Summer 2022, Week 7

The kids didn’t have any camps this week—- which was good because it was otherwise jammed with fun friends and family activities.

The girls and I went downtown to the National Theatre with a gaggle of friends to see the musical Six. It is super high-energy fun, fun, fun. The tragic bios of Henry' the VIIIs six wives are converted into something surprising, entertaining, and (even if it were just for a moment) thought-provoking.

The next night we met up with the Camarotes in Baltimore for the baptism of our sweet niece and nephew. I was honored to be Hamilton’s godmother. The deacon performing the service was just wonderful and engaging. He invited Baya and Linc to help out with the service- they were delighted to have a role. It was such a beautiful evening celebrating family and faith.

Last but definitely not least, the kids got a kids-only pool party with Aunt Anna immediately followed by an epic sleepover with tractor races at Grandma and Opa’s farm.

Here’s the Week 7 highlight reel. Hope you like it!

Wonder what we’ll do to top this next week???

Summer 2022, Week 6

Week 6 didn’t disappoint. Two-thirds of our kids went to skateboard camp with 5 of their friends from the neighborhood. It made for an epic carpool! Reviews were mixed. It was a great camp but apparently makes for a long week when you decide you don’t like skateboarding 20 minutes into Day 1. Sigh.

The delight of my week was a coffee date with the kids and my cousin and all-around awesome person Kenny Flanagan. He was in town from Mississippi doing what groups of rural county supervisors do in DC— shake hands and plead your case for two new roads and an airport.

We laughed and talked about family, dogs, his ideas for improving the game of soccer, and his candy distribution strategy when riding on the firetruck as Santa. He has “Magic Hands!”

We also talked about his seething hatred of Auburn football. The funny coincidence was after we parted and got back in traffic, we were RIGHT behind someone with Auburn plates. Too funny.

Marin had several soccer games this week— including 1 in torrential downpour, 1 under a rainbow, and her first in a big high school stadium. Oh and 1 had a truck selling beer. What?! So, of course, when in Rome…

Here’s our highlight video for the week.

That’s all for now! See you next week!

Summer 2022, Week 5

Week 5 means we’re half way through summer. So only 328 weeks to go. Kidding. We’re at the point when time is speeding up.

We kicked-off the week with another pool party at Aunt Anna’s. We then hosted a “chopped”-style cooking challenge with friends. Then we ended on a spendy shopping trip to Urban Outfitters just in time for the New Kids on the Block concert downtown. (Luckily we had help with hair and makeup from Baya.)

How’d we end up at the Mix Tape Tour concert featuring all the 90s favorites? Well, we got tickets last minute courtesy of Aunt Molly and Uncle Mike. The huge surprise was getting invited into their friend’s fancy suite with catered food, a full bar, and sparkly clean, convenient bathroom. Not exactly a normal concert experience for Marin- a first-timer! It’d be like getting bumped up to first class on your first-ever plane ride. It’s going to be hard to top this!

Also in the Week 5 mix where a bunch of sports and camps. For example, Linc finished up 3 “totally epic” weeks of travel day camp. Each day they get on a little bus and go to some super fun, interesting activity— water park, laser tag, the aquarium, etc. The final week was an outdoor adventure camp with a ropes course, fishing, paddling, outdoor survival skills (for 8-year-olds!?), and hiking. You can imagine which activity got his only ‘not fun’ rating.

Our video highlights are below. Thanks for watching!

PS- Regular blog readers might like to know that Brian’s photography skills have NOT improved. I mean, seriously. We’re supposed to be the focus of this picture, right? Why did he need to get the open utility room door and trash can!!!???

Summer 2022, Week 4

This week featured a couple of those moments when I say to myself, “Oh yeah. I forgot how much I like XYX.”

They were just little things- things you’d never think to mention if someone asked, “Hey, what do you like to do?” Nonetheless, there were little delights in an otherwise predictable week.

The first was in Omaha, NE. I was there for work and enjoyed a fun workout at their downtown Orange Theory studio followed by vegan Indian takeout (consumed in my hotel bed while watching “Beat Bobby Flay." The delightful part happened the next morning. I’d mapped out a trail run along the Missouri River. They have a footbridge that takes you into Iowa.

Get to the point, you say? I will.

Delight #1 was remember the little joy of being in two places at once. It was a quick, light moment of fun to get a picture of one sneaker in each state.

Okay. I can feel your views of me deteriorating by the sentence. What’s next? Might I redeem myself?

Delight #2 was an 8-beer sampler. It’s was a nice, just-for-us buffet of drinks. You see, I’d forgotten how much I like little tastes of a lot of things (food, wine, beer, ice cream, lip-gloss, etc.) So when Brian and I ended up with a kid-free night, we walked up to our local wine/beer shop for a yummy dinner and, yes, a beer tasting. Delightful!

There were a lot of other really cool things for the kids this week— and some challenges, too.

Here are our video highlights!

Looking forward to seeing what surprises come with Week 5!

Summer 2022, Week 3

For the uninitiated, Boba tea (or bubble tea) is creamy or fruity, very sweet tea with chewy balls at the bottom. If you’re trying it for the first time, I’d highly recommend:

• Studying the menu for at least a week ahead of time. Then plan on ordering whatever the very cute but apathetic teenage cashier with extravagantly long lashes suggests. Don’t rely on your own knowledge of what you like. You don’t know.

• Then, specify your sweetness level. 0, 10, 30, 50, or 70%???!!! Huh? I’m not even a dentist and this seems like a bad idea.

• Most importantly, know that boba tea is a cool kid thing. Act annoyed when drinking it so you don’t mess up the “ass-thet-ic.” What, huh? Those words don’t even make sense.

Before I paid $17 to learn the lessons above, we had had a crazy week. It started with dropping the girls off at camp. We then celebrated the 4th with our dear friends and neighbors. Unfortunately, it was also our turn for Covid. Ugh.

We’re all better now, have our girls back and are looking forward to week 4! Thanks for watching our video!

Summer 2022, Week 2

This week was all about making stuff— a genius base for our badminton net thanks to Opa, a lemonade stand, and coding small machines at camp.

Summer 2022, Week 1

Instead of posts this summer, I’m going to TRY to keep up with short videos that capture what we’re doing each week. Here’s week 1!

Watch to find out why this baby picture from the mid 70s made the cut!

What’s not pictured was a lot of meetings, back and forth driving to camp, a really fun family dinner and pool party at Aunt Anna’s house, summer league basketball and soccer games, slivers of swim practice, and gallons of ice cream and Big Gulp slurpees.

I’ll get more representative pictures and videos this week. Thanks for watching!

Building the Butterfly Fence

An a desperate attempt to urge spring along, Baya and I decorated the back fence today with hundreds of beautiful, fluttering butterflies!

To start, we bough a couple hundred colored butterflies from… where else… Amazon. They’re a light but pretty sturdy plastic. We’d planned to glue them but realized very quickly that that wasn’t going to work.

We tried a couple different types of glue… including hot glue which required a sprint from the porch where the gun was plugged in. It tried WAY too quickly.

No problem!

We took a break for a quick trip to Michaels for a new staple gun. (We have one but, alas, no staples.) Once we had the right tools, the project progressed pretty quickly.

Baya placed every single one of these butterflies. I was just there to help out.

We were pretty pleased with how this came out! We don’t know how long they’ll last. We’re hoping until mid-June when we’ll switch. We’re already cooking up a plan for what’s next!

5Ks Both Days

As luck would have it, I got to run back-to-back 5Ks this weekend.

On Saturday, Linc and I joined our dear friends and neighbors at the Jen Bush Lawson Foundation 5K. This is one of those charming, uphill both ways kinds of courses through the mountains of Arlington. I could have done with a little (or a lot) less incline.

Then, Nate surged ahead with a 1/2 mile to go. As his temporary guardian, huffing and puffing, I decided he’d probably be fine in this family-friendly crowd. When we caught up with him at the finish, he announced that he just might like running after all.

Yippee! I love hearing that. (And I wonder if beating the pants off your friends and mom have anything to do with this sudden realization. Hmmm…)

And Jen. Wow. I was just so impressed. She set a goal, knocked out her training, and crushed her run. Not only that, she was the top individual fundraiser for this cause that is especially close to her heart. This earned her the honors of smushing a pie in the founder’s face. HILARIOUS!

Then this morning, the girls and I finished our fall Girls on the Run (GOTR) program with a 5K at Reston Town Center. This national program aims to, “inspire girls to build confidence and other important life skills through dynamic, interactive lessons and physical activity.”

Everything was going fine until the start when I immediately lost all my kids in the crowd. It’s one thing to lose your own kids but I was buddy running with a friend of Baya’s. So, that means I’d also lost someone else’s kid. Ugh! Panicked, I raced up and back the first mile twice looking for them before catching up. I’m pretty sure I set a PR darting in between the more responsible parents while lugging a bouncy and loud backpack filled with 6 cans of color hair chalk spray stuff, 2 water bottles that weren’t mine, a dozen unopened handwarmers, and the extra hats and gloves everyone shed before they started. Sigh.

In hindsight, I should have known. Baya and Marin’s PE teacher had offered them challenge before the race. Whoever crossed the finish line first got to pick a crazy outfit for the other to wear on Monday. There was no way Baya was going to lose that bet. I’m pretty sure she and her friend did a sub 7-minute mile fueled purely by sibling rivalry.

Now relieved that I was able to reconnect with everyone I’d brought to the event, I can reflect and say this.

Coaching this season was truly one of the highlights of my year— running, life skills, personal empowerment, and…. hair chalk?! What’s not to love?!

Coaching alongside 3 awesome women and getting to know 29 of Marin and Baya’s friends and classmates was pure joy. Each practice, they all brought all the energy, positivity, and humor without an ounce of drama. They all showed up big time today on a chilly, chilly morning and finished strong. I am SO PROUD and can’t wait until Spring session!

#GOTR

Blue Skies and Red Rocks: Our summer vacation in Utah

Looking out the sliding glass door of this cushy condo, it’s hard to imagine life here in the early days before AC, sunscreen, and Slurpees. Southeast Utah is as scratchy, hot, and hard as it is beautiful. With the sandstone arches, canyons, petroglyphs, and scraggly log cabin ruins, time shows here in a way it doesn’t in our DC suburb.

Our trip this summer was to Moab, Utah with five days rafting and camping on the Green River. It was both really good and really challenging. Good in the sense that we felt “away.” It was all outside after so much inside.

But being out in the elements- the sand, sun, water, and wind- for so long was just hard at times. And with all that, the kids did great- we did great. We left with a bank of new stories, inside jokes, experiences, and pictures that we could only get fully disconnected.

Here’s what we did…

Bookended by two travel days (because Moab is out there, y’all), we spent five days river rafting Desolation Canyon on the Green River with Mild to Wild and a day each in Arches and Canyonlands national parks.

A few of the highlights are below…

Desolation Canyon & Green River Rafting

I can’t even start writing about this trip without mentioning Annie and Cam- our simply amazing, amazing guides. (As a side note, I thought we should call them “Cannie” but it never stuck.)

Anyway, this 20-year-old dynamic duo are childhood friends and both Moab natives (somewhat rare in the more transient raft guide profession, I’m told.) They were cool, funny, thoughtful… and they worked their asses off making this experience possible for us. The responsibility on their shoulders was pretty massive— something I didn’t fully grasp until we were dropped off in the actual middle of nowhere.

A job description for a raft guide might read something like:

Get a bunch of inexperienced (sometimes fussy) people safety down a river with Class II & III rapids while rowing, rowing some more, hiking, entertaining, chatting history and geology, preparing elaborate meals, hauling all the stuff (and there was A LOT OF STUFF including our “groover” which you can look up if you have a strong stomach and weak imagination), conducting small motor maintenance in 20 MPH winds, having your performance continuously rated by a 7-year-old, and answering an unending series of questions….for FIVE DAYS!!!

It was an endurance event unlike any other I’ve seen but they did it and did it so well. Now we’re bonded for life via text, Instagram, and Christmas cards whether they like it or not (and I’m not going to ask.)

Here’s a short video with highlights.

Arches National Park

Back in Moab, UT and freshly showered, we visited the eye-popping sandstone arches in… Arches NP. This is a fantastic park in that it’s stunningly beautiful with these really cool rock formations carved by water and wind. It’s also a relatively small so it felt do-able in a day. Our day went something like: leverage our 4th grader for free entry, take a short drive, do a short hike, picture picture, short drive now with the Imagine Dragons in the background, take another short hike, picture picture, followed by snacks and more DJ’ing from the backseat.

After leaving the park, we stopped for a late lunch. Linc ordered and ate a soft pretzel the size of his torso. (He’s singlehandedly keeping carbs in business while the rest of the world is on keto.)

I’m pretty sure this was Linc’s favorite part of the trip.

Canyonlands National Park

The next day, we pushed the limits of our rented Jeep (and nerve) as Brian drove the Shafer Trail into the canyon with the same name. The switchbacks at the start were literally breathtaking.

Click the picture below to see a short video. It might look familiar. (It’s the spot where they filmed that famous final scene in Thelma and Louise. Yikes!)

Video driving the Shafer Trail

Once down at the bottom, the rest of the gazillion (or really 2) hour ride was almost too bumpy to be fun but the view sho’ was pretty. Everyone perked up when we saw some goats that made us think of Grandma and Opa.

While away, we also celebrated Baya’s “Star” birthday. We’ve learned that’s when your age matches your birthday day. So, she turned 9 on the 9th under a sombrero with her favorite Mexican meal.

It was the kind of trip that I’m glad we did and I’m glad it’s done. To close out, more pictures!