Roommate reunion 2013

Roommate reunion!  

My lovely roommates and their families came to visit for a few days over the course of the summer, for a few blissful days.  It was fantastic seeing how the little ones are growing (so quickly!) and to spend time together as a group again.  We made pancakes, played with the bunnies, had a girls-only lunch downtown, picked veggies from the garden, played in the rain, made fancy desserts, and enjoyed time together.  We've done this just about every year since college, but this was the first time that we had all of the husbands and children with us as well, and that made it even better.  I can't wait for next time!

The sunflowers were showing off for their visit.

 Dinners are an adventure with seven adults and three little boys under five.

 Step portrait!

 Fancy dessert!  And not that hard to make.  And SO delicious!

 Very proud of chocolate mousse and fruit tart.

 Lunch time!

 Playing with Gwenn, who really enjoys eating lettuce treats from small people.

This kid is an expert pancake-maker.

 Picking carrots!

Halloween!!

Our first Halloween in our new house- we had 191 kids come!


Jim set up the rubber animals - this is taken from kid-eye view. We had one who refused to approach because he was scared of spiders.


Orange lights, pumpkins, skulls, rats, tombstones (one mother told her son that those were the graves of kids who don't say "thank you")


Our decor had nothing on our neighbors across the street. They were featured in national newspapers, and you can see why: in addition to the complete graveyard set up (complete with dead brides, zombies, vampires, witches, etc), they had a witch grandmother and granddaughter playing the fiddle in the front yard (no, really)!


The candy mailed to us from the Natural Candy Store! There's something especially amazing about having a box of chocolate mailed to you. We actually ran out - Jim had to run to the store to get more at 7:30!



Our friend D came down for the holiday - she's a wizard and I'm a witch. We looked awesome.

This is what the kids saw when they rang the doorbell :-)




Jim was a raven. It was quite scary.

Trick-or-treaters on the street in the evening autumn glow....

Always take the time to smell the roses!

I spent a lovely week visiting friends in Boston and Hartford last week - oh man, I wish we lived closer.

Canoeing on the Shenandoah

...is amazing...

Our friend D from grad school came down for the weekend a few weeks ago, and we had the brilliant and wonderful idea of going canoeing on the river. The Downriver Canoe Company dropped us off about 8 miles upstream, and the river was high and fast enough that we barely had to row at all. There are some small rapids and a "ledge" that's reallllllly fun to go down and we canoe past the state park, which means that there are some absolutely stunning views. It was such a perfect, relaxing, fun day to play in the water.







Come visit!

New York, New York

(It's raining so hard we might wash away...)

My friend, R, from grad school and I went up to NYC to visit my brother and our other friend from grad school a couple of weekends ago- leaving warm spring weather for chilly NYC "spring". But it was great! My brother got us onto the ferry to visit the Statue of Liberty without having to wait on that interminable line.

Southern Manhattan from the water

Statue of Liberty!

The museum for the Statue is actually pretty neat. Here we are sitting on a replica of Liberty's foot...

Her shadow is truly impressive....

My brother and I on the ferry...

Statue of Liberty!

The cranes look like dinosaurs

New York, New York......

Cleveland 2: Shasta 0 (and a beautiful wedding)

Well, she's OK now...

We went to Cleveland this weekend to attend our friend Ross's wedding to his fiancee Kristen. The wedding was beautiful and fun. The bride and groom looked amazingly happy and it was wonderful to see them both again and also to see Ross's family, who we hadn't seen for several years.

However.

Ross suggested that we visit North Park in Cleveland before the wedding, since it didn't begin till 4. He gave us directions and we hopped in the car and headed out there around noon. It's a pretty park with some small lakes and bridges and playgrounds and nice walking paths. After we were on the opposite side of the lake from the car, Jim looked down, and said, "Shasta, what do you have?"

There was a piece of fishing line hanging out of her mouth. She was trying to swallow, and so we grabbed her and tried to gently open her mouth and take it out, worried about fishhooks.

We couldn't get it out.

(The last time we were in Cleveland, Shasta ate rat poison left out in Ross's apartment. That resulted in a visit to the emergency vet in Cleveland. At least this time, we knew kind of where it was, and we were a lot closer to it than we had been....)
We spent the next two hours in the waiting room of the emergency vet clinic (the same one), waiting for Shasta to get x-rays so we could see what had happened to her. She wasn't whining but she was drooling like a fountain, and gagging and coughing. Finally, to our consternation, she swallowed the rest of the fishing line.

The vet finally got the xrays and we met with her - 45 minutes before we had to be at the church for the wedding. It turns out the line *did* have a fish hook attached to it and it had impaled itself in her mouth :-(
The vet then proposed sedating her and trying to see if she could cut the fishhook out. We explained about the wedding, and she replied that she'd give us a call when she had news.

Off we went to the wedding...There was a break between the reception and the ceremony. We anxiously stared at the phones, waiting for them to ring. We finally broke down and gave them a call instead. They got the hook out! We jumped in the car to go get our poor puppy (who's so afraid of vets). After another hour spent in the waiting room waiting for them to bring her out, she finally emerged from one of the rooms, with tears streaking her muzzle, her tail between her legs, and a huge lump on her side from subcutaneous fluids. She was so happy to see us.

$485 later (thank God that after our last visit to Cleveland, we bought pet insurance!), we made it back to the hotel. Shasta LOVES hotels. She's been sleeping (with occasional potty breaks) since then.

So in sum, no ill effects, except renewed conviction that Shasta is crazy (fishhooks = food??). We are never bringing her back to Cleveland again.

And we even made it on time to the reception! Yay!

Some favorites from this weekend

We had a wonderful, amazing weekend. Fun, relaxing, rejuvenating and heartening. Some favorite pics:


Baby's first ocean experience! He LOVED it.

Boston's 4th of July fireworks!


Listening to the Pops by the Charles River

Jim sharing the news of his *NEW JOB* with his family at the campsite

Evy and I hiked here. It was beautiful and far away and we were the only people on the entire lake.

World cup fans...

Picnicking at Tanglewood

Hiking through 'moose country' along a creek

The NYC Public Library