Fall in Pictures

 As I looked back through pictures since the last time I wrote a post (Labor Day!), I see that a lot of life happened in two months...

Joshua's ingrown toenail from last year returned with a vengeance but this removal went so much smoother and it's healing up great!

I enjoyed having family over for my birthday.  It was a typical school night with a total revolving door of people as they came home from places and went to places, but it was nice anyway.

Julia's continuing middle school band life and in 7th grade, things get more eventful...they play at football games, have multiple concerts, and go to Universal Studios!

Nanny and Pa took the girls to Frozen at DPAC, which I heard was amazing.

The boys went with a few friends to a State football game.  Joshua especially was in heaven...or maybe he felt like he was in the heavens because he was on the top row. ;)  They eventually got to move down and enjoy all the excitement of a win.

The boys played box lacrosse over at the Sportsplex.  We love this league- it's 5 minutes away on a small field, played in a shorter, faster paced way than the traditional game.  Gray's team was made of Orange High 10th and 12th graders and Joshua's was 9th and 11th.  They got to play each other some (see above) and both had a lot of fun.

Stacy took this pic of our quarterly sibling "birthday" dinner.  We went to Pie Pushers in Durham and I enjoyed getting to order real (not gf) pizza and fun conversation.

Hurricane Ian blew through and gave us a Friday off school.  It began as a normal day with a little extra wind.  Gray dealt with it in dramatic fashion, putting on a swimsuit to go rescue his ball from the yard in the drizzle.

Then our power went out and it got a bit crazy...not the weather so much as the people.  By 5 or 6 pm, the kids were so restless it was comical.  We had all the candles lit and at one point they had pulled out their instruments (keep in mind Gray hadn't played his clarinet since 6th grade) and tried to entertain themselves that way.  It was too dark for board games and everyone got cranky and went to bed early.  Oh- and Matt was on a guys' weekend in Virginia so it was up to me to keep everything going here!

On Day 2 of no power, Jeannie and the boys came over and we spent the whole day filming a kid-directed movie.  There were CIA agents, stolen paintings, a gang of criminals.  According to the [sometimes angry] producer (Gray), we have not finished filming.  So I guess it's coming to a living room near you in 2023??

After that, the boys and I headed to work at a Duke football concession stand to raise money for the lacrosse team and the girls had a sleepover with the Moores.  We got a text saying our power would be out another entire day but then it magically came on that night, to whooping and hollering from the Moore house, which they sent to us over at Duke.  It was nice to come home to electricity and not have our food ruined!

The hurricane Friday marked the start of my 2 week fall break.  I spent the first part cleaning out my closet, doing lots of meal planning, and working on Matt's Halloween costume.  He was to be the Mandalorian while Allie was Baby Yoda. It ended up taking a lot of time, but wasn't unpleasant to do in a quiet house while watching a show.  

Matt and I got to go to a fancy birthday party for a friend here.  The food was so good and I enjoyed seeing my friends.

Julia continues to skate, though the rink was closed for al ong period of time twice this year and her lessons have been sporadic, so she's been a little discouraged about her progress and not as into it as before.

These two peas in a pod enjoy the daily carpool/afterschool playdate.  As Jeannie says, they have no sense of personal space and as you can see, they are total goofballs together.  

Julia did a second year of cross country, which she sometimes enjoys and sometimes doesn't.  She did well again and usually finished in the top quarter of the girls.

The boys began off-season lacrosse, which sometimes looked like this--- more team building fun than grueling drills.

During my break, I also helped Julia put together a bake sale and yard sale fundraiser (for Julia's band trip) for our neighborhood annual sale.

Friends and family were so kind and donated lots of stuff in addition to what we found around our house.  

The morning of the sale dawned cold and people came early.  The bake sale was a total hit and Julia ended up making more than her goal, which was such a blessing and made all the work worth it!

It was a busy weekend, with the yard sale, Mimi and GrandGene visiting, and Joshua's birthday.  The night before his birthday, Joshua, Matt, Gray, and Joshua's good friend Alden headed to Rock 'n' Roll sushi and polished off 40 plates (yes 40) of sushi.  

The day of Joshua's birthday, he just wanted to watch football (though State sadly lost) and grill out with the family.  He had a good day!  17 years old and so grown up.  He has become quite independent and manages his busy life pretty well.  Next week we begin college visits and time is flying so fast.  He’s still got his eyes on NC State and will visit soon (and Gray too, because we need all the shortcuts we can get in this college finding process for one kid right after the other) but he sometimes thinks about whether he could play lacrosse in college and whether he would want to. A very small school in Ohio recently contacted him about starting the recruiting process there, which is kinda cool even if he sticks with State, where he could only try to play club lacrosse. 

Allie did her very first mile run.  It was freezing cold!  Matt and I were working but she had the biggest cheering section-- two aunts and 4 grandparents!  She apparently did an age-appropriate amount of running, walking, and chatting with friends.  

Julia is really loving chances to babysit.  She and Addie got to keep this little guy and his twin on their own last month and we all got to watch them again in October.

Somehow I got no pictures of my beloved cousins who visited from London and South Korea in October, but I got some of the rest of the crew as we gathered at my parents'.  Joshua had a tournament part of the weekend, so we took two cars and I was chosen as the supervisor of Gray driving down. It wasn’t the easiest drive, with situations like patches of traffic while we needed to merge on the highway, where I’m sure my blood pressure went sky-high, but overall it was fun. I don’t get that much individual time with the kids and when Gray is in a good mood, he can be really pleasantly chatty. He’s a huge fan of music so we talked about that some, which somehow morphed into us singing duets—my fav being Gangster’s Paradise, which was a fav of my teen years. I sang that while he sang the Weird Al version, Amish Paradise…which is just hilarious and so Gray. Anything that puts a different spin on a game, sport, song, way of doing anything, is right up his alley. I hope he gets to use that bent of his in a career someday. He has two “automatic A” classes this quarter, which on the one hand annoys me but on the other, I can see the blessing for him, as he’s been able to manage the other two really well on his own and get some confidence in his ability to do school, as well as (hopefully) set up some good patterns for when next semester’s difficulty level goes waaay up. 

The cousins all loved their usual football/basketball in the front yard and welcomed their extended family right in to the group.

Cross country did their annual end of season donut run.  Snapped this of Julia and friends at the awards/wrap up.  She loves when I do that.  ;)

Gray is playing rec basketball again and again has an undefeated team.  His hair is growing (in anticipation of lacrosse mulleting that is supposed to happen instead of bleaching this year) so he now sports an attractive "unicorn horn" when he plays.

Halloween weekend was super busy.  On Friday, I helped with a band Halloween carnival at Julia's school, which is always fun to see the kids in their natural element and all dressed up.  Then Julia had her bff's bday sleepover and the siblings slept over at our house.  Then Saturday, Matt and Joshua went up to Delaware for a lacrosse tournament, Gray had a game, the girls went to a Halloween carnival, and then the girls and I went a skating Halloween party.  They were worn out after that and went to bed early while Gray and I entertained ourselves watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which he'd never seen. Sunday we finally carved our pumpkin and roasted the seeds and Monday we went to school in costume.

My teacher and I were Piggy and Gerald for Book Character Day.  It was not a typical Halloween...but then I guess most aren't.  This year, we were going to be missing Gray because he had basketball tryouts at school.  We ended up with members missing from the Baker and Moore families too, due to sickness and sports.  So it was pretty low key getting fewer people fed and costumed and out the door.

Matt in all his Mandalorian glory and Allie in her very simple costume of the fleece jacket she wore a million times last year and a wrap around cardigan from Goodwill.

Gray donned a Batman mask and did about 30 minutes of trick or treating with us before I ran him to try outs.  He had a goal to make the high school team this year and went to off season practice and worked a lot at home... but lots of other kids had this goal too and sadly, he didn't make it.  He wasn't too down about it though and I sure am proud of him for taking the risk.

Jeannie and I were "pigs in a blanket".  So fun to have her here to share the occasion.

Julia bought this costume with her money a month ago and wore it three times over the Halloween weekend.  She was sometimes calling it "Jasmine" and sometimes an Arabian dancer.

The little one in the front bailed on trick or treating after the first 30 minutes.  She went with me to take Gray and stayed at home with Matt after that to pass out candy.  Matt loved it when kids knew who he was and was happy to stay home since it was getting hot walking around and hard to see out of the helmet.  The 5 kids in the back carried on through the neighborhood until we got caught in a downpour on the other side of the neighborhood and had our friend bring us home to end the night. They had fun though and I was glad they were happy to stay together with Jeannie and I a little bit behind them.  Pretty soon we won't have anyone to escort around...except Allie of course, but she's not going to be in it for the long haul anytime soon! ;)

Now we head into November.  The kids have 5 days off of school through this month so it will pass quickly, though with no one playing a winter sport, we will have a bit more downtime than usual.  We look forward to seeing Matt's parents' new beach house, celebrating Thanksgiving, and hopefully another great quarter of school for the kids, who all finished up Q1 really well.

Fantastic Family Camp

 After a pretty smooth sailing first week of school (pics from 1st day above), we left school/work early that Friday and headed to Ridgecrest for our long awaited (and long paid for-- ouch!) family camp adventure.  Our friends had been going- and trying to get us to go- for years, and we finally bit the bullet!  In total, we had 4 families from our neighborhood there, and found another family that used to live in our neighborhood too!  

The first evening we had dinner in the dining hall, followed by a Campus Crusade-esque meeting that included camp songs, worship songs, a short message, and games with some funny guys who would be the entertainment of the weekend... Hugh and Jarms from the invented country of ARM-ania, where they were obsessed with bicep muscles.  They dressed in track suits, had theme songs, balloon-stuffed sleeves, accents, and lots of funny bits.  These meetings were fun and they did a great job with the simple direct message that God loves and makes his promises to flawed people like all of us.  I also enjoyed singing the worship songs surrounded by lots of families, who no doubt are trying to be faithful as parents and followers of Jesus like we are, and needing lots of help and encouragement.

After that there was a game in the dark where families competed (one half of camp v. the other) to "mine" various materials on another "planet".  Basically, we had to run around and pick up glow sticks and return them to the properly color-coded location around camp.  The kids loved this and got really into it...though partway through, when we actually had grasped what we were supposed to be doing, we figured they couldn't possibly be counting all those glow sticks and we realized they were just taking the filled buckets and redumping them around the ground so they could be picked up again in an endless cycle.  No matter.  Allie loved following the girl with the armfuls of glow sticks and collecting them back up again.  After that we had ice cream and attempted to settle into the cabin for bedtime while the boys headed to play basketball in the gym.  The first night of attempted sleep, we were super hot and then cold and all a little too out of our norm to sleep much.  There were glowstick distractions, boys coming in late with slammed cabin doors, the sounds of all of us tossing and turning.  We woke to the sounds of "Here Comes the Sun" and a rousing "Good Morning" from the camp director and headed off to breakfast.

Saturday after breakfast we had another worship meeting and some family questions to discuss before driving over to the neighboring boys' camp (most families stayed at the girls' camp) for Sock War.  I thought this would be similar to our Christmas "snowball" fight where we just try to throw the fake snowballs at each other, but no-- this was much more.  First there was a dramatic skit in the dark of a gym to announce each team's leader- Batman and Darth Vader, then after a brief explanation of how this was more like Capture the Flag, we headed off to our base to fill our socks with sawdust and prepare to defend/attack.  The boys and Julia ventured out and had adventures outside our base, ultimately returning with a small group of teammates and the other team's flag to end the game.  Allie and I hung around the base, I predictably got hit with a sock, only hit someone once (a kid who had already been hit and was on his was to "prison"), and chatted with some other folks.  It was fun though.  We were served lunch after that and changed into swimsuits for water fun.  They fed us sooo much food on this trip.  It was wonderful to just show up for meals and not cook!  But we had more than our share of sweets and were feeling pretty stuffed by the end.  

It was super fun doing water activities on the lake that afternoon.  I loved watching everyone do the blob and rope swing into the water and Matt and I enjoyed a trip down the zipline together.  The boys did axe throwing and also got really into a big game of dodgeball at one point, which ended up being one of their favorite activities.  And then there was Allie.  I had forgotten her swimsuit, but she didn't want to get in the water anyway.  She was content to feed the fish, hang with friends, and go to "canteen" where we could pick a drink and candy each day for free.  She really didn't do much of anything the whole weekend.  She loved the covered shelter where the kids played 4 square, carpet ball, and she could sit and color.  Pretty sure we could make the coloring happen at home. ;)  She is just so cautious about new things, though not so much about new kids.  She made friends with the girls next door (whose parents happened to be at Clemson when I was) and it was like they'd always known each other!  At the end, the kids had a goal of Julia getting "blobbed" by Joshua, who she decided was her perfect weight match for the jumping pillow.  Only issue was that she kept falling off before Joshua could jump down.  It was pretty hilarious.  Gray was trying to get Matt to blob him and had the same issue, but eventually all got it and it was very fun.  Julia had some fears and frustrations to work through with all these adventurous water things that didn't always work the way she planned, but she is determined and kept trying even through tears at times.

We headed back to our cabins and cooked packet meals over the fire, which we had assembled after breakfast.  Unfortunately, I cautioned everyone to be generous with the season salt so they wouldn't be bland and all our food ended up waaay too salty.  We had a campfire with some traditional Christian camp songs (which, when asked to contribute verses, some kids somehow turned into rallies for their sports team after an exciting day of college football) and a short message, followed by an amazing s'more bar.  I tried a nutella s'more with banana slices and will never be the same.  ;)  We got Allie to bed and the other three stayed out later with their friends.  We got a lot of family time together but they also loved the freedom to meet their friends from home and do things together in this sprawling, but safe environment of camp...well, except for Julia's worry about bears after we spotted a baby nearby (against the fence in the pic above).

On Sunday, we woke to chilly and rainy looking skies.  We had the usual breakfast and worship meeting, then had free time the whole day, so we hung out at our camp awhile and I decided to try some new things--I did archery to start, though I couldn't get Allie to join.  The boys and Matt did riflery, which Joshua was super good at apparently.  Then we watched some friends try the "leap of faith", where you climb (in a harness) to the top of a wooden pole, stand up and jump like a trapeze artist to try to grab a metal bar.  The first kid got stuck in fear at the top and much to our chagrin, they don't just say "time's up buddy" and yank you down, so it was quite awhile for our friends' turn to come up.  As Lisa says, you need a master's in psychology to work that station!  It was fun to watch friends young and old try the leap once the first kid got down.  We had quite a few adventurous ones!  Meanwhile, the boys played some ultimate frisbee and Matt got super sweaty, just in time for our last chance to take a nice family photo (really, who is going to look nice at camp anyway?!).  Sleep deprived, dirty, rained on and sweaty we were, but we got our picture made and received that beauty in a frame on the last morning.

After lunch, we headed to boys' camp with the lake and did some four square, which I'm not sure I'd ever played.  The boys did laser tag and the girls watched friends do water activities again.  Julia headed back for the "giant swing" with friends, and Matt, Allie, the boys, our friend Will, and I went and did indoor soccer and trap shooting (it was fun, though I was not good at it!).  

Back at camp, we had a nice bbq meal, which was to be followed by an ice cream sundae luau at the pool.  Only issue was, it started pouring chilly rain about 10 minutes after it started.  We were unprepared, which tended to be our mode that weekend, and it was never easy to just run back to the cabin because everything was really spread out and you had to hike half a mountain to get to our place.  Nevertheless, with the idea of trying new things and making the best of the weekend, we all ended up freezing our buns off in the pool.  The boys played basketball, I held Allie, Julia tried line dances, we talked with friends, and eventually the rain passed.  We ended the night watching Gray and some other friends participate in "Hugh and Jarms' Splash Contest" where Gray attempted to jump off the diving board and make a shot in the basketball goal at the same time.  We went back to the cabin soaked and tired, but big kids still headed out for one last night at the gym.

It began to pour sometime in the night and was raining buckets all morning as we ate breakfast, had our last worship meeting, and hastily packed up and booked it out of there, sitting in wet clothes and shoes the whole ride home.  Not the best ending to the weekend, but more memories made!  As we pulled away from camp, all said they were glad we went and Julia stereotypically urged us to commit at that moment to coming again next year:).