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one rainy night
Last night was amusing. And low cost. Incredibly low cost. Riley had to work. Kevin had to work. I was basically just looking for something to do with the five remaining children and their one mother. My first thought was to drive down the road a little bit and picnic and play by this cool stream/waterfall area near us. But the skies looked grey. And I didn’t feel like eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So I loaded up my rag tag team and headed into town. (They really were ragtag. Mosely’s green skirt did not match her blue shirt – neither in style nor in color. Although London’s attire…
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tradition
tradition: a long-established custom that has been passed on. Yes. Perfect. I love tradition. I love events and details and activities that you do year after year, holiday after holiday, season after season. And I love July Fourth. Love it. Love the mad rush that leads up to the day. Love the kids helping decorate the porch so it looks all shades of blue, red and white festive. Love the tattoos that every kid chooses to slap across their cheeks. I think part of what I love is how you can try to make so many particulars the same – the food, the location, the order of events (guns, tubing,…
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Resurfacing.
Last week we were in Virginia. The Mother Land. My state of birth. The birth state of four of our six children. And she was beautiful. I know I will be dissecting last week for many posts and tossing out photos like candy on Halloween. Or like sparklers on July Fourth. It was wonderful to see the gang all lined up for our Camp Fourth week. And it was goodgoodgood to be in a landscape as familiar as the tops of my children’s heads. I’ve missed that. The dip and the curves of the back roads that lead to my parents’ former farm and my framily’s current farm. The willow…
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forty-two hours. full and worthwhile.
Last weekend. 42 hours. 14.5 of them spent in the confines of the Suburban. One graduation celebration for this sweet nephew. The kids all running around in the post-ten-o-clock dark, glow sticks waving, skin sticky from the Atlantic ocean wind, pine cones tossed in the fire pit and you ask yourself, “Why don’t we do this more often?” And you remember the six-turned-eight hour drive and the rearranging of work schedules and the packing of the past day and the laundry of the future day. But who really cares about any of that when a fire is blazing and your big brother is smoking clams on the grill and your…
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photo dump. true and false.
We are home. The Suburban has been unloaded. Two loads of laundry have been washed. I’m going to unload a plethora of photos on you. And relay a few true/false statements for you as well. Get comfy, here we go. Hiking is a fantastic whole-family-inclusive activity. True. The predicted rain ruined our first day of outdoor adventure. False. Hiking with a guide allows you to learn details you would not otherwise know. True. There is a tree called the black birch whose branches taste like spearmint and can serve as a natural mouth freshener. True. Our N.O.C. guide, Charles, taught us this. True. Charles made a friend of Piper the moment…
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Adventure: Day Two
Day two. It’s like this. Internet service is sketchy in the mountains. We are traveling with six children who are off their normal routine of eating and sleeping. One of them is not yet even two years old. I can only type this post from my iPhone. And we do not always have service. As previously mentioned. And I do not yet know how to add a photo to a post through the iPhone. King Solomon is that good. I am not. So. Forgive this abbreviated post. Please check out the many photos I have been sending through Twitter. (When it is available.). And trust that when I return home…
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Adventure: Day One
A Keigley trip always looks a little like chaos. Mostly organized chaos, but chaos nonetheless. And since I am blogging on the road, a new adventure for me, this post may sound a little like chaos. Organized chaos, maybe, but chaos nonetheless. (What I am actually trying to say is – this post might be a bit like Virginia Woolf’s writing. Scattered.) Today we made it to Gatlinburg. We let the kids ride go-carts even before we bothered to eat lunch. On every family trip we always ask the question beforehand, “What’s the one thing you most want to do on this trip? If we were in the car driving…
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The Hawke Has Landed
I sat down tonight (or last night, if you read this during the day, like regular folk. or tonight if you are alece and you read somehow in cyber space over my shoulder as I type in the nearly wee hours.) to type a little post about something else. I can’t even remember what right now. Because I was interrupted by a boy named Bergen who was telling me stories about his recent ManTrip 2011. It was really too late for him to be awake, but since he arrived home and crashed after the trip from about 5 p.m. until about 7 p.m. – wrecking both tonight’s rest and possibly…
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Want to take an adventure with our family? (Virtually. Of course.)
Spring break is next week. Well, spring break according to Riley’s school schedule. And since we like Riley and want to include her in our adventures, we declare next week to be our entire family’s spring break as well. Gas prices are, um, frighteningly high. Especially when you drive a gas machine like our Suburban. So we are staying closer to home this year. Just through the mountains a bit to our neighboring state of Tennessee. Gatlinburg, to be precise. Sure, it’s a little touristy with their never-ending pancake houses and fudge factories on every corner. Their mini golf up a hill and their family dinner shows that seem to…
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treasures, surprises: the makings of a childhood
It’s been too rainy to be outside most days this week. So when the sun finally came shining through, the kids did not find it a difficult task to convince me to let them play outside. Despite the fact that we all knew (although none of us spoke of it) that outside play would probably end in mud and mess and varying degrees of wet and/or ruined shoes and clothes. And it was a messy adventure. And a Keen shoe is M.I.A. And the path in front of our house is covered in crumpled wet clothes that were required to be shed pre-entry into our home. And the area beside…
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How To Win Friends & Influence People: Jr. Edition
We visited our favorite museum last week. Hands on! in Hendersonville. Thanks to my sweet dad our family can visit that wonderland any day we choose this year with our handy-dandy museum membership. (That sounded trite. It wasn’t. I seriously am so thankful for that gift and so thankful for the museum and I wish someone was paying me to say this stuff, but they so aren’t.) As I was saying . . . We played at the museum. I took a lot of photos using a new technique Page showed me the last time he and his family were visiting. Fox discovered paints and felt it was perfectly acceptable…
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Gingerbread Houses at Grove Park
The Christmas Chain has been ripped open every morning with eager anticipation. The words on the little paper strips have led us to watching a few more Christmas classics – like Pee Wee’s Christmas Special. (Yeah, I don’t believe that’s considered a classic at any home but ours. It’s an insane little piece of 80’s/90’s television. Please, please, confide to me that someone else has watched this show so I won’t feel as if our family is odd alone.) We’ve baked banana bread and drawn Christmas cards for our neighbors. We’ve visited our local children’s museum and created gingerbread houses. But there have also been some paper requests that have…
