Iron Heritage Festival

Two weeks ago was the annual Iron Heritage Festival.  It is a big festival that has a lot to do with the Iron heritage of our town, aptly named.  There is a parade, train rides, street festivals, and food, and you know, Teddy Roosevelt.

IHF is a good time here in Danville.  This year, local musician/teacher/builder Van Wagner, built a coal barge and brought it up the Susquehanna river for demonstrations.  Lilly seemed most excited to find her friends and spend some time with them.

Then we went home and made friendship bracelets.  Lilly was really excited about that.  Turns out it's more fun to watch your mom make friendship bracelets than to actually make them yourself.

The end.

Deer/Lots of pictures of Jack on a swing

Deer are very common where we live, but is still catches me off guard when I see one in my back yard.  Every time I see one up close I am surprised by the size of the deer.  

They are always much larger than I remember.  It just seems odd to have such a large animal wandering through my backyard.

In case you're counting I have seen deer, squirrels, birds, groundhogs, rabbits, and chipmunks.  My neighbor has spotted a fox and a bear.  We have quite the woodland collection in my neighborhood.

The deer appeared confused at the large amount of used play equipment in our yard.

I am not sure how Jack would have reacted to the deer but he does love all the play equipment in our yard.  He even requested to swing in the baby swing this week.

Just for old time's sake, here is Jack on the same swing in the summer of 2010.

Summer of 2011

He spent most of 2011 trying out the big kid swings...

Summer 2012: Jack needs more height on his swing, which makes it harder to get good shots.

My sweet boy.

9 years later...

Jim and I celebrated our 9 year anniversary on July 19.  I have never scanned in our professional pictures and year after year I pull up the same 8 pictures that my friend emailed me after the wedding. I also claim that I will one day scan in the professional pictures.  I would like to make that same claim again today.

We were able to get away for a night to celebrate.  We had dinner, went to see Spiderman and  the next morning we shopped for a few hours at the outlets.  Jim didn't think that part would be fun, but it was and he loved it, no matter what he tells you.  He scored some pretty good deals at the outlets.

We asked someone to take our picture in the hotel lobby but that man was a bit of a total moron and no matter how many times he tried to push the button on the camera he just couldn't push the button (I would like you to think back to the post of my 6 year old and her amazing photos she took with the same camera and the same button that wouldn't work for the adult man). He literally wasn't moving his finger.  Now that I think about it, maybe he was messing with us because he was annoyed we asked him to take a picture. 

Anyway, we reverted to our stand by where Jim holds out his arm and takes a picture of us.  Jim thought I was being ridiculous and that face (above) was his way of proving it.  However, I assured him that his arm method was a somewhat flattering angle of me and he finally agreed to smile and take more arm pictures.

I really do love when Jim holds his arm out and takes a picture of us (Jim also sent me flowers from a real florist, I love that too).  We still laugh and have fun every day. Except for the days we don't.  We have the best kids (sorry rest of the world, it's true) and we are pretty lucky to have each other.

Nana is 70

On July 18 Jim's mom turned 70 and she came to our house for some birthday fun.
No pressure to celebrate your mother in law's 70th birthday, right?

She looks pretty fantastic for 70.  When I asked her what wisdom she could impart to us as a 70 year old, she told me not to get caught up in your chronological age, just to act how you feel, because she certainly doesn't feel 70.  Her mother is 96 and still lives at home and gardens regularly.

For our small birthday celebration I bought this chocolate lover's cake, and it was true to it's name.

Then I added 70 candles.

Then Jim and I spent a long time lighting all the candles.

Everyone was pretty excited about the candle situation.

Jack and Lilly helped Nana blow out all 70 candles.

Basically the entire evening was centered on candles, not sure if you got that.

Betsy has 7 children, 7 children in law (is that a phrase?) 23 grandchildren, 3 great grand children, her husband, mother, brothers, many cousins, brothers and sisters in law, nieces and nephews, and of all those people we were the one's who got to be with her on her birthday.  Pretty lucky for us.

Friday the 13th indeed.

I just realized it was Friday the 13th and now my day makes perfect sense.  It was a day out of a mother horror show.  Not any real horror like death and tragedy, just a normal mom day gone wrong because of too much screaming and too many bodily fluids involved.

7:00 AM  Both children wake up whining and crying for breakfast. Jack doesn't like the plate I have given him so he throws his bread across the kitchen followed by his plate.  He then sits in his usual time out spot.

8:00 AM Schedule a doctor's appointment for Lilly at 9:30 for her severe stomach pain and accompanying issues that have been going on for 8 days.

8:30 Dress screaming children and myself.

9:15 Attempt to leave the house to take Jack to my friend's house (who graciously agreed to watch him), and have to pry away the iPad from two screaming children.  Who continue to scream all the way to the car and during the car ride.

9:33 Arrive 3 minutes late to the doctor's office.

9:45 Greeted by a 12 year old boy claiming to be a medical intern.

10:20 12 year old intern finishes examining Lilly and questioning me 35 minutes later only to then tell me she will be examined next by the most senior Resident.

10:22 Most senior resident, who looks to be 24, comes to examine Lilly.  Lilly tells him her ankles hurt too and he asks me when her arthritic pain started. What?  He then examines her for 20 more minutes and tells me she is developing scoliosis of the spine and she might have had E Coli or Salmonella. What??

10:47  Resident finally finishes his horrible questioning and examining and goes to confirm with the real doctor  Attending.

10:49 Resident returns to inform me that the Attending agrees with his vague diagnosis of possible E Coli and or Salmonella and she should NOT be eating fruit roll ups like he saw her eating during the exam.

10:49:30 I am enraged with fury and inform him my child does NOT eat fruit roll ups but she eats 100% whole fruit leather made from ORGANIC fruit.  He then tells me that if her arthritic pain worsens I need to bring her in immediately. What??

10:55 Check out of doctor's office.

11:15 Pick up Jack who throws a cup at me, screams and has a time out at my friends house. Then we all leave to go home.

11:30 Children have a bland lunch in attempt to compensate for the possible E Coli/Salmonella outbreak that the child doctor diagnosed.

11:45  Jack hits everyone in the house, throws more things, screams, and goes to bed.

11:55 Lilly continues to tell me everything that hurts in great detail for the next hour until I tell her she needs to have some quiet time.

2:00 Nap time is over, the screaming is so bad that I just drag Jack to the car with no shoes so we can go to the library and the grocery store.

2:15 At the Library Lilly tells the librarian that she has finished her book chart and needs another one. The Librarian responds:  "I hope you are taking time to play outside."  Instead of saying "Great job, way to read books, small kindergartner."  She says "I hope you are taking time to play outside."  Which throws me into defensive mom mode where I say "Oh Lilly, do we play outside?"  Lilly then replies "No."  Which makes me want to drag her outside and leave her there so she can remember how much time she actually does spend outside.

3:00  Children scream through the grocery store and Jack tries to hit me with his airplane as many times as he can.

4:00 We are home and I make the children play outside with bubbles.  Each of them have their own bubbles and they each scream and demand for me to look at their bubbles.  This goes on for what feels like hours, but was probably only 15 minutes.

5:00 Carson and Alysson show up for babysitting swap night and I have the idea to create our own chalk festival since there was so much whining about not attending the chalk festival at Penn State.

5:04 Lilly and Carson get into a heated debate over whether Carson actually has super hero powers.  Accusations of lying are thrown around between the children and I make many threats about cancelling our chalk festival if everyone can't play nice.

5:45 We eat dinner and the whining and complaining ensues.  I begin to question my very being and what I did to cause so much whining in my life.

6:30 Jack has explosive diarrhea all over the basement and up his back.  I put him in the bathtub where he screams and screams because I am attempting to clean him.

6:45 Finally get Jack into bed for stories where he screams because I only read him three stories.  Meanwhile the other three children keep running upstairs screaming because they keep finding spiders in the basement. They then capture the spiders and attempt to take them outside.  I am just grateful Lilly has friends to play with to keep her distracted from all the whining and screaming that seemed to take place today.

7:10 I sit at my computer and wonder why I have failed as a mother to have raised such horribly whiny children.  Then I look at my blog and remember not all days are like this, and I am grateful.

Penn State

We went to Penn State for their annual Art's Fest on Wednesday.  A few friends came along and we had a great time.  Here are all the children on the pig statue (we didn't make it to the Nittany Lion statue).

The pig used to be their mascot in the 1800's.  I was happy because last time I was there Jack was quite afraid of the pig statue.  This time he was not!  There was not a single picture of even half the children looking at the camera at the same time, so I just picked the best one of Jack, you know, since he conquered his fear and all.


Wednesday was kids day and they had all kind of exhibits and hands on activities.  My personal favorite was the ice cream made from liquid nitrogen.

After all the learning we went to eat at the Green Bowl.  That was where Jim and I used to eat when we were dating. It was fun to take the children there.

After lunch we walked over to the water exhibits for the children to get soaked.

These three spend most of their days together.

My sweet boy Jack sat out the water exhibit.

After all of that we went for ice cream at the creamery.  It was so delicious that no one took a single picture.  Lovely and utterly exhausting day.  Jack was asleep for the night by 5:45PM and Lilly was out by 6:30PM and I followed close behind.

Lilly's photography

Lilly seems to have her father's eye for photography.  Here are some of her photos from our morning walk.

She asked me for the camera this morning, put the strap around her neck and began shooting.  Every picture she attempted she took at least 3 shots in rapid succession.  (Jack had just finished playing in the sand box, if you are wondering why he looks sandy and pale.)

It was amazing all the things she found to photograph on our short walk down the street and back.

Who knew we had so much nature?

The color in this flower is striking, it has not been edited or enhanced, it looks like it was painted on.

After living in this neighborhood for three years we finally met Helen, who lives down the street from us.  She has beautiful gardens that she attributes to her farm upbringing.  She told us her husband died in 2010 and if he had just lived 4 months longer they would have been married 70 years.  She said it's no wonder why she misses him so, and people seem surprised that she would be lonely.  She told me she will be turning 90 on October 5.  She also told me she has no children so she doesn't know if she will do anything fun to celebrate.  Please help remind me to take balloons to Helen on October 5.

Not sure if I would have had that conversation with Helen had my children not waved hello. Lilly really helps us to see everything around us.