Father's Day

     We drove out to Westminster this past week to pick berries at Baugher's Farm.  The strawberries were ripe and very tasty!  The girls did really well picking and we ended up with 20 lbs. when we left.  They love picking fruit and veggies!  They have a surprisingly long attention span for it.   I hope they still love it when we have our own one day.

     There is a petting zoo at Baugher's with various farm animals.  Lyla found her miniature donkey.  Celee got a kiss from a cow.  Gwyn fell in love with the kittens.  Actually they all fell in love with the kittens and spent the better part of an hour and a half playing with them.  One kitten kept running up under a pallet and pawing at straw, so Gwyn played with him for a long time.  We answered an ad for zoo helpers there once a week.  I don't know if this is going to work out, but I think it is something we would all enjoy so much!

When we got home we made some yummy strawberry jam.  Even Jason likes it!  I ended up canning 10 pints of jam and freezing around 2 gallons of strawberries.  Then we had another whole container full to just eat.  And they are so strawberry-y!  I love having fresh from the field fruit to eat.  And I love the feeling of making things to eat later with it.  I love it when I get asked, "Can we have biscuits with dinner?" just so they can put homemade strawberry jam on it.  That means it's got to be good.

The girls keep begging me to let them play in the "ditch."  So we finally did.  This is really the drainage ditch/creek that runs down in front of our apartment.  It is neat because, minus the muffled car noise, it seems really secluded because of the rise on both sides of the creek and the dense trees and foliage around it.  So they climbed and waded and played there.  And of course they beg to go back every day.

     Not to be satisfied with a drainage ditch, we decided to go to an actual river for a picnic.  The water was super cold from all the rain, but that didn't stop the girls from getting in it, although I did not have to worry about them wanting to swim.  There were some other people there full-on swimming, but we all agreed to wait for a day when the water is warmer.  Tinkerbell did not want to get in the water at all either, but she had a great time running and rolling in the grass sans the leash.  Gunpowder Falls is such a beautiful place!  I am so glad it's only a short drive up the road.

     Saturday we went down to Arundel Mills with the expressed purpose of going to the Lego Store as a kind of Father's Day concession for Jason.  Little did he know we had other plans too!  When we drove up, Jason remarked, "Look!  There's the Medieval Times castle!" Yes, we all knew this already because we had secretly gotten tickets for us to have dinner there.  We decided to wait a bit to tell him though.  It was funny because before going down he thought we might go earlier and eat lunch at the Cheesecake Factory there and I just kept saying it would be better to go down later and eat dinner somewhere.  So after walking the mall for quite a while we told him the surprise.  I am so proud of the girls for keeping the secret.  Lyla did a great job, even though she kept getting really nervous about the secret dinner and that Jason might buy a watch before we gave him the one we had ordered him for Father's Day.  But it all worked out and the secret was fun to keep.  We sat in the blue section.  Whenever the Blue Knight would do well in a contest the Princess gave him carnations which he kissed and threw to girls in the blue section.  Gwyn and Celee both caught a carnation from him!  Lyla was a little disappointed to not get one, but I think the overall excitement of the show kept her from being too sad.  In the end the Blue Knight won which made it even more exciting for our section.  I don't know if the show is always the same and the Blue Knight always wins?  But it was a added bonus for us and the girls screamed and yelled and cheered for him throughout the tournament.  Jason and I cheered our best too.  I'm so glad we could surprise him and make him feel special for Father's Day.  He is a wonderful father and I am so lucky to be his partner in this crazy little family we have.

While we killed time in the mall before our show was to start, we went into the Bass Pro Shop.  Gwyn was the only one old enough to do the rock climbing wall, and the only one that had on closed toed shoes.  Even though her shoes were not the best for climbing, being the slip-on tennis shoe type, she climbed two of the paths.  This doesn't surprise me at all as all three of my girls have a tendency to climb anything nearby that could be climbed.  

As an aside, I finally got my new bedding for Jason and myself.  I realized that in the 12 1/2 years we've been married, I have never bought bedding.  I have bought sheets before (clearance or Hudson's cause that's how I roll) but we were still using hand-me-down comforters or quilts.  We tend to use stuff until it's holey, so I went to IKEA and bought us new bedding.  And the Moxie approves.  

New things

     Jason and I went out spontaneously!!  Well, as spontaneously as you can get when you need to make sure you have a babysitter.  He found out on Tuesday that Weird Al was playing in Baltimore on Wednesday evening.  Did I think I could find a babysitter on such short notice?  Yes I did.  Things didn't go smoothly exactly and were encumbered by a root canal, but we did make it to the concert and had a wonderful time!  At the concert I realized that I have not been to a concert other than one Winter Jam in Champaign in 5 years!  This blows my mind because music fills a large part of me.  I am not particularly good at any particular performance of music be it singing or instrumental, but I am constantly singing (outloud or in my head) and I love the days when I do get to play around on the piano, dulcimer or fiddle.  So let this Weird Al concert be the first of many in re-visiting that part of life that I love!

     I had noticed a park that looked like it had a pond on one of the routes I run, so the girls and I decided to explore it this week.  It is a small park in a neighborhood, but it is heavily wooded so it is easy to forget you're in the middle of suburbia.  There is a nice pond with a fountain.  We watched a crane for a while and saw him catching and eating fish.  There are evidently some big koi fish in the pond too, and every so often we saw them coming to the top.  We took a picnic and had our lunch there.  We also saw what I have decided must have been a muskrat.  I have noticed a smell too sometimes around the area that I think is muskrats, or ground hogs perhaps.  The tail makes me think it is muskrats though.  Either way, wildlife abounds in Maryland.  Watch for it! (That's an inside joke for Jason)

     We tried some new things this week besides a new park.  Crab pizza.  I read that this is Maryland in pizza form.  The alfredo is seasoned with Old Bay and of course there is crab meat on it.  It was so-so for me.  The kids loved it.  I wouldn't crave it, but if they want it again I wouldn't hate it.  We also played Munchkin for the first time.  It is pretty fun.  Lyla even can hang with it.  We have to help her a little but after we played it through once everyone got the jist of it.  The girls love the funny descriptions of things on the cards and they love to curse or send monsters after me or Jason's pawn.  I think sometimes they don't care if they win or loose as long as they keep me from winning.  I'll just have to try even harder!

   
Sunday some of the girls in Lyla's Girl Scout troop bridged to Brownies.  They had the ceremony at Ladew Gardens.  Ladew Gardens is such an awesome and beautiful place!  It reminds me of Allerton in Illinois, but smaller acreage and more elaborate gardens.  Gwyn's troop helped out with the ceremony and Gwyn finished earning her Junior Aide patch.  Celee was the resident Brownie there to welcome the Daisies to Brownies.  Lyla was the only Daisy there that wasn't bridging, so she got to be the flag bearer.  It was a short and sweet ceremony followed by a scavenger hunt for curious things to find in the gardens.   For instance, there are 12 swan topiaries, a bench made of sticks, a bird house with no door, a topiary fox hunt, a sundial, and lots more interesting things hidden on the property.

 

     I had brought along the dresses I made the girls for Easter and some props.  Jason and the girls indulged me for a while and we took pictures in various places around the gardens.  I think the girls got into it because they kept telling Jason, "Daddy!  Take a picture of me over here!"  or "Take a picture of me smelling these flowers!"  So it ended up being not just my thing.  It was hot though, so we didn't stay horribly long, but we got some neat pics.  

  

Summer Time!

Summer is here!  We were so ready to swim on Tuesday and headed off to the pool at 11am sharp when the front office lady had told me it was open.  But is wasn't open, so I called the office again and a man there told me it is only open on the weekends until school is out.  We were soooo bummed!  So we went home and ate lunch then went to Oregon Ridge to see if we could swim or at least play at the "beach" there even though it technically isn't open either.  Success!!  I do think technically you are not supposed to actually get into the water when there is no life guard there.  Some people were swimming anyway.  I told the girls they could, but only in the very shallow wading area.  Later we did find out that our apartment pool IS open before school's out.  It opens at 3:30 each day.  I don't know why I was told wrong information twice, but now we know.  And we did have a fun time at Oregon Ridge.  I enjoyed sitting in the sun.  The girls got to play and splash with some other little girls that were there.  And there were hundreds of little tadpoles all along the edge of the water that the girls caught and watched for a long time.  We did return them to the lake before leaving this time though.

I noticed the crazy amount of honeysuckle growing behind our apartment and it gave me ideas.  So we went out and gathered a bucket full of the blooms to bring back.  My goal was to get 6 cups, enough to make jelly and sorbet.   So that afternoon I made the jelly.  It looks and smells so wonderful!  Then I attempted the sorbet the next day.  I don't think I let it freeze long enough so it ended up more like a slushie than sorbet.  Also I'm the only one that liked it - I think it was just tooo sweet.  It was like really intense cotton candy with flowers.  I actually made myself sick drinking it because I didn't want to waste it after the girls didn't want theirs!

There are also a ton of wild roses growing all around and behind our apartment building in the woods.  It is awesome to smell roses when I'm walking Tinkerbell or when the girls and I tromp off into the woods.

On Friday we went to explore Harper's Ferry WV with friends.  We all had learned about Fredrick Douglass and made the trip to see where he made some famous speeches and comment about the place.  We also learned a lot about John Brown's Raid before going so it was really neat to see where it all happened.  The first thing the kids wanted to do was get in the Shenandoah River.  It is crazy hard to keep them out of water!  We did eat our picnic lunch on the river though and promised them they could put their feet in on our way out.

We decided to do the Junior Ranger program.  This led us around the various exhibits, trails, and monuments collecting information and doing activities around Harper's Ferry.  The girls enjoyed the dress up clothes.  We also hiked up the hill to Jefferson's Rock.  What an amazing view!  The Rock got its name after Thomas Jefferson looked out at the point where the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers converge and said, "this scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic".  

It was crazy hot that day so our promise of ice cream after hiking up the hill was much appreciated.

After completing their booklets, the kids were sworn in as Junior Rangers and received their pins.  Each park is different, and at Harper's Ferry there are three levels of activities of which each has its own pin.  All the kids except Lyla were determined to get all three and they did.  Lyla is more of the mind to make sure she gets one, so as not to be left out, but she's not going to stress about getting all of them.  So she was happy with her one pin.

Saturday the girls and I went with Celee's Girl Scout troop to Aberdeen MD to a Ripken Stadium encampment.  Again, it was crazy hot (I love it!) but the girls had A LOT of fun.  We pitched our tent and then the girls were pretty much free to run around doing activities and playing for the rest of the time.  At one point while we were all standing around up in the stands in the shade, Gwyn had her elephant (that she sleeps with) and was throwing it up high and catching it.  And wouldn't you know it?  It got stuck up on one of the beams in the ceiling.  We went to ask for help and a Ripken employee came to try to knock it down with a baseball.  After many tries, the baseball got stuck up there too.  Finally someone brought a ladder and a broom and got the elephant down, but the baseball is still there for all we know.  So now we know some interesting trivia about Ripken Stadium.  How did a baseball get stuck up in the rafters at the top of the stadium?  Gwyn did it.

The girls all got their faces painted.  With mustaches.  They kept sweating them off and going back and getting them again.  We had a pretty good dance party going on in one are.  There were two bounce houses.  People were chalking and braiding hair.  Celee won tickets to an Ironbirds game later in the summer.  At 10:45 they started the movie.  It was Hotel for Dogs.  Needless to say I did not pay much attention to that thriller.  Lights were out after the movie which didn't end until 12:45.  Then there were some noisy girls next to our tent so we didn't actually go to sleep until around 1am.  The we woke up a little after 5am and tried to go back to sleep, but at 6am the wake up call came over the loud speakers and the 80-90s pop music began.  So after 4 or so hours of sleep we were a bit loopy.  I was actually having a good time singing, dancing and generally being silly.  The girls were surprisingly cooperative too!  So we packed up the tent, had breakfast and headed home.  We all crashed Sunday afternoon, but it was definitely a fun weekend.

I've decided to do a juice cleanse this week.  My skin has been so bad for the past couple of weeks.  I think that I allowed emotional eating to form some habits of the candy/chocolate kind that are probably the source of the breakouts.  I'm pretty sure than citrus is not the cause of my breakouts so that's why those type of fruits are included.  This is what $70 of fruits and vegetables look like.  I'm going to miss dairy for a week.  :(  But it's worth it if I can have some peace about my skin and prove to myself (again) that food is not my master.  And now I'm accountable to do it because I've said it publicly right?