Summer

It definately feels like summer! It has been a long time since I last posted. My cousin Caitlin, who is 10, comes over every day during the week while her mom is at work now. She and Anastasia love each other! I must say, it truly feels like summer as we spend our days watching cartoons, playing cards and swimming in our cheesy 10 x 3 foot blow-up pool as well as taking trips to downtown Fredericksburg and Washington DC. I am also teaching Caitlin how to sew. Thursday we drove to DC for the Folk Life Festival (which is free) and we had a great time. These awesome people from Ireland taught us how to do Clay Animation total Wallace and Grommit Style! I really enjoyed it and it was so hot it melted our clay so we were covered in red and green slime... what fun!

Hanging out with Caitlin all day makes me feel like I stepped back in time to be 10 again. Life seemed so simple and sweet and oh so dramatic. When life consisted of friendship bracelets and sticker albums, secret worlds and polly pockets, roller skating and sleep overs (especially cool were the back-to-back sleep overs). I was so fortunate to have one really great best friend... Tara. We met in third grade under the rule of Mrs. Eric, who was very possibly the meanest teacher at Park Ridge Elementary. We had a mutual friend, Victoria who invited both Tara and I over to her house for a sleep over. Tara and I became great friends instantly and remain the greatest of friends to this day. We had a secret world called TarabithaClare (after the book "Bridge to Terabithia") in the woods beside Tara's house that had a creek running through it. That was the first and possibly the only place I ever saw fairies as well as a momosa tree... the kind that troll hair grows on. We would spend countless hours in those woods, the pool, Tara's backyard hammock. We caught frogs in her small goldfish pond and found magic wherever we went. We played Tic-tac-toe until there was no more room on her front porch for any more chalk drawings. What a life eh? I guess the beauty of being a parent is that I get to do it all over again so long as I don't waste all of my time on housework and "getting things done."

Tara and I with popsicles. Summer, 1993

Same summer, modeling out matching

outfits and sticker-collections