Octobery Things

It's been a month since my last blog post?  A month???  I don't even know where time is going any more.  I really don't.  We have been enjoying the most beautiful autumn!  But all good things must come to an end, and this week our highs plummeted from 85 degrees to 55, with us waking up this morning to 27 degrees outside!!!  How can that happen in just a few days???

So we're trying to readjust to cold weather.  Bring out the sweatshirts and gloves!

Anyway.  What have we been up to?  More of the same, mostly.  I'm still walking the kids to the bus stop and occasionally getting beautiful weather to take pictures of.  This week it finally got super dark at this time, so it will be good on Sunday when we turn our clocks back and get some daylight in the morning.  I hate the kids waiting for the bus in the dark-- it just feels so wrong!

I love a good mist on Carter Mountain!

My neighbor Ginna texted me one morning about a free tennis class for girls called Girls Rule the Court, so we signed our girls up for it!  Ginna's parents have been extremely generous about picking them up from school and getting them there, and then usually Craig can bring Camille home, so that's worked out well!  She'd played a couple times with Bentley, so Camille was her usual enthusiastic self over this!  I think that helped Sydney and Beth be more brave, too, since they tend to be a little more anxious than my kids.

Sydney, Beth, Camille

One week when I picked her up, all the girls had put leaves in their ponytails.  I'm not sure how that tied in with tennis, but I'm glad they were having fun outside!

I got to help with one of Adam's biggest weddings, both driving and then puttering around the venue doing whatever needed doing, including holding drinks for Adam's husband and sister-in-law, which Adam quickly documented:

I love this picture because I'm genuinely laughing and also because I'm holding the glass so stupidly-- I clearly know nothing about alcohol!

Here are some pictures of the actual wedding-- it was so pretty!!!

Table settings...  You can see the bride and groom in the background there!

This flower arch probably cost more than all my cars combined...

This tiny detail on the cake made me smile-- bad doggy!  (In actuality, that poor doggy is a rescue dog and spent the entire wedding huddled in people's arms terrified until the aunt of the bride took pity on it and asked if I would take her and the doggy back to the bride and groom's home, which is exactly the kind of thing they were paying me big money to do!)

A few days later, as I was leaving the house to pick up Kendra, I spotted this magnificent rainbow over Carter Mountain:

Isn't that spectacular?

And, I got artsy with Dolly's green eggs and decided to photograph them with the (only slightly wilted) flowers left over from that amazing wedding:

I promise not to post egg pictures... too often....

In the middle of all this wedding stuff, I was also trying to get ready for family pictures.  Trying to figure out what we should wear so that we're coordinated without being embarrassing is a real chore, let me tell you.  I like to start with me, because I figure I'm the one who cares the most about what I look like.  (Right?  That doesn't make me a terrible person, does it?)  So I choose whatever dress or outfit I feel cute in, and then pick colors for everyone else based on what they already have that will work, and then we figure out what we need still.  I lay everything out on my bed or on the floor and take pictures so I can get Rachael and Adam's opinions as I go.  It's a process, y'all!

So I'd been working on this, but with all the weddings on the weekends, I didn't actually have time to take the kids shopping.  So I explained to Craig what we still needed and asked him to take care of it and he nailed it!  I was so happy!  So, yes, the following weekend we went out and took pictures with Adam and they turned out so lovely!  I could not have been happier with how it all went.  I will post some of my favorites (and some of the hilarious goofs) soon!  I promise!

Another thing I've spent a lot of time doing this last month is going to see Taylor Swift's Eras Movie.  Yup, I went opening night.  And was super excited, too.  I dragged Craig, Kendra, and Adam along with me and I LOVED IT.  I can't believe how talented she is.  And the stamina it must take to be up there singing for over three hours!!!!  Even opera singers get more breaks than that!  My only problem was that she did a bunch of songs that aren't really my favorites, so every time she'd start singing one of those, I'd feel just a teensy bit disappointed because now there would be less time for the songs I truly love.  So that was weirdly stressful.  But I still absolutely loved getting to see the concert without having to shell out thousands of dollars for it.  I loved it so much that as soon as it was over, I texted my Mom, who was coming to visit the next week, if she wanted to see it with me so I could go again!  (She said Sure-- woot!). I did NOT sing along, because I just wanted to take in everything.  Afterwards, Craig mentioned that this was the first time he'd actually heard Taylor's voice without mine!  He was like, "Oh, is that what she sounds like?"  😂

A ton of people dressed up for the movie, but I like to be as comfortable as possible if I'm going to sit in a movie theater for over three hours, so dressed like a complete slob in my pajama pants and crocks.  We had reclining seats, so I even kicked off my shoes for the movie.  It was fantastic.  My only concession was wearing my All Too Well shirt.  So it was kind of a bummer that Adam decided we needed our picture taken with the movie poster (and I blinked, of course).  Ah, well.

Kendra looks cute, at least!

I've started doing interviews for my choir again, which is fun.  I like having an excuse to hang out with people and ask them questions and get to know them better!  (Now I just have to actually write up those interviews I've conducted!  Three so far, still two to go!)  This time around I'm just interviewing people on the board.  I don't know yet if we'll have soloists for our Christmas concert, but if they do, they're probably still figuring out who they're hiring.  In any case, one of the women I spoke with mentioned that she likes doing escape rooms, and her favorite was one I hadn't even heard of, History Unlocked!  So, naturally, I had to check it out!

We convinced our friends the Huffs to do it with us, and we had a great time puzzling out all the clues in a Thomas Jefferson themed room.  This is my kind of stuff!

Waiting for our room to be set up

Mission accomplished!  I love getting to do stuff like this with our friends!

The Huffs also hosted a fireside the next day (around an actual fire!), so all the little kids got to play in the basement while the rest of us were outside-- it looks like they had a great time!  (And Craig did the fireside and talked about pride and he did a great job, I was so proud!)

Clockwise, we have Camille, Maya, Gideon, Bram, Peter, and Colton

The next day I was doing my usual Costco shopping and I saw a goldfinch land in the tree in front of me!  So I HAD to take a picture of it, and it's really pretty terrible, but they're just so rare to see, it made me so happy!  

Can you find him in there?  He's dead center, upper third of the picture.  Such a happy looking little guy!

For Young Womens the next night, we were at the Sorenson's home, where they have goats and chickens and had a built a lovely fire for us.  (Two fires in one week-- what a great autumn!)  Near the end of the night, the girls retreated to the covered porch to play jenga and I had to snap a picture:

We were also busy ordering costumes for the kids.  Camille originally wanted to be a plague doctor, which is pretty creepy for a little girl, but I hated to tell her no.  But since we can't wear masks at the church party, I did finally talk her out of that idea.  (Honestly, wearing a mask while you're walking around in the dark trick-or-treating doesn't work very well, either!). So instead, she decided to go as a flying squirrel, which was appropriately adorable!

And, my mom came to visit!!!  We, of course, took very few pictures because I never manage to take pictures when I have company.  Seriously, I don't know why I'm so bad at that.  But we had the best time, really!  We hiked the Monticello Trails and saw this really cool snake that had threaded itself through this fence to catch some sun:

I think it was about 6 feet long!

Once we got to the visitor's center for Monticello we meandered around looking at the gallery that explained all the different design work that went into Jefferson's home and the renovations he did on it after the Revolutionary War.  It was really interesting, until I got a phone call that a service guy would be arriving earlier than I'd expected (in all fairness, we'd also completely lost track of the time and it was much later than I thought; but still, the guy was early!) so then we booked it out of there and back down the hill as fast as we could!  I was very impressed-- my Mom's old knees could NEVER have hurried downhill for a couple miles that way!  Go, Mom!!!

AND,  we DID get to watch the Taylor Swift movie together (and Adam came along, too!) And I had the best time, again!  Poor Mom had to endure me leaning over to explain some of the significance of each song.  Sorry, Mom!  I think I enjoyed it even more the second time because I could stop worrying about which songs Taylor wasn't singing and just really enjoy everything she did sing.  Which was a lot!  There was so much to love about it all!  So, yes, I'm a big dork.  But I'm a big dork WHO KNOWS WHAT SHE LIKES!

On another day, Mom and I visited Petite MarieBette for quiche and hot chocolate and then Gearhart's Fine Chocolates.  Then we drove to Carter Mountain and just stood around enjoying the view and chatting.  We had gorgeous weather the entire time Mom was here.  

One without sunglasses, too!

We also ate out a lot and got plenty of ice cream (including one night when we went to Chaps and nearly died laughing at all the ways we were managing to spill everything!).  And on the nights when we stayed in, I made vegetarian meals for my quasi-vegetarian mother!

I'd hoped to go to a corn maze, something we've managed to do the last couple falls with my Mom, but the timing never really worked out.  We were constantly running around taking my kids to all their various activities, and by the time we could have gotten to one of the mazes, it would have been pretty late and dark.  Doing a maze in the dark sounds less fun to me.  So that didn't happen.  Which was fine. 

And then before I knew it it was time to take Mom back to the airport, which is always sad.  But I was glad we got to have so much fun together.  And there was not time to sit around feeling blue anyway, because all the Halloween stuff was about to get underway...