do it "Princes Bride" style without a problem (climbing up with just my arms not using my legs at all - see below). I was definitely wrong. 

Asher, Agnes, and Elliott didn't make it very far on their first try. Christian and Ethan did a little better. But Julia made it all the way to the top. She was pretty proud to be able to show up her brothers on a physical/strength thing.

Then I tried to teach them the proper way to use their feet to clamp the rope. A few of them tried that and made it farther, but their arms were all already tired by that point.

I am interested to see how long it will take them to learn to get to the top. And maybe one day I will be like Fezzik and make it with just my arms and at least three of them on my back.

Here are some pictures and videos of their first tries.

Elliott's 9th Birthday

Elliott turned 9 this past week. We had a fun time celebrating his birthday. He chose to do a family activity rather than a friend birthday party. So on Thursday we all went to the skating rink. He picked that last year as well. I think he would have rather gone to the trampoline place, but it is so expensive. With the cost of the entrance and socks for all of us, it would have been over three times the cost of skating for the whole night, but for just 1 hour of jumping. So instead, we gave him tickets for him and one friend to go some time. The Abels also met us there for skating which was a lot of fun.

A couple days later on Saturday we celebrated his birthday. The Abels and our neighbors were able to join us for a birthday dinner and cake. And then that night we got to watch some of the second season of the Mandalorian. Elliott received a lot of food presents for his birthday this year, including bags of chips, pop, a bag of pepperoni, and candy. He was super excited for it all.

Here he is:

As a 9 year old, I asked him to tell me about some of his favorites. He said his favorite subject in school is Science, but his favorite thing to do in school is soccer. His favorite inside activities are soccer or watching movies, and his favorite outside activities is snowball fighting. His favorite dinner is lasagna, breakfast is monkeybread, and favorite dessert is chocolate cake (he was able to have all of those on his birthday). 

Elliott is a very good swimmer. With COVID-19 we have been restricted to only swimming laps on Fridays when we go to the pool and only three kids get to come along. Elliott almost always picks to be one of the kids who comes along and he goes non-stop swimming laps for the 45 minutes while we are in the water. For some reason, he also loves shoveling snow. We haven't had much this year, but whenever it does snow he always asks if he can shovel the neighbors driveway or clear off our trampoline. Sometimes we will even find him shoveling off the basketball court just for fun. Maybe it all stems back to him being born in the middle of a snowstorm when we lived in Alaska. In general, he is very affectionate and flexible - happy to go along with whatever his siblings are doing. We are so grateful that he is part of our family!

And here are a couple of the pictures from when he was just a few days old.