Fairy Festival

For the last few years we've gone to the fairy festival at Spotswood Farm in Pennsylvania with J, M, and S. For a festival, this one is pretty good. It is calmer than the RenFair, and probably a bit more interesting than the sheep and wool festival. More to do, less to have to buy.

And you can wear fairy wings all year. Yes, it is a fairy festival, but there are people in all sorts of costumes. Or not. All good.

We do some of the same things every year. Like ...

Face painting. C11 never does this. But S10 and Q10 did.

Pouting S10.

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Ice cream.

Making fairy houses:

And new for this year, meeting Alexander Hamilton ... oops, C11 tells me this is LuLu.

Thanks to C11 for her photos!!!

The Lion King Experience (school play)

Q10 joined the school play and got the role of Zazu, the king's advisor. She has an incredible sense of comedic timing.

Here she is before the show in her costume. She designed it herself:

I do not have an incredible sense of when I need to start taking video. I missed much of her action. But she was fantastic.

Here are the bits I DO have. I might update with more photos later TCR did a nice job of catching stills.

Every spring

Every spring this car has something happen to it.

1) Squirrels chewed through the engine harness
2) Dad crashed into the bumper on his 70th birthday. I still have a little hole
3) Somebody did a minor hit an run. They probably backed into it. The dent was small, but annoying.
4) and now, somebody decided that it was the perfect canvas for grey spray paint.

It was, actually. The perpetrator could have hit the grey Honda and it would have increased the value of the car.

In the end, it wasn't a big deal. A friend told us we might be able to get it off with soap, water, and elbow grease. I started from the left, C46 started from the right, we scrubbed and met in the middle 20 minutes later. And the car is back to normal.

Q9 becomes Q10 (happy birthday! A decade of awesome!)

Yep, she did it. She made it into double digits. Not like we actually thought she wouldn't. Unfortunately for her, she was sick and fever-y the two days before her birthday, and planned party, so she (she! not me) sensibly cancelled the party.

But we had a family celebration, cake, emotional meltdown, and gifts. All to be expected.

Actually, her actual birthday Q10 had a field trip to the science convention in DC. It was a giant convention for school kids with science stuff. It was pretty amazing. I chaperoned, and it was so incredibly disorganized, maybe because this was the first year our school went. The buses, the lines, the communication. All bad. I mean, we got there and got home, so that was good. But we probably could have seen and done more if we understood what actually was happening.

So, here are Q10 and S9 at the convention.

Then home and birthday. You'll notice two things. 1) Q10 is wearing a lovely crown that her friend S9 made her. Yes, Awesome is spelled wrong. And 2) she is wearing feathers and a feather boa. Stay tuned for the school play. She is AMAZING (Awesome, I mean Awsome, even).

And her cake was a white cake with whipped cream and strawberries and strawberry jam. It was 100% delicious. 

 

Anyway, we're pretty pleased that she's been with us for a decade. Our decade of Q has been wonderful.

Bike ride

C11 and her friend M11 and I took a bike ride to go to the bagel place in College Park. We biked there via Rt. 1, however, and I wasn't interested in doing that on the way home. I'm turning into one of those people (mothers) who is always worried about cars hitting her children who bike because her children can't bike in a particularly straight line.

Ug. Sorry, children. I really do try to let you do things you can do. But, cars, bikes, worries.

So, instead of taking Rt. 1 home we went around on the bike path, and C11 & M11 found the exercise stops, and wanted to do them all. It was kind of a hoot.

Videos! They wanted me to video everything. 

 

I've got to take these girls out again. It was a great bike ride, fun on the exercise equipment, and a bagel. What could be better? Oh, a stop at the bookstore would have made their day complete. It wasn't open, though.