Installment Four

Daniel's at a theology conference (so I might not see him until midnight) and I'm waiting for dough to rise to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast, so I thought I'd create another installment. The first picture was taken from our front yard (BTW, I hate new home neighborhoods!) and the rainbow was so huge that I couldn't capture the whole thing. Soon after that a double rainbow appeared. Pretty cool.

This next one is a little gross...after one of the big summer rains, the girls were delighted to discover baby toads all over the place. So they caught them. All 503 of them, or at least it seemed like 503. They attempted to give them names, but only the largest one could be distinguished. Her name? Mrs. Orange, of course.

We went to our county seat on July 4th for the parade...a small town named Stanardsville only about 15 minutes away. It's a gorgeous drive, and the parade was totally small town America. (The only caveat I would put on that statement was the "$15 VIP parade seating" on the balcony of a historic hotel that offered mint juleps and other assorted beverages at TEN O'CLOCK in the morning! I don't think Mayberry would do that.) We went with friends from co-op and had a blast. We wanted to keep hanging out, so we went out to lunch with them. Then we almost crashed their neighborhood party because we heard there would be fireworks, but we thought that might be rude. My grandmother used to crash weddings; that's definitely more rude.

We were sad that we did NOT get a photo of the crazy lady on her riding lawnmower who drove as if she had attended the VIP seating get-together beforehand. She had on lots of bling, lots of pom-poms, and she had attached a wanted poster of herself to her riding lawnmower. She lapped the parade participants and came around twice, waving and hollering for all she was worth. On the second lap, she was talking with someone and jumped the curb. HOW did I not get a picture of that??

Before I sign off to actually go read a book, here's a story from Abigail today:

I took Adah and Abigail Target shopping and grocery shopping and Abigail was being her usual chatty self. I might have been tuning her out a bit (or a lot). Suddenly she yelled, "Mommy! Did you see that? Did you see that statue that looked like a deer or maybe was a deer?"

Me: "Um-hum."

Abigail: "Mommy, do you believe me?"
Me: silence (checking off things in my head)

Abigail: "Hey, LADY, do you believe me?!"

Well, I definitely heard THAT. :) Adah and I collapsed laughing. And I think some of Oma's New York genes made it into that girl. :)