After spending Friday night of Memorial Day weekend busy on many fronts (Tim with Benton at his season opening double-header baseball games and I, with Alana and Carson, helping to host a block party for 30 or so neighbors.) We got up on Saturday, packed up, and headed to the farm in West Virginia. We […]

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Last night was a late night on all fronts: Julie, Carson, and Alana were at the block party that Julie initiated/coordinated as a welcome/farewell/get-to-know-each-other event — diligently planned around the work and travel schedules of as many people as possible on the block, but overlooking… Benton’s first baseball games of the season — a double-header […]

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Trips to Bob’s farm in West Virginia are pretty much always on the “over-” end of The Stimulation Spectrum for the kids. And, a 3.5-4 hour drive back home is where the crash can hit. Especially Alana. Clearly, she had already been enough of a handful in the morning as we packed up that we […]

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Alana is a bit fearless. She discovered that she could get herself into the tire swing by herself if she just sort of rag-dolled her way in. Meg was plenty happy to provide the locomotion!

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I wrapped up an utterly exhausting week in Austin by getting 3.5 hours of sleep on Friday night, catching a 5:40 AM flight back to Columbus (via Houston), and then getting in my truck to drive 3 hours out to Bob’s farm in West Virginia. I arrived shortly after 2:00 in the afternoon, which meant […]

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Carson got a great book on fingerprint drawing (and requisite inkpads, pen, and pad) for Christmas from Cheryl and Bruce Bone. He was wayyyyy into it. With pretty nifty results! Carson being Carson, it wasn’t too long after the above picture was completed that he began freestyling. So, we went from innocuous happy people…to superheroes…to […]

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Good conditions for some pretty interesting ice formations, such as all of the trees being “decorated:” I snuck down to the pond at one point, and it was frozen over, although I’m not sure how thick it was: So the “fauna” shot is a bit of a stretch! There were a flock of 20+ blue […]

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When we arrived Thursday late afternoon, the temperature was hovering around 20 degrees. I got everything turned on, and we thought we were in good shape. It wasn’t until after dark that we realized that there was no hot water — although the gas was on, it had really low pressure, which was enough to […]

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A couple of years ago, I tracked down a hand-cranked bellows sold by Campmor. This was shortly after Benton had gotten going with coaxing campfires back from glowing embers when he woke up in the morning. Frankly, I was a little concerned that he would hyperventilate some day, as using his lungs to fan the […]

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(more to come in the coming days from our weekend in West Virginia…)

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