Way Back Weekly

I love this picture!
When I do my life coaching I often tell clients who are grieving to look at things like pictures they haven't seen before or memories that suddenly surface as gifts from loved ones who have moved on.
That's certainly the way I felt when I came upon this picture in a bunch of pictures that my dad gave me when we were in the Poconos this summer.

This picture was taken at my parents' 25 wedding party, which I've written about before in a Way Back post (it was a surprise party planned by the kids and attended by friends and family who had been at the original wedding as well as some "newer" friends.) I have looked at pictures from this party for nearly 30 years, yet somehow had never seen this one. I love the look on my brother's face (who was proudly a Mama's boy!) and my mom's smile as she laughs at something Aunt Brenda is telling her (Aunt Brenda is in the mirror behind them in the original picture). It's just so "them."

There were a few other pictures of the 25th (held at the Peter Pratt Inn in Yorktown) that you may see in the future, but this one jumped right out at me, so I had to share it with all of you!

FireFall

One of the best things about living in Pennsylvania is fall. The older I get the less I like winter (or maybe it's the more dependent I get on having to drive everywhere!) but there is no substitute for fall. And I have to say that this fall has been quite nice. The leaves haven't really changed ... they just kind of rusted and fell onto my front yard ... but the air has been crisp and cool and the breeze almost always brings the smell of burning leaves.
This past weekend we were the cause of some of that burning and not because I forgot to extinguish the candles I like to have lit in the bathrooms!
As you may recall we lost a tree last fall (several actually) in a freak storm and we gave most of the wood away. This past weekend though, we decided to burn the remainder of it and toast some marshmallows.
Here is the photographic evidence!

First of all we never do anything in the backyard without Hannah setting up a "stand." Here she has decided to provide us with marshmallows. Free. (Usually we get charged ... I cannot tell you the number of bracelets I have purchased and then given back to her over the past week...)

Here she is at the table with a sample marshmallow. I have to tell you that both girls remembered our fire safety from the previous week's camp out. In fact, when Rob asked Lizzie what she learned about fire safety her response was, "We learned that you've got to put your hair up or wear a bandanna so it doesn't catch on fire (insert long pause while she looks at his head) so ... you're good." Seriously that kid cracks me up. That's Rob there guarding the fire, which he built.

 

 Here's a close-up of the fire. It burned a good long time and many, many marshmallows were consumed:

Here's one right here. Hannah liked catching them on fire, but she didn't like eating them all burned. It was a conundrum.

 

Even Cash got in on the fun ...

... but I think it was just for the marshmallows... see how he's sizing up Lizzie's? Yummy, yummy! Although in the interest of full disclosure Hannah tried to give him her burned marshmallow from the previous picture and he refused to eat it, too. He's kind of picky that way.

We hope you are enjoying fall wherever you are, too!

Fun with Texting

Lizzie spent her summer doing math and she got pretty good at it (she's gotten nearly perfect grades on the tests she's taken since the year began) AND she earned an iPod Touch.
Rob already had one, so the two of them text each other ALL. THE. TIME. She's upstairs, he's downstairs, and they text.
Once in a while Hannah takes my iPad and gets in on the fun. Here is an "exchange" between Hannah and Lizzie, which pretty much mirrors how they actually speak to each other in real life:

Hannah: Liz
Hannah: Liz
Hannah: Liz
Hannah: Are You Alive?
Hannah: Are You Alive?
Hannah: I Love Pandas and Elephants
Hannah: Lizzie
Hannah: Hi Liz
Hannah: You are a weird goofball
Lizzie: Ugh
Hannah: Okay, you are cute
Lizzie: Ugh

Lizzie has also gotten a couple of aps for the iPod that let her do fun stuff. One is an ap where you take a picture of an animal and then you line up the mouth and eyes and you record your voice (you can disguise your voice in different ways) so that it looks like the animal is talking. Lizzie is currently obsessed with making these and when she is done she texts the to me and Rob. Here are a couple of the funnier ones:

The Horse Video

The Cat Video

Girls in Trees 2

 We like trees in this family. The girls like to climb them and I like to take pictures of them:

In fact, sometimes I like to take pictures of them climbing them, such a in this post from a few years ago (late 2008.) And I use the term a few years ago loosely since honestly it seems like just a few days ago (and unbelievably on Halloween we will begin our seventh year in this house!) that I posted those photos.
If you don't want to click, here's an example:
Cute, aren't they?


In fact yesterday (or really a couple of yesterdays ago) I snapped this shot of Hannah and Lizzie and a tree. This tree is the same tree as above (it's a very interesting tree -- kind of a camo tree!) and it's at Poole Forge, which is (as regular blog readers know) one of my favorite places to take photos.
My how my girls have grown!! But they are still cute!!

Little Dancer Girl

What have I been doing, you ask? Mostly putting Lizzie's hair in a bun (or two!) Lizzie takes three dance classes a week and has two additional rehearsals for the Nutcracker and each and every one of those needs her hair in a bun. And so I am the bun expert!! I'm proud of Lizzie because she made it her goal to participate more in dance this year and to try and earn her pointe shoes and she's well on her way to that goal. Her dance teacher told her maybe she could get the pointe shoes for her birthday in November, so it sounds like it's coming quickly. She's thrilled. I think it's a little soon, but most of the other 10-11 year olds that she started dance with are on pointe, so she wants to be part of that group.

She's now part of the Pottstown Dance Theater Repertory and they recently did a show with student choreographer. Lizzie danced in a modern jazz number to "When the Saints Go Marching In" choreographed by the dance school's mother, Aunt Renee (that's what all the kids call her) and it was really quite good. Aunt Renee told me she didn't really dance (she does participate each year in the African Dance program) but she's a musician so she choreographed her dance that way. It was cute and Lizzie got to dance with an umbrella AND throw beads out into the audience at the end.

Here's the small group of dancers for this number:

Lizzie and her friend Nina from dance class. They seem to often be at rehearsals at the same time (although rehearsals and classes are held Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday for Liz, so she has lots of people with whom she seems to be at rehearsals all the time!)

Here's Liz just after the show and, as you can see, my buns held up very well! :) The entire performance was really nice and it looks like there are some good choreographers in the group! Oh, and in case you were wondering where my other little dancer is, Hannah is no longer interested in dance (although she was re-interested after this performance, but only in the snacks and gifts the dancers got!) Hannah's going to devote herself to singing and pageants this year. Next up is the Nutcracker and we are deep in those rehearsals now -- pictures from that in December!

Camping with the Girls

(KEEP SCROLLING DOWN FOR A WAY BACK POST!)

A couple of weeks ago I had to go camping to learn how to go camping so I could take my Girl Scout Troop (14-5th graders) on an overnight camping trip. Here are some pictures from the trip which was attended by 13 of my scouts and four other parents. We earned three badges while we were there. This is Hannah and her best friend Phoebe together with Izzy and Francie working on the drawing badge. During the course of the day they had to draw the same scene three times, to get the different shadings of sun as the light moved, and then also from the perspective of a bug.

But while the drawing badge was fun, the real craft of the weekend was making bracelets with a rainbow loom. If you don't have a tween girl it's likely you don't know what these are, but they are rubber band bracelets that are woven together in lots of different ways (think macrame with rubber bands!) The troop made a million of them whenever we weren't doing anything else. Here's Lizzie working on one of hers:

We broke the "Leave No Trace" rule that was part of our camping badge when several of the girls found and kept these monkey brains "fruits." They are actually called Osage Oranges and, among other things repel mosquitoes. You can't eat them, though. And they do really look like Monkey Brains. Half of my troop took a couple mile hike (I stayed behind with the other half) and Hannah took this picture of Phoebe and her monkey brain:

Some troops like to sing (and mine certainly does, too) but what they REALLY like is to dance. I brought my iPad (no other electronics were allowed except for phones if the girls felt they'd need to call home and say goodnight or something -- none of them did!) and we danced for a couple of hours in the evening. Here's Hannah, Charlie, Steph, Grace and Paytan doing Cotton-Eyed Joe:

We also earned the Simple Meals badge (we had done a couple of steps before the campout). I broke the girls into three patrols and each patrol fixed a meal. This is the dinner group making tacos. What makes this picture memorable is that the adult and two children on the right of the photo are vegetarians, and they had to chop up the meat (actually Hannah and Phoebe did that while they watched) and Amy had no idea how to make sure it was "done." The tacos were delish though and the refried beans that we made for the veggies in the group were a huge hit with all the girls.

Lizzie's cooking the marshmallow for her s'more. She's wearing the bandanna that she made as part of the Junior Camping badge they all earned. And, just so you can all be extra impressed, I built that fire, which raged on (it's not yet raging in this photo) for most of the evening:

More dancing! Here's Hannah, Phoebe and Analisa doing the Macarena:

Time to rock out to Make It Shine (theme song from Victorious):

 

Here are two of the adults who  helped me out, Amy and Cindy, during their full-contact game of Blink. It's a fast paced matching game that Amy is very bad at and Cindy is very good at. Amy kept cheating and Cindy kept winning. It was hysterical although I doubt the troop knew why we were laughing so loudly. I will say that for all her worries about roughing it (she made Cindy pick up a bag of Doritos when she left camp to go walk her dog) Amy was the one who got up at 6 am on Sunday morning and went out and cleaned and raked the fire circle so I wouldn't have to. All the parents who came really helped out and made things run very smoothly -- even though they were screaming more loudly about the mice in the cabin than the girls were.... ;)

 

Here's the whole group just before we left for home on Sunday morning. I was tired (the mice kept a lot of people up for much of the night as they scratched around in the attic so I stayed up to keep everyone calm...) but otherwise unharmed from the trip which my troop deemed AWESOME!! In May we're doing a Camporee with the whole Service Unit (all the girls in our school district) and we'll be at it again -- hopefully with NO MICE along for the trip!

Way Back and Watch Out!

Where have I been for the last month? Well, you are about to find out!! I am going to post DAILY blogs for the next week, just to get some of this stuff off my mind and onto my blog!

First of course, we need to start with a Way Back Weekly!

When we went to the Poconos this year my Dad gave me several large file folders of photos containing lots of pictures of people I don't know ... but plenty of gems. With Halloween right around the corner I'm sharing this one:

This is a photo of Mom and Dad at a Halloween Party (I sincerely hope!) I think my Dad told me it was at their Golf Club in Mahopac. My dad is wearing number 75, which I believe is my brother T.A.'s actual football jersey, which would date this photo to the early 1980s. Also both my parents are smoking so that would mean it was before 1990 when my mom quit (although if memory serves me correctly Dad quit first, right?)  Anyway, the picture makes me laugh -- until I remember that these two crazy kids were the age I am now, when this photo was taken. And that's the scariest Halloween story I can tell...