October 19, 2011
Last Saturday turned out to be a gorgeous fall day. Benton and a few of his friends coordinated one of their get-togethers on a nearby field for a pick-up soccer game. I decided I sneak over and try to get some pictures of the action.
When I arrived…they had decided to hang out on the playscape next to the field instead of starting their game, so, instead of 12-year-olds in action, I walked a two-mile loop through the neighborhood and tried to get some good shots of the season.
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October 18, 2011
Our camping frequency has dropped off dramatically since we’ve moved to Ohio, so we decided in the middle of the summer to simply pick a weekend and make it happen. The trip was in late September, and we opened up the activity to a range of friends. As it turned out, my sister flew up from Austin to attend, the Pages (with their three kids), one of my co-workers and his daughter, and another of Benton’s friends all came. It turned out to be the right-sized crowd, and it was an easy-going, compatible bunch. We headed down to Hocking Hills, which is widely regarded as one of the more scenic areas in Ohio (and where we camped over Thanksgiving two years ago).
The boys devised a 2-on-2 football game that seemed to run semi-continuously throughout the weekend:
Alana and Claire were inseparable:
Drew and Ella at Upper Falls near Old Man’s Cave:
Alana at Old Man’s Cave:
A walk in the woods — Julie, Amy, Ella, Drew:
Julie at the dam near our campsite:
We ate well, with corn chowder, tamale pie, and pineapple upside-down cake for dinner on Saturday night:
Randy was recovering from rotator cuff surgery, so he got his daily physical therapy from Amy:
And, on Saturday evening, we pulled out some Michigan-acquired sparklers and turned the kids loose:
Not a bad weekend getaway at all!
Posted in Alana, Benton, Carson, Julie 1 Comment »
October 17, 2011
While I am far behind on posting, and Alana did turn six back in June, and this is a post about Alana’s birthday party…the party occurred less than two weeks ago.
You see, June was a busy month. School was over, summer travel was kicking into high gear, and Alana turned six. But, she didn’t get a party, which wasn’t a big deal…at the time.
Apparently, Alana quietly stewed off and on all summer about this non-party. Her concern, as best we can tell, was that, while her birth certificate and the calendar might claim that she was six years old, the absence of a formal party to recognize the occasion might very well have thrown the universe completely out of balance. By Julie’s count, Alana had at least three separate “birthday recognition events,” but none of those included an Alana-centric gathering of her peers to recognize her next step toward teen-hood.
SO, she decided that a tea party was in order. Julie, not wanting to discourage industriousness, told Alana to have at it.
And then Julie got herself thoroughly sucked into the planning and executing the event.
Throughout the planning Alana insisted that this was a NO BOYS affair — an insistence that had every Y chromosome in the house breathing a sigh of relief about.
Like all good tea parties, this one included an actual silver tea service (which had been polished maybe once previously since it came into our possession):
The “tea” was served (actual tea was offered, but most of the guests opted for sour lemonade — made intentionally sour so that they would need to drop sugar cubes into it to sweeten it up):
The hostess welcomed her guests and outlined the rules of a game she had devised for entertainment:
Like all proper tea parties, after sipping and munching, the party headed to the basement for a post-tea spot of dancing.
And, like all good spots of dancing (or, at least, like all good events with a group of kids on a basement stage where a ceiling-mounted black light is available), the dancing turned into a rave:
With calories appropriately burned, the party returned to the first floor for candles and brownies with the NOW properly six-year-old hostess:
And NOW Alana feels like she truly is six years old.
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October 16, 2011
Alana has had a busy fall of soccer, which she has thoroughly enjoyed.
On the day these pictures were taken, her father proposed that she put her hair into a pony tail, but she insisted that was not necessary.
Hanging out a Benton’s game — a girl’s gotta’ just chill sometimes:
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October 15, 2011
It’s been a busy fall on a lot of fronts, which is my excuse for not posting. I’ll see if I can get caught up with a few posts over the next few days.
Starting off, Benton made his first foray into school-run sports by running cross country this fall. We’re not sure where exactly he got the idea (none of his close friends ran), but he’d announced in the spring that he thought he would give it a try in the fall, and give it a try he did! What I now realize is that cross country — any distance running I suppose — is something of an engineering problem, in that the goal is to find a pace during the core of the race and then starting the final sprint in such a way that you’re out of gas right as you arrive at the finish line (but not before). Below are a couple of pictures from one of the invitational tournaments near the end of the season. Benton bested his personal best in this race by over half a minute, finishing the 2-mile course in 13 minutes and 20 seconds — a solid, middle-of-the-pack finish in the varsity race (7th and 8th graders):
We headed straight from that race over to some soccer fields just east of Columbus so he could knock out his second fall sport — soccer. Benton is now on a team in a mid-level league that has a couple of his good friends on it. The team is one of the best in their league, having lost only one game as they head into the end-of-season tournament (that loss came on the one weekend when Benton…and his two friends…were off camping — more on that in a later post). As with cross country, Benton is a solid, above-average player who genuinely enjoys the sport and his teammates, so that has made for a fun fall.
All in all, it’s been an active fall!
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August 21, 2011
It turns out, our long weekend in and around Cooperstown, New York appears to warrant three posts rather than the initially planned two. Rather than staying in a hotel, Julie found Shadow Brook Campground, which had a good-sized camper already on-site that we could rent, a small pond that allowed fishing (no license required), and paddle boats available for a very nominal fee ($5/half hour). That seemed like it would make for more interesting downtime, and it did!
The Pond
We were in the camper tucked back in the trees (you can see some blue chairs in front of it)
The Fishing
Carson had a hook in the water within 15 minutes of us arriving at the site:
Benton also got into the action:
And, at one point, even Alana (with doll in tow) gave it a shot:
The Paddle Boats
We didn’t get around to renting a paddle boat until our last evening, but all three kids piled on…
…and quickly decided that the fun thing to do would be to paddle through the fountain in the middle of the pond:
The Playground
Alana went swimming, but, before swimming, she tried out the playground:
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August 20, 2011
Below are some other pictures from our long weekend in and around Cooperstown, New York.
Alana Knows the Art of Baseball Spectating
(My favorite picture from the weekend)
Around Cooperstown
Downtown Cooperstown is eminently walkable
And…eminently stoppable (for ice cream):
Since Benton doesn’t eat ice cream, he got a blue sorbet/gelato or somesuch:
And…a gratuitous picture of a bumblebee on a flower outside a house on a side street:
Posted in Alana, Benton, Carson 1 Comment »
August 18, 2011
Summer’s winding down, but we managed to squeeze in one more family trip before school starts. This one was a 9.5-hour drive (each way) to Cooperstown, New York, to see a friend play the first couple of games of a youth baseball tournament, to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, and to check out whatever other sites there were in the area (as it turns out, there are quite a few!). I’m going to add up the miles our minivan traveled from spring break through the end of the summer at some point, but the fact that the kids weren’t even remotely fazed by 19 hours in the car from a Thursday to a Monday says something about their conditioning!
Julie — born a half a generation too late to really catch her calling as a travel agent — wound up scoring us a spot at a campground near town. It wasn’t camping, exactly, as we stayed in a camper that was situated on-site, but it was fun and convenient!
The baseball: 104 teams from across the country. It kicked off with an opening ceremony followed by a skills competition on Saturday night, then 3 days of 2-games-a-day play for tournament seeding, followed by a single-elimination tournament. The Austin Bats went 4-2 in the seeding, so they wound up as the no. 36 seeded team. They then won their first two games in the tournament before losing to the no. 4 seed, which went on to ultimately lose to the no. 1 seed to just miss being in the championship game. Not a bad showing at all!
Saturday Evening at Dreams Park (HDR-Enhanced)
The Parking Lot of Dreams Park (the fields are down below in the background)
Just After the Opening Ceremonies: ~1,200 kids!
Jack — The Kid We Were There to See
Jack Gets a Hit
Jack Digs for First Base
Posted in Alana, Benton, Carson, Julie 3 Comments »
August 4, 2011
On something of a lark, I flew down to New Orleans for a long weekend a couple of weeks ago to meet up with some industry peers whom I mostly know through Twitter and blogs, but most of whom I’d met in person at least once. It turned out to be a pretty interesting trip. I snapped a few pictures that seemed worth sharing:
A heavily HDR-enhanced photo down a row of above-ground tombs in Lafayette Cemetery:
A sculpture behind Cafe du Monde:
A house sparrow behind Cafe du Monde:
And…this just made me laugh. It’s a sign on the gate to the police station in the French Quarter. You might be a tourist area if the police department not only sells T-shirts, but advertises that fact:
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August 3, 2011
I wasn’t along for this leg of the trip, but it appears that Julie took a couple of photos, so I’m posting them and describing as best I can. En route back from Maine to Columbus, Julie stopped off for the weekend at the Hallacs’ in Armonk, New York. Allegedly, Trice and Jimmy were there (owners of the house and parents of the three girls who live there), as were Paul and Patty (parents of Markus, who live in Brooklyn and drove out for a visit), but no photo evidence of their presence was captured.
Benton told me that he spent so much time in the Hallacs’ pool at one point that he had large chunks of skin coming off of his feet (lovely image, that):
Some sort of posed photos with 5 of the 7 kids captured (the twins were apparently off to bed or elsewhere):
l-r: Alana, Benton, Anna, Carson, Markus
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