Douthat State Park: rekindling the Myers-Benner-Showalter-Godshall tradition!

I'll probably be well on my way towards needing to split our 2023 blog book into two also, if I can't limit the photos I add to each post. But in this case I had pictures from multiple families to choose from, making it even harder to reign myself in! And we missed two years worth of gatherings due to COVID, so this post is long overdue! We started these yearly gatherings of three generations of friends back in 2013 and did it yearly until 2019. We missed 2020, 2021 and this was our rescheduled fall 2022 gathering. I say that strategically since I'm hoping this one didn't count for 2023 and we might squeeze another one in this fall with Kali - we missed her!

I alluded in the last post that there was some uncertainty last week if all of us would be healthy to gather, but Friday evening we found ourselves all together (minus Kali who is still in Pittsburgh) at a lovely lodge in Douthat State Park. Alida and Terah rode with my parents making their trip noisier and ours much quieter! They were the first to arrive and got to check out the lodge making them right ready and eager to give us a tour the second we arrived! This was the first time we were gathering somewhere other than Mom and Dad's Mountain House of Hope in Harman, WV. 

The weekend can we summed up in a few words and shared with a lot of pictures. It included so much game playing, delicious meals, giggling and lots of kiddo fun, hiking, exploring the playground and sandy beach by the lake, meaningful conversations, more yummy foods, puzzling, hike and seek, book reading, soccer, demolition (and consumption) of Alida's skyscraper gingerbread structure, and lots of laughter (especially when playing Ransom Notes). Here's some images of the time together!

One of my favorite traditions is the grandparents taking all the grandkids so that the four of us in the middle generation get to go for a hike with just our four sets of ears involved and no interruptions. It's always a lovely gift and makes me yearn for more! 

The pictures of their time while we hiked would make me hard pressed to say who had more fun. No need to figure that out, but they hadn't seemed to miss us in the least! And Terah would not have wanted to be with us because, while we were not lost, we didn't know where we were much of the time!

I loved Terah's portrait of Jason!

As mentioned, many many games were played! I'll give you just one sampling from Ransom Notes, but there were so many hilarious ones!

The preparation of delicious meals was divided between all of us such that each family was only in charge of one meal. As much as I loved our times at Mom and Dad's place in West Virginia, it felt good to be in a neutral space where no one had a weightier role hosting. I think the relaxation was spread a little more evenly this way, but I guess I can't be sure without polling everyone!

We brought along our wooden Christmas puzzle, which provided some good entertainment. And it should go down in history and that it was me and Dad who finished it, probably the two biggest "unpuzzlers" in our family! I did have to keep swatting my mom's hands away in order to accomplish it!

Alida sneakily brought along The Book with No Pictures and Grandpa (Myers) responded positively to Terah's request to read her a book before seeing the kids mischievously race down the hall to fetch it! There was also a reading of Mom's new snow book that Dad got for her at the gift shop. That was probably about the longest the kids sat still at any one time other than maybe mealtimes.

I only observed the soccer game (and took pictures). I think most of the kids have now surpassed my abilities!!! The dynamic in our times together is definitely different than when a handful of the humans were still in diapers or needing naps or wanting to be held much of the time. That was beautiful and special too, just in a different way. It's pretty fun to see the kids and their dads engaged in a soccer game all together. 

Sunday morning came WAY TOO FAST! While I was not as verbal as my kiddos about it, I felt all the things they were expressing too! I felt sad about leaving and tired after not sleeping as well as in my own bed and wishing for a longer time with such dear friends! We all felt our feels on the way home and then the settling back in wasn't too rocky! Hopefully it won't be 2+ years before we do it again!!! There's something really precious about gathering intergenerationally with others with whom we have so much shared life history. And to have that shared history and also really enjoy spending lots of time together is a gift. We did our best to savor it and eagerly anticipate the next time!

The week leading up to the year marker...

Midday today we arrived home from a long anticipated weekend away with friends. More on that in a subsequent post. For now, while our younger gals take in some Charlie Brown and Snoopy entertainment (not as good as the friends they played with all weekend but some veg time was in order upon arrival home!!), I'm going to share a few things from this past week prior to our getaway weekend. 

Jason officially kicked off his Sassafras Enterprises work year this week and will be working a good amount in the coming weeks to hopefully allow for a lighter schedule come spring planting time. It was a bit of a challenging start since we have good reason to believe that Jason got a dose of food poisoning Saturday, knocking him out for much Sunday and making his week start out with less spunk and energy than he would have preferred. Thankfully, his appetite is back to normal now - I knew it the day I came back from a walk and he was gushing about how delicious his breakfast of eggs and toast had been that morning!

So he was home and moving slow on Monday when the friend we bought our three piglets from came out to castrate one. Long story but it needed to be done and sadly didn't go off without a hitch - unbeknownst to us, Snuffle had a hernia and that became very apparent during this normally very routine procedure. We aren't sure the final end of the story as the friend came and took Snuffle and replaced him with a different piglet. We are not vets and were anticipating putting the farm in someone else's care for the weekend so didn't feel like we could take on an additional pig surgery or nursing care. (Just got a call from the friend saying Snuffle is doing better, acting interested in food again and starting to eat - very good news!!)

A short paragraph does not adequately communicate how hard this ordeal was for all involved, but especially Alida who had been central to the taming of the piglets and Snuffle had been her favorite. I was glad that she was able to spend some time with him in his house before he returned to his initial home and I feel certain he knew that she cared about him. At that point she just didn't want him to suffer, which was how we all felt. There is much more than could be said, but the new little guy is solidly at home here now and has seemed to blend in very smoothly with Upa and Gus. The new one hasn't been formally named yet but Friday, before we left for Douthat State Park, Alida came up excited to tell me that she had gotten him to flop over for a belly scratch! It only took a few days of her patiently hanging out with him and the others for him to learn that she was someone to stick around and be friends with!

Our week on the home front unfolded a bit differently than we anticipated after I had my closest COVID call (that I know of) yet - a long outdoor walk and talk with a few dear friends a little over 24 hours before one of them tested positive. Thankfully she is on the mend and it appears the outdoor air flow worked its preventative magic for the rest of us. But the exposure did a number on my health anxiety and also meant some adjustments to our normal cousin playdate and Luca care schedule. That opened up some unexpected space to???.... go through clothes!

I will just note a two things:

1. I love going through my closet with any of my daughters! They are so helpful practically and emotionally, coaching me through any decisions I get stuck making. We set metrics for how much stuff we'd feel satisfied, great or amazed if I got rid of. We surpassed the amazed mark! A KC Davis podcast on getting rid of stuff helped me many times - is the relief I will have getting rid of this item greater than the sadness I could feel due to parting with it? How often do I use it and how easy would it be to replace? Is it worth keeping shoes that are falling apart in my closet rather than just throwing them in the trash, even if I feel bad that I can't think of any way to repurpose them? And so on...

We also had some fun and comic relief with a few items!

2. My closet project gave Terah "the bug!" She was so so so eager to go through all her clothes. We started with their dresses and then I caved and offered to help with the rest of her stuff. As she started trying things on many things were no longer fitting. How did this happen so so fast? I got the next size down from the attic and it was a good thing I did because even some of that stuff was already too small. By day's end we had about 5 bags of things ready to go to Ivy, I was wiped out, and Terah was very excited to have her wardrobe organized again! I love hand-me-downs so much. As we went through the next bin, it felt like a trip down memory lane. She is now enjoying a pair of Kali's favorite pj's!

It strikes me sometimes how good it feels (and still strange) to have enough wiggle room in my life now to say "yes" more often to the girls' requests for help or for me to do something with them (spur of the moment). I get pangs of sadness for how much I tried to fit in the cracks for so long. I think we are all savoring having more time at home together. Yesterday marked one year since my last day at CJP. While the processing and healing continues, and will for some time, I crossed that one year mark with no regrets for having made that major life transition last January, and with more energy and eagerness for what this year will hold. When we got back today from a super special weekend that felt too short to all of us (again, stay tuned for more on that soon), I told Jason, Terah and Alida that it would be even harder if we didn't return home to a place I love so very much!

Pittsburgh and home again!

Jason and I took a record LOW number of photos while our kids were having a lovely time in Pittsburgh with their aunt and uncle! The days we had to savor alone (the most since we had children) went by very fast, but not quite fast enough for our youngest. It wasn't that Terah wasn't having a wonderful time, but she was also contending with fun AND a missing feeling. That seemed to strike most as night or when we were on the phone and she was not interested in ever saying goodbye. One day I got the text first from Kali and later from Mark that he had found the Boggle words "Terah really wants Mommy" on their living room floor. Alida had helped her craft it. And then on the day of our arrival, she was bouncing up and down by the door as she waited for us. I had a little leech hanging on me for some time after we were safely there with them. I don't think she's quite ready for a week of overnight camp! Nor am I!!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I think Jason and I struck a decent balance of work and play in our days together, feeling the new year looming but trying to soak up this final "slower time." We made good progress in both of the books we are reading together, though the smell of the girls' gingerbread houses in the living room next to us was rather tantalizing. The evergreen tree in "the yard" of our home that Kali constructed fell over partway through the week so we got permission from the girls to eat that tree and the one other yard tree. That tied us over until their return!! One house consumed and two to go.

I was the farm chores person for the week (which I enjoyed since it is fun to get into a rhythm of doing it each morning). It was fun to see various things I often am not out and about enough to notice - like the fact that I think our two ducks raised by mama hens have finally figured out that they are ducks. They have started hanging out by Kali's duck pen joining in with the quacking chorus at times. Jason continued making some headway on the bike shed walls and chipping away at the winter cut back list! He's very cognizant, as I am I, that things are gonna change for him shortly with Sassafras Enterprises work picking back up here in the new year. He's got more than enough work lined up for 2023!

So while our house was much quieter than usual, there was a lot of hubbub happening in Pittsburg. I was not there but I have received multiple reports of the extensive teasing and pranking that was happening. While some might have tried to feign innocence, all contributed to a laundry list of things told to us: bananas in the Christmas tree, wasabi almonds snuck into the plain bowl to wow a kid's palate, slippers in pillow cases, lego food in the fridge, stuffed animals playing Rook and reading an etiquette book, edamame put in Mark's leftover smoothie, cereals swapped around in the boxes and so on. 

A big event before we arrived was their Swedish night where they did their best to dress in traditional Swedish clothing, learned some dances and a few Swedish words, and feasted on split pea soup and plettor. They're 1/8th Swedish, genetically, though culturally it's down to reclamation, not preservation.

The night must have worn them out!!

At one point in the week, Terah was having fun with their small domino set and that led to her and Alida watching videos of dominos, like this one from the Dutch Domino Team. (Yes, I did in fact just get completely derailed from this blog post while the girls introduced me to the wonders of domino teams building scenes with 700,000+ dominos!) Anyway, this led to Mark and Christie ordering a set of 1,100 for the girls to have fun with, and so they did!! Here's Kali's cardinal and there were supposedly many other creations prior to our arrival, and some following as we got to join in the fun. But there wasn't a lot of time for domino building as we arrived with just a bit of time to spare before needing to spiffy up for the fancy tea party we had been invited to join!

Fancy clothes, delicious food and excellent post-tea entertainment. There were linzer cookies with peach and raspberry jam, but I think my favorite item was the cheese coins (Jason the wisecracker suggested that after we start eating them we call them "bitcoins"; a freshly minted joke that got quite a bit of currency, cheesy though it was).

Jason and I were clearly the least prepared in the "fancy realm" but a tie from Mark and some makeup from Christie and we were deemed acceptable. As the "honored guests" we also got the pleasure of serving the tea! Mark had not been informed ahead of time that he would be providing the entertainment. Alida had asked me to bring along The Book With No Pictures, a favorite of theirs to have adults read without knowing what was coming their way. Mark was such an excellent sport, even when he knew that Alida was clearly up to something. The reading was not a disappointment in the least.

We had one full day with them all together and savored a portion of it exploring and old abandoned country club near them that was chock full of trails and other interesting features (random stair cases, cool graffiti, etc...). Now I would not say that Terah initially savored it as "fear of getting lost" creates some big feels for her these days. Thanks to Dr. Becky and the Good Inside podcast, I felt more able to stay in the feels with her for a bit. So after a sort of rocky start, she was ready to take on crossing a log over a stream. My knees were a little week as I came behind her! We all made it across safely! There was stone skipping and rock hurling and I believe I'm the only one that slipped my foot into the stream and got wet! Probably my favorite part was the old tennis courts with some pretty inspiring messages all along the old wall. I think this one was my favorite!

That evening we bundled up in most of the clothes we had along to go enjoy milkshakes outside in freezing temps with Mark's sister and family. It was a memorable experience - our first Jake Shake ever!

And before we knew it, it was Tuesday morning and time to head home. But just the four of us for now, as Kali is remaining for a few more weeks to continue to milk our quarantine time for all it's worth. We aren't hearing much from her, but all the snippets of news have been positive!

We took an alternate route to/fro Pittsburgh in an effort to avoid toll roads, which are quite expensive for those of us without EZPass. We'll be doing that route from now on - taking 30 for a long way was much more pleasant, and included some snow 

We waited an extra day to take down the plastic barrier between us and my parents so that we could connect in person indoors with some dear friends who are being very careful to avoid COVID. We were so grateful for the circumstances lining up to enjoy some "normal" time with them before ending our time staying quarantined. And then it was time to "tear down the wall!" We are happily podded back up with my parents! That said, I would be dishonest if I were to say the "coming out of quarantine" has been smooth on my nerves. Rather the opposite. All the questions and conversations return - the discernment, the logistics, the decisions... Sigh! But there have been some really good things in the last few days, including the flow up and down the stairs between the two households at Tangly Woods. 

Here are three things I'm so glad the last few days included! Jason and I got to go and donate blood together. They gave us snazzy matching long-sleeve T-shirts.

Thursday we got to watch Luca again for the first time in almost a month. I had been dreaming about him so much. I was a little worried he might have forgotten us. He hadn't! I was so glad!! And I think it is safe to say that Luca might be the reason our 2022 blog book had to be split into two books to print. I am having a very hard time not taking a lot of photos of this little guy. He's on the move now, wanting us to walk him around holding his hands. He had a preference for Alida being the one to walk him, but he would often have her bring him to find me. When he's crawling around and I'm not in the room, he'll make a sound and I mimic him and he'll crawl towards my voice until he's not sure which way to go and then he'll call to me again and if I answer he'll continue on his way. He finds me every time and I love it!

The girls never want him to leave, but this Thursday Terah was chomping at the bit to make a cake so she turned her attention to that as soon as he headed home. I did not have to help much with the cake part but the energy was waning by the time the decorating and cleanup rolled around! We are very much enjoying their creations!

Then yesterday the younger gals joined me for our Friday errands around town including a special visit AND a play date! We got to enjoy lunch with our dear friends Don and Margaret and then shared our wooden Christmas puzzle with them. We got it all put together before we needed to keep moving. 

When we got home from town my mom had gotten her Christmas decorations away and all her snowflakes and "let it snow" signs were up. You can try to imagine how pleased she was to wake up today to this. If her decorations are TOO successful, we might have to have a conversation about just how many snow-themed things she can put around her place!!

It was gone by the afternoon! We are being treated to the evening sun shining on the sycamores along the stream once again!