First Half of December 2020 - piano recital, Santa Margarita River Trail, Christmas stuff begins, etc.

Tiny, who wears dresses exclusively, did some letter-writing practice while the biggers did their school.

I found a note about a scavenger hunt in my room. Berry is the best. 

"There's a few papers in your room. Find them. There's 17 of them."  

She had a written words on little scraps of paper - "praying," "painting," "running," "skiing," "wishing," etc. I don't believe there was any significance to the words. 

We went out for a night walk once to enjoy the Christmas lights and ran into Cikaneks on our way out. I'm not sure why Nathan and Wrenzy held hands, but it was adorable. 

Our house and Cikaneks' house were two of the best lit. 

Ever and Wrenzy did a Zoom piano recital on a Saturday morning. I recorded Ever's sideways because I can never remember how my video function works. 

After the recital, we hiked the Santa Margarita River Trail. I always love the yellow trees. I took lots of pictures of people's backs. 

We fueled up with the traditional candy dispersal at a sign.

We lunched by the river.

We had never gone past the river but wanted to venture on. A lot of weird off-roading and scrambling occurred before we picked up the trail. 

Berrykins melted down and couldn't take anymore. I really wanted to get to the end of the trail, so Jim stayed on a bench with the littles while Ever ran/walked with me to the end. I took Jim's phone with the All Trails app so we could find our way. I'm so bad at map-reading that when there was a fork, we just picked a way and then watched the app to see if we were staying on the trail or not; if not, we'd go back and take the other way. Wouldn't have made it without the app. It was a fun time with Goose. I loved holding her hand and jogging the trail. 

The end of the trail was a little anticlimactic. It just sort of stopped, and there wasn't much to see. 

Ever and I were gone for a good chunk of time because it was a decent distance to the end (maybe a mile each way) and we did a little backtracking. Jim did not have a particularly good time with the disgruntled littles. He definitely got the short end of that stick. Anyway, we got back to them and started the return trip. We passed an old, wrecked car off the side of the trail and checked it out. 

Anna invited Ever and a bunch of other friends of Leela and Rafi to participate in a paddle-boarding thing. They had a lot of fun.

Lelei Thompson, Ever, Hollis Holder with Grace Spengler on her back (Grace and Hollis are Palmquist friends), Leela, Rafi, and Fox Bunnell

The Kindness Elves returned. Wrenzy wrote them the sweetest note.

Translation: "Elves, I am sorry if I am disturbing ['dusterving' = cutest spelling ever] you. But I wanted to say that for Christmas I want a bunny that has a necklace sewed onto it with a bed to go with it and a crown. Love, Wren."

Ever made cute Christmas cookies for a Primary activity conducted over Zoom.