Fall days...

We enjoyed the first officially titled "family night" last night. The only goal was to love each other and have fun, avoid the "to do" list and be more of less unproductive (at least in the traditional sense of the word). This will be a skill this family will have to work on honing, with the exception of our 6 year old! We kicked it off around 4:45pm with a long and leisurely hike on the mountain, exploring new trails and all three agreeing that next time we need to leave in the morning and have LOTS of time to get "to the ridge" (that's Kali's goal, and we share it). About 30 pictures from our hike are online at http://picasaweb.google.com/bennerj8/FamilyNightHikeOnMoutain# but the colors in person are not comparable to what is captured by the camera.

The rest of the evening included banana splits, game playing and Jason playing guitar and singing for us (Kali and I's colds don't make us fit for much joining in, though Kali did get her drum out for the final numbers). It was a good way to start off this "vacation week" for me. Likely I would have taken a sick day today anyway to nurse this cold back to health but we all feel good enough to be enjoying more time together. It will be a week also packed with emotion as we think about the time surrounding Nora's birthday this Friday. Last night as Jason played the guitar and we were in the front room together, I found myself envisioning that space with a little toddler in our midst. It was a good, sweet, sad, hopeful, longing-for, missing it kind of feeling...