Steve

Happy happy 29th birthday to my brother Steve! We wish we could share your birthday with you...hope it's a good one.

Steve is my brother, Pete's brother-in-law, and the Lou's godfather. He is funny, kind, sarcastic, a runner, a thinker, a reader. He can be serious and silly, quiet and the life of the party. He is generous and supportive to his family and friends. He's also just generally a fun guy to have around. One day we will kidnap him and he will live up here.

We love you!

Mama's day off

Due to vacation and the approach of yet another term start (yeah, they just keep on coming), I had thought I would need to work today. Pete wanted to go to a jeep club event in the woods somewhere, so he planned to take the Lou. She's been pretty excited to go with her Daddy and have a hike and a picnic lunch. Some friends and I had also planned a girls' night in (which takes so much schedule coordination that it's sad) for tonight, so I had also planned to head up to Mo and Gardner's for the night.

Well. I do not in fact have to work today. Yay! And even though everyone else bailed, Mo and I are still having our girls' night in. So I'm home ALONE, and then heading out to meet Mo this afternoon. I'll be bearing the fixins for Beth's Amaretto Margaritas, and we'll order takeout. Fantastic. Maybe we'll even sleep in tomorrow. I don't even know what to do with myself!

Other than that, not much going on around here. Went out for ice cream last night, and then to hang out with the Littlefield-Gouds, friends in Dover with two little girls. Stayed out way too late, but it had been a while, and the kids play together pretty nicely.

I love summer, when it's like it is today. Blue sky, a few fluffy white clouds, a breeze....and it's NOT 99 degrees.

I think I'll go clean my kitchen. You are all jealous that I lead such an exciting life, admit it.

Picture Day

Today is school picture day. We got all dressed up (she chose her dress from the two outfits I offered, which did NOT include her Blue's Clues dress). Then I decided that since I probably won't like any of the proofs that come back, I would try it myself.








If you look closely, in the second picture you can see that little bit of baby left in her face. I see the chubby, toothless cherub from two summers ago, who is becoming more distant by the minute.

That Lou

When I came home from work last night, she met me at the door. I bent down to hug her, and she held my face in both hands and said, "You are my precious girl."







(Pictures are from Father's Day)

We are home this afternoon, since they lost power at daycare. The Lou just informed me that she has made her empty juice box into a dreidel....and is now singing the Dreidel Song.

I caught you this delicious bass

Molly: "Uncle Pete! Uncle Pete! There's a dead fish, Uncle Pete!"

Ah, vacation....

A day at home doing 500 loads of laundry / grocery shopping / generally trying to forget I had to head back to work today. Then a day back at work, and here I am. The trip....it was a great time. We swam, we worked on a 1,000 piece puzzle (without much success until Holly came along). We read, we read to the kids. We played many games of Uno (mostly, Ella beat us). We had a Summer Solstice party. We had fires in the fireplace and on the beach, where many s'mores were consumed. We made margaritas and gin and tonics. We talked and talked, and we sat and watched the fire. And we laughed. All good.

Tuesday afternoon















Wednesday






Thursday





















I sadly have nothing after Thursday evening....since I made a crucial error when deleting old picture files off the memory card. Um, yeah. I didn't delete them, and ran out of space. Call it my Homer moment: I am so smart! S-M-R-T! So there are no pictures just yet of Old Macdonald's Farm (Charlotte: "No, goats! No lick my mama! Shoo!") or our trip to the ice cream trolley. Fortunately, there's the film the Peter-man shot.

And of course, a huge huge thank you to Pete and Holly, who watched the small Nasons so that the big Nasons could go out for dinner and drinks Friday night. Nothing like sipping a cosmo on the terrace under the trees.

I did not want to leave....I especially did not want to leave once Molly started calling, "Bye Charlotte! I love you!" and crying. Of course, the crying could have been because she was told to keep her fingers away from the car door, but still. On the way home, Charlotte asked, "Are we going back to the lake now?"

The Great Escape

We are back from Sackets. Such a good vacation- sand, sun, swims in the pool and walks on the beach. We also had a few big thunderstorms and lots and lots of wind. I'll write more a little later, but here are a few pics for now.

On fire (for me, anyway)

A sudden rash of finished-object productivity. The pattern was free (love knitty.com), Lou picked the colors, and it really was pretty easy. Despite my hatred of seaming, the seams are beauteous, if I do say so myself. You'll just have to take my word for it.

The first time I showed it to her, she flat out refused to try it on. Okay, so the seaming wasn't done. I tried again once it was complete. She obliged, with the I'm-humoring-you-Mama vibe, then screeched at me to "get it off me!" Will you wear it another time? I asked. "No, I doesn't."

She seemed to like it a bit better when she saw it in the pile of things to be packed. "That's MINE."








We shall see. I might be making more of them, possibly in larger sizes. I might be working on one right now.

The Forest

Last Sunday, I showed the girls that if you go in under the two spruce trees at the end of the driveway, the space between the two trunks becomes a little fort. They were pretty excited to discover the "forest" and the bounty of cones it yielded.







Since the Alberta spruce is very young still (and therefore kid-size), it doesn't grow its own cones yet. Naturally, it needs donated cones.




And before my camera batteries went dead, I caught one picture of Miss Molly Moo with bubbles. Man, that girl is fast!

Pleased with myself

I made some little sweaters for my friend Amy's baby, who is coming around mid-July, and whose gender is as yet unknown. I am just so proud of how well they came out.


They close with little ribbon ties:


Detail around the neckline (made by increasing the number of stitches):


And a tiny sleeve cuff!


I am generally not very good with project timetables. It's why I now start things way in advance of when I need them to be done or make things a size up from where I will need them to be (Charlotte's sweaters). Sometimes that works well...sometimes not so much. I still have not completed a baby gift for a friend's child who was born last October...and I started it in the one year size.

I wonder about this inability to complete projects. It's not just the knitting; there's house projects and yard projects as well. It's partly that I get distracted by other things, or that sometimes my life moves too fast. That's a goal for me this summer. I need to slow down and just appreciate the time I have to do the things I enjoy with the people I love, and not be running around like a maniac trying to do as much as possible in the minimal time off we tend to get from work in the summer.

One of the women I work with has parents who emigrated from Greece before she was born. She was raised in the US but has spent tons of time in Greece, including going to high school there. She says that in Greece, a person gets a month off each year, and most people take the time all at once and in the summer. Doesn't that sound amazing? What would I do with a whole summer off? Food for thought.

I am so looking forward to vacation! Not much longer....

And for those who are thinking, "Less jibber-jabber. More pictures of the Lou,"