Virginia: Getting There, Apple Picking, and Sky Meadows

On Thursday, September 27 we flew to DC to visit the Homers. Again, Wrenzy chose a sophisticated outfit for the day of travel and looked so grown-up. I imagined she was in her 20's and traveling for work.

We got in late. Coco fed us, and then it was bedtime.

While we were at Coco's, the littles spent hours and hours in the mornings and evenings (and in between, when we were home) playing in Anson's room. By "playing," I mean taking a zillion books off the shelf and out of the basket and spreading toys all over, too. They were so happy back there together, which was lovely. It just necessitated regular cleanup. I think this was Friday morning:

Friday once we got organized and ready, we went apple picking and then did a short hike in Sky Meadows State Park. Cousin Lucy, who is a freshman at George Washington, was able to join us, so that was a nice bonus. Most of the good apples were gone, so we had to look a bit. Thanks in large part to Wrenzy, we still managed to make out with a ton of apples. 

Wrenzy is a hard little worker. Once she was on the case, the bags filled quickly.

She found a laden little tree and ran back and forth from it to me (I was holding the bag). She'd run and pick an apple, run back to me and drop it in the bag, and then go back for another.

It's hard to know how to pose with a giant apple-picker.

Again with the apple-picker.

  
Coco captured so much cousin love. The girls were all over Anson all the time, and he took it very well.

When we tried to leave, Tiny had a tantrum over something or other and refused to come.

A couple of us tried an apple or two while we were out. Wrenzy showed off hers with a serious face.

Dustin had his heart set on trying a certain type of apple, and Jim had his set on another (Red Delicious).  I think what happened was Jim said he wanted Red Delicious, Ever concurred, and then Red Delicious became a mission. We parted ways with Coco and Dun Dun with plans to meet up shortly. Dustin was fast and grabbed an apple or two of his kind; Jim, meanwhile, thought it his fatherly duty to help Ever fill up a whole nother bag of Red Delicious. I finally had to go find him and Ever and make them come back because everyone was tired of waiting. 

We hit the bathrooms and admired the landscape and colonial-style building as we did.

We debated how long a hike to go on. Ever is not the speediest hiker (understatement), so it's a good thing we chose the shorter one. It's such a beautiful spot. I love green!

Anson stretched his legs at the top.

Tiny, on the other hand, had zonked out.

From certain angles, she looked headless.

Ever took a moment to display her mastery of The Floss.

Wrenzy ate it into a bunch of mud and got really dirty. She took it like a champ, though. Muddy sleeves:

Anson was released from his pack and relished the freedom. He kept falling because of the slope, but he didn't mind at all. It was pretty funny to watch.

Ever is a really big fan of Lucy. The whole time we were in Virginia, she was asking about Lucy, when we were going to see her again, was she coming over tonight?, etc. Since we pulled her out of school for so long for this trip, she did independent study to avoid unexcused absences. Part of that was writing about what we did each day. Multiple entries contained excited mentions of Lucy. The entry she wrote about this day was really cute.

September Home Life

Reading is still a favorite pastime around here.

Sam, Tess, and Rue Hawkins came down from Manhattan Beach for a weekend. We fed them yummy pizza upon arrival Friday night. Saturday morning, the Hawkins girls initiated a roly poly hunt. Ever and Wren were really interested in catching roly polies but were scared to touch them. The girls got plastic bags to put their critters in, and initially my girls would only touch the bugs through extra bags on their hands. Eventually, however, they dropped their makeshift gloves and started going after them barehanded. The rolies provided hours of backyard fun. Nathan Cikanek joined in the festivities, too.

Wren, Tess, and Rue:

Sometimes my kids get anti-social and opt for, say, reading, over playing with visiting friends. Jim indulged them.

Wrenzy showed off the fruits of her labors.

They ended up catching probably hundreds of the things. Somebody dropped a bag inside the house, and that was not OK with me. In the end, the bags were left outside, and the rolies escaped. The girls were sad, and I was relieved. Sam and his girls left that afternoon. It was fun to have them. Ever and Wren are really big fans of Tess and Rue.

Tiny lives in her "Anna/Elsa" dresses. This is how we went grocery shopping one morning after school drop-off - Anna/Elsa dress for Tiny, jammies and Anna/Elsa purse for Wrenzy. We're not winning any awards for style.

I got excellent facial expressions inside.

Tiny tried, unsuccessfully, to make a castle out of yogurt.

I always have the littles help me unload the dishwasher. They do a really good job, except for the time that Tiny put the silverware in my back pockets instead of in the drawer.

Tiny got an insane, full-body rash that lasted for days. The picture doesn't do it justice. It was really, really awful. Apparently it was just caused by a virus. She seems to be rather rash-prone.

Naked Zoza helped me clean one day. Ever wouldn't get out of the frame, but I had to record Wrenzy Swiffering the floor and singing, "I don't know if I'm related to gassy..." from Frozen. (The real line is, "I don't know if I'm elated or gassy, but I'm somewhere in the zone."

After the Swiffer, she got into vacuuming and went all around the family room with the attachment. She even folded the rug up to get underneath it. I was so proud of my little perfectionist.

Jim had the idea of Pippi Longstocking for Ever's dress-like-a-movie-character day at school. He found and cut wire that worked great. I looked at some pictures of Pippi and then selected the best clothes I could find in her closet. We did eyeliner freckles, too. I thought she looked amazing. We really nailed it for a throw-together-at-the-last-second costume.

Creative play:

The girls love the song "Angela" by The Lumineers. Wren and Tiny think the line "Home at last" in the chorus is "Hope a-la," and that's what they call the song. One afternoon, we had Pandora on, and Tiny said, "I want Hope A-la." Shortly after that, the song happened to come on, and before I had even identified it in my head, she exclaimed, "It's Hope A-la!" 

All of the girls are very opinionated about music (and clothes, for that matter). They know what they like and what they don't like.

The destruction of the bedroom and bathroom continued. Jim and Ever surveyed the damage.

Jim had to take out these giant support beams along where the old closets were. When he cut down the first one, he was scared it would be so heavy that it could put a hole through the floor when it fell. He situated a board underneath it to break the fall and calculated well. 

The side of the room with the closets removed:

We had a lot of debris in our entryway for a while.

Jim let me hire a big French Canadian named Pierre from Clear Junk Removal to haul it all to the dump the week we left for Coco's house. It was so great to get rid of it (especially because rat droppings had appeared around the mess, to my horror).

Jim has left our bedroom and bathroom carpet and amenities to the extent possible. The toilet is still useable, but you have to step through a door frame across a little floorless section, staying to the left side of the door opening, and then step left to the toilet. Immediately past the door opening on the right side is a pile of tools, debris, and all sorts of junk. It looks like this:

One night Wrenzy cried for me, and I got up quickly and went to her. I should have waited to see if she'd go back to sleep, and I certainly should have waited to get my bearings. But I didn't. I was kind of out of it because I hadn't been asleep very long and was so exhausted. I felt how I used to feel when I got up with babies in the night - a little unsteady and fuzzy-headed. I went to Wrenzy, and she just wanted something dumb like for me to put her blanket on her. I decided to use the bathroom while I was up. I made it in the dark to the door frame pictured above and stepped through with my left foot. When I stepped with my right foot, though, I stepped into the mess on that side and went down. I cried out. Jim got up and asked if I were OK. I said I was, but a minute later I turned on the light and saw that I was bleeding. He got back up and fetched me a Band-Aid. It was a pretty good slice.

Jim and I have talked forever about putting artificial grass in the back yard. It's just not right to water lawns here, and he can't keep the lawn how he likes it anyway. He plants this beautiful, fine grass, and then "bad grass," as he calls it, comes in and takes over. He has planted and replanted this yard several times. He agreed not to do it again because we're just going to put in turf. But he couldn't help himself. The man is unstoppable when it comes to the yards. The morning we left for DC, he was outside poisoning the bad grass so he can reseed one more time.

Master Bath Demo

Jim and I finally figured out a way, we think, to fix our lame master bedroom/bathroom. After many hours of brainstorming, we came up with a plan to take out the wall of closets in our room, turn a big portion of the existing bathroom into a walk-in closet, and redo/add to the other existing portion of the bathroom. It is a crazy huge project. We talked to a couple of contractors about turning the loft in the garage into a room and a bunch of other work, and they said it would cost a fortune. We'd thought about tacking the garage onto the loft project if we hired someone, but now we're not hiring anyone and Jim is doing it himself.

He was burned out on home renovations for a long time, but he got pretty pumped when he started this in August.

My favorite was when he was doing the demo and called out to me, "I've got the fever!" 

He took out the wall between our bathroom and the hallway by the other bedrooms.

He took out several more walls. 

Ever helped remove nails and cart out drywall. Jim paid her a quarter per load of drywall she carried downstairs in a large garbage can. 

I haven't taken a lot of pictures, but I think I have later ones that show additional destruction. I'm posting these from August in an effort to stay chronological. In any case, that is the beginning of a very long, very insane project.

Videos & Jim's Birthday

A few videos to remember the girls at this age. Wrenzy counting:

Tiny wearing her "dance class" (tutu):

Wrenzy was trying to ask for spaghetti, and she just couldn't get the word right. She said it over and over but of course pretty much stopped when I started filming.

Jim's birthday was on a Tuesday this year. The Sunday before, Ever decorated the house while he napped. 

She decked out a chair, too, with crepe paper, ribbons, and a balloon, but I didn't get a picture of that. The tape ripped a bunch of paint off, so it's a good thing we don't care about those chairs. We made a yellow cake with chocolate frosting that day, and the girls made Jim a lovely card. He and I went to dinner and a movie at some point. That was the extent of the celebration.

I got to the gym once, and the littles' outfits seemed unusually coordinated.