Yee haw

Today was a good day.  It started off with going to a baby shower that had the best food I'd had in a while.  It was way yummy.  The games were good and I got to listen to some people trash talk.  That always makes for a good day.  I said too much at the baby shower, but sometimes once you get me going it's hard to get me to stop.  Maybe some day I'll learn to shut my mouth.

Then I came home to a sleeping baby rather than the screaming baby I was expecting.

So I went and got a movie.  The first movie we've gotten since we moved here.
Then Peter worked on the desk some.

 Then he came up with something brilliant to have for dinner, so I went to the store to get bacon.  I'm going to be so excited for the day I finally have our freezer stocked again and I don't have to go to the store every time I need something.

For dinner we had stuffed mashed potatoes with all (that is, some) of the stuff that my parents brought to us.  SO MUCH PRODUCE!  I've been having tomato sandwiches for lunch every day since they got here and I have a so many tomatoes left to go.  It's a good life.  Anyway, the potatoes were delicious.

Then when we were cleaning up I put on some oldies.  But unfortunately Google Play doesn't think I search well enough, so it put on a country-from-the-50s station rather than the swing-from-the-50s I expected.  Pretty soon I had kids coming up from the basement dressed as cowboys and cowgirls and there was a cowboy/girl station in the living room.  The kids set up a carnival with moose roping, duck riding, egg tossing, and rock sitting.  I got to crack my whip for the first time since moving here (but quietly, since the neighbors were having a party).  We ended the night with a dance party.  Good job, Google--way to pick the right music.

They make me laugh

Irene after coughing: That was just my body coughing.

After an intense session of "actually it's.." trying to convince Irene that the meat we were having for dinner was beef, not chicken:
Benton laughing: Actually it's cow!
Mima, somewhat out of nowhere: Actually it's lemur!
She was so pleased about the joke she made and it was perfect comedic timing.

There were a whole bunch of other funny things said lately, but I don't remember them.  We had a crazy night last night.  I was up until about 4 and Peter was up starting at about 3:30 helping Irene with her stomach bug.  Today is a tired day.

Happy birthday, Benton!

Benton turned six today!  Crazy.  Although I tend to think of my kids as older than they are anyways, so I've been thinking of him as six for a while, but he's officially there now.  Anyways, it was a good day.  

We started off the day by going to the Pumpkin Village at the Leesburg Animal Farm (or something like that).  There were lots of animals to see and touch and feed.  I was so close to feeding a zebu.  It totally made reading the z section of the dictionary as a child worth it.  I got to touch the leg of a 102 year old tortoise and feed the world's cutest little alpaca, too.  The kids did stuff, too.  They had tons of bounce houses and slides and play structures all over the place.  It was really, really fun.  They had pedal carts, too. They were so fun.  There's nothing like pedaling around a little racetrack with your knees up by your ears.  Elias loved it because I held him in front of me and he got to hold onto the steering wheel.  Elias loves steering wheels.  There were a ton of other people we knew there because a couple of homeschool groups went.  And there was practically no one else there because it was overcast and somewhat rainy.  Mima even went down one of the gunnysack slides with me.  The first time was not her choice, but she warmed up to it.  They had a hayride that went past a bunch of dinosaur statues and random stuff from books.  The kids liked it.

Then we came home and played and had mummies for dinner and made Benton a cake.  It was fun.  

The end.

 This picture of Benton's presents cracks me up.

Cousins!

We had cousins come visit us!  Hooray!  Apparently these were the only pictures we got of them, but the kids had SO MUCH fun with them here.  Thanks for coming , guys. 

No room in the inn

I'm amazed at how many times there just isn't room for me on my bed.  How can one little baby take up over half a king-sized bed?  

The littles

As we were driving home from dropping the Brita and Benton off at co-op Mima said something from the back of the car that I couldn't understand.
Me: Mima, what did you say?
Mima: Irene can tell you.
Me: Irene, what did Mima say?
Irene: She said I could tell you.

As we were waiting to turn from Catharpin onto Sudley:
Mima: Mom, which way are w going to turn?
Me: We're going to turn left.
<We successfully turn left.>
Mima: Good eye, Mom.
Thanks, Mima.

Success!

This girl just finished her math book!  (You know, last week.  It took a while to get a picture.)  Congratulations, Mima!

Mima is also learning to read much more quickly than I was planning for.  She's already reading words with two consonants next to each other.  She has no fear (when it comes to trying to read new things in her reading book. ;) 

Another Smurf

So tonight Peter and I were working on the desk we're building.  Technically we've only been building it for less than a day, but the grand plans have been moving forward for lots of months.  Anyways, we needed Elias to be occupied while we glued the top together so I came up with a brilliant plan.  It involved giving my little tiny baby lots of Halloween Oreos.  By the time he was done he reminded me of the "Bring me another smurf" meme.  If you haven't seen it you should look it up.  It's life-changing.  The sheer messiness never shows up quite as well on camera, but here's a very happy Elias tonight:

And here's a very happy Elias from a few days ago:

Peter cleans him up every time.  That's totally why I married him.

Monica's visit

Monica came to visit us!  It was so nice having her here.  The kids looked forward to her visit so much and they made her lots and lots and lots of presents and talked it up to Elias a lot.  Irene has lots of Monica references (like "this is the song that Monica sang to Elias when he was a baby"), but I'm not sure if she actually remembered her or not.  The other kids definitely did.  They all loved her, though.  And everybody cried when she left.  Me included.

Anyways, when we picked her up from the airport we went straight to the Udvar-Hazy Center.  The kids were really excited to show her the space shuttle.  We saw the hot air balloon buckets and all the trinkets by them, which we hadn't seen before.

The next day we went to Chatham Manor.  Monica had gotten a National Parks Passport when she was visiting Melissa and so we were trying to get her a few more stamps in her passport.  One of the park rangers gave each of the kids a pack of cards with pictures on them and she let Mima and Irene each stamp the stamps on a piece of paper.  They were pretty thrilled with that.  We saw where George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stayed when they visited the house.  And saw the trees that Walt Whitman wrote about while he was there assisting with surgeries.  And we saw the pontoon bridge recreation.  It was fun.

Then we went to Yorktown.  But not the National Battlefield, just the touristy place.  The guy at the second station had the kids help him string apples and put more out to dry.  Irene was really engaged by stringing apples.  Then we went into the kitchen with him where we learned about curing meat and other things.  We were in a lot of smoky kitchens this week.  He asked Monica where she was from, asked if we were LDS and then said he was, too.  Such a small little Mormon world.  We got learn about cannon balls and mortars and see a musket demonstration and each of the kids (except Elias) got to hold a musket.  I love how every place we go they say the same things about the guns: "They're all real, just not real old."

Then we went to the touristy Jamestown.  We didn't have a whole lot of time there so we only looked in a couple of the buildings in the fort and then headed to the ships.  The Discovery was closed and Irene didn't want to go on any ships, so Monica took the other kids on the Godspeed and the Susan Constant.  Then we walked back through the Indian village while Brita and Benton ran through every activity in the village. The kids had a lot of fun.

Next was historic Jamestown, but I miscalculated how long it took to get there (it's like less than five minutes), so we stopped at the glassblowers.  I bought a passport there and got my first stamps.  Red-letter moment right there. ;)  We had some boiled eggs outside the National Jamestown site and then went in through Jamestown and to the place where they have the things they found in the fort.  That's one of my favorite places to visit down there.  They have so much stuff.

Monica wanted to see the ocean while she was here and I figured that that was the closest we would be so she put her feet in the water by the glasshouse, but then I started to feel guilty since it was really a river instead of the ocean so we decided to go to Virginia Beach.


A couple of weeks ago I was at a dinner after a baptism and one of the ladies there was talking about a guy she knew who always referred to Virginia Beach, where he was from, as Va Beach.  So the whole time Monica and I were going there and coming back we referred to it was Va Beach, which is what the signs say, they just don't intend for it to be read that way.

We sent a happy birthday message to my dad, too, since it was his birthday.

We got back about 1:30 in the morning or so.  Stupid construction on 95.

The next day we tried not to move.  We were dead tired.

Wednesday we went to playgroup where, apparently, the kids slid down a big hill on a wagon and crashed into some bushes as their roller coaster.  They had lots of crazy fun that we didn't know about until we left.

That afternoon we got a picnic ready and went to Great Falls with Peter.  It's beautiful there.  We went to each of the three overlooks, got all the stamps in our passports, and (finally) found the bathrooms.  Of course Benton had to pee again by the time we got back to the car.  We looked up the price of some of the houses we passed on the way home.  Such big houses!

Thursday we went to D.C.  And how!  Monica and I ran into the Lincoln Memorial to collect our stamps.  They had eight.  We dropped Monica off at the International Spy Museum and went to the Natural History Museum.  After parking at the Ronald Reagan building, which required them to check all over inside and under our car for explosives or something.  We had lunch at the Natural History Museum and then met Monica on the wrong side of the National Archives building and went in to see the constitution and a bunch of other stuff.  So many things to see.  Then we went to the US Botanic Garden, then to the Air and Space Museum.  Then we hung out by the carousel for a while to rest our weary legs and eat an astronaut ice cream sandwich.  We stopped by the Smithsonian Castle and then we headed to the Washington Monument.  On the way I made Monica stop to get stamps at a park ranger booth.  They told her that the building down the hill from the Washington Monument had 22 stamps, so we booked it to there to get them.  As fast as our rested weary legs would take us.  Which was not all that fast.

After we got our stamps we walked past the Washington Monument, through the WWII memorial, past the Constitution Gardens, along the Vietnam Wall, past the Lincoln, by the Korean War memorial, near (but not too near) the D.C. war memorial, through the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, and stopped at the FDR memorial, where Monica refused to go any further.  Peter went back to the car when we got to the Lincoln, so he met us at the FDR and we went back to Virginia and had dinner at Texas Roadhouse.  The food was really good.  We were really hungry.  Mostly Monica.  And dead tired.  Brita and Benton walked the whole way (not to Texas Roadhouse).  We had two strollers and the sling.  The Bob stroller is definitely superior to the little free one, but it was nice to have two.

Friday we weren't as dead as we thought we'd be so we cleaned a bit around the house and then went to the National Firearms Museum when Peter came home early.  So many guns! We walked in and there was a little section which we though might be all of the museum, but it just kept going and the only thing they had in there was guns. It was actually a really cool place. They had a hand cannon from the 1350s, tons of decorative guns, a bunch of movie guns (like a storm trooper blaster), and a big display of Gatling guns.

On Saturday we left very early (especially for Monica) and headed down Skyline drive to get our Shenandoah Park stamps.

 Then we went to the Frontier Culture Museum. It was amazing! They had farms from the 1700s in different countries, like Nigeria, England, Ireland, and Germany. Then they had a section of farms from different time periods in the United States. Most of the houses were real buildings relocated to the museum. The American ones were from the Shenandoah valley. The kids got to play games, and saw wood, and talk to living history actors about what life was like in each of the places. It really was a cool museum.

On the way in to the museum there was a sign that said, "BEAT THE HEAT WITH FRESH FUDGE" which we thought was hilarious. When Monica was buying fudge in the store she asked if they guaranteed it would keep us cool since that's what the sign said. The fudge was really yummy. She got six kinds and we ate them all.

After the museum, we headed over to Appomattox. Peter was tired so I drove, which scared Monica. There are some windy roads in Virginia (with really fast speed limits). We got to the courthouse just in time for the movie. They had lots of neat artifacts, including General Lee's copy of the terms of surrender. Then we went to the McLean house, saw the tavern, popped over to the jail, and looked in at the general store. Then we headed back to the bathrooms. (Naturally.) Lucky for you I have not included all of our bathroom stops. Then we drove through "Historic" downtown Appomattox, got ice cream, and went home.

...And that doesn't include all the stuff I forgot like Monica taking the kids to Gettysburg, us going to the library.  And a long awaited trip for Monica to Aldi.  You've got to love Aldi.

With all that running around we still had time to play Dominion, watch Leverage, and Sporcle. Just like old times.