A couple of weekend aces

Our weeks have a tendency to border on monotonous--work is, well, work, and once we get home, life revolves around what we're going to have for dinner, what errands we have to run, and how much we can cram into the evening before the girls have to get ready for bed. Once they're asleep, we finish up our other chores and relax until I pull myself off the couch to figure out what I'm going to wear the next day so it can be ironed. Sometimes, our weekends can be a bit monotonous, too--what errands need to be run, what meals we're going to prepare, what groceries we need to buy--but the last two weekends, I think the Serrano family deserves a pat on the back for knocking those 48 hours together out of the park.

Last Saturday, we ran to Target, to Costco, and to the Mexican store in the scary part of Peoria that sells the. best. tamales. ever. The girls were so very well behaved at all our stops (cupcake goldfish never hurt) that it made a surprise we'd been planning even more special: after lunch, we took our first trip to the pool in town.

I was apprehensive--the last time I'd been in a bathing suit was 2008, and two babies and six years later, things just don't look like they used to. But Josh was supportive and at the end of the day, I knew I needed to get over myself, not just for the girls, but for me too. It was a great decision, because we had a fantastic time.

After the pool, we came home and relaxed, and Josh made pico de gallo, rice, and Serrano beans to go with our tamales--a great end to a great day.

On Sunday, we ticked another item off the summer bucket list and had our first family picnic. We went to the park at the top of Grand View Drive, where we'd had Elaina's one year pictures taken, and spread out a blanket and had our lunch.

Trying out the self-timer--sort of successful!

After lunch, the girls played on the equipment, ran the bases, and were visited by a ginormous wild turkey that appeared out of nowhere.

Running the bases

On our way home from the park, we stopped at Big Lots to get a big jug of bubbles and found some other summer accessories as well.

The girls played in the pool for a bit, and we blew bubbles. When that fun was finished, we came inside to relax, and we made a lemon sorbet to welcome summer even more.

As we finished dinner, a strong storm was blowing into the area, which made for some beautiful clouds.

The rain came down in sheets for awhile, but the storm wasn't destructive or long. The sun came out as the girls were taking their baths, so we pulled them out of the tub so they could see it, too.

This weekend was just as spectacular. Mom and Dad came up on Friday afternoon, and they accompanied us to the Claud Ellen Days carnival. They always make it a point to come up for Claud Ellen Days, if for nothing else to spend time with the girls and go to the parade. But this was the first year they made it to the carnival as well.

Because I am awesome at documenting things, I took zero pictures of my parents with the girls.

That aside, the girls had a great, great time. It was such fun to watch them. This was our fourth year going, and each year they enjoy it a little bit more. I will be so sad when they are old enough to go without us.

Arcadia got to come, too

pure joy

Later, when the girls went to bed, Mom made a copy of the genealogy she and my aunt have been working on. Honestly, I find it all so fascinating. On my grandpa's mother's side, we can trace the family line all the way back to a man born in 1668 in Ireland. And there are some pretty awesome names in there, too: Minerva, Newberry, Eliza. My favorite belonged to my great-great grandma's sister: Columbia Ann. (You can guess how quickly Josh nixed that as a potential name should we have any more daughters.)

I scanned some more pictures and am so thankful we have them--I know most families don't. I attribute it to the fact that our family is relatively small, and that the old farm house my grandma lives in is the same house where my grandpa was raised, and where his mother was raised, and who knows how many generations back were as well.

My great-grandmother, Nettie as a young woman

My grampa as an infant

Yesterday, Josh and Elaina got up early and bought donuts for all of us for breakfast, and we took Mom and Dad to Picket Fence to look around (and so they could meet Miss Stephanie). Then I took Mom and Dad to Peoria so they could look at getting a new camera. It was a successful venture, and we brought lunch home and relaxed a bit before it was time for the parade.

We met Rita downtown and settled into our seats and sort of noticed how quiet it was. Well, that's because the parade started at 1:00, not 2:00. Womp, womp.

This says it all.

All was not lost, however. Since missing the parade had been my mistake (but seriously, when do parades ever not start at 2:00??), we took the girls back to the carnival for two rides and a chance to play one more game. Elaina got a blowup dolphin, which she accessorized when we came home.

Rainbow dolphin

Mom and Dad left not long after, and this time the only tears shed were mine. (They are leaving for Kenya with Rachel, Lips, and Nehemiah next week. I have been vacillating between being so excited they get to go and dreading their absence. Usually I am about 60/40, but when they pulled out of our driveway yesterday, it was about .0000005/99.999995. Only four more weeks til they're there and back, right?)

Today was a wonderfully lowkey day.

After a few weeks' absence, we made it back to church, and I got a few pictures of the girls in their matchy-matchy outfits (thank you, Zulily).

Still haven't figured out how to get them both smiling and looking at the camera at the same time...

Chasing a butterfly

After church, the rest of the day has been filled with relaxation, playing, and reading (just shy of halfway through Gathering Blue, the second book in The Giver set, and it is already amazing). And to top it off, Josh made quadruple berry preserves which are, for the record, amazing.

Strawberry, blueberry, black raspberry, and red raspberry

All in all, quite a successful four days, indeed.

Finding Mildred

In late December 1916, my great-grandparents had their first child, a daughter they named Mildred Jane. Less than two years later, she died.

We have so little of her.

A china doll, with delicate features and a green dress. A lock of golden hair, a color not unlike my mother's had been as a child, or mine, or the color Elaina's is now. A baby ring that is tiny, tiny, with tiny hearts printed on the band. And a yellowed slip of newspaper upon which her obituary was published.

Mildred Jane Copes, only child of Mr and Mrs Clinton Copes was born Dec 30 1916, and after four weeks of serious illness, died August 27, 1918 at their home 4 and 1/2 miles west of Vermont,  aged 1 year, 7 months and 28 days. [...]  Despite all the tender loving care that parents could give, despite medical skill, and the constant care of a competent nurse nothing could stay the ravages of the disease. With her bright eyes and pleasant smile, little Mildred was a lovable child; and while this bereavement is beyond our understanding it is not ours to question. Some day, some time we'll understand. [..]

There were no pictures, no memories, no stories to tell us who she had been. Just a doll, a lock of hair, a ring, and a newspaper clipping.

My grandpa was born in November 1919, a little more than a year after his sister died, and though his parents were disappointed he was not another girl, it seems they made a conscious effort to not make the same mistake twice. We have pictures of him as an infant, dressed in a white gown; the distinctive dimple on his chin that tells us the sweet baby in the picture is him. We have pictures of him as a toddler with ringlets curled into his hair, and pictures of him as a little boy, posed with his brother, Wendell. We have pictures of him as a child, barefooted on the farm, with cousins, with Wendell, with the family dog. We have pictures of him as a young man with his classmates, dressed in overalls and downcast eyes, and as a high school graduate with wavy hair (red, I am told) and a slight smile that hid his propensity to tease.

In fact, we have pictures that go much further back than my grandfather. There is one of Nettie and Clint, my grandfather's parents, on their wedding day in 1911. They are posed stoically, he, trim in a suit, and she, dressed in white with an impossibly tiny waist. There is one of Nettie and her sisters, Effie and Annie, standing behind their seated parents in front of the farmhouse. There is one of my great-great grandparents, Thomas and Amanda, in their later years. There is one of Nettie, who was born in 1881, as a little girl, maybe 3 or 4, with curls and light eyes. There are pictures of relatives long forgotten and twice removed. Among the others, there is even a tintype.

But of Mildred, there was nothing.

It is nearly incomprehensible in this age of selfies, newborn portraits, and 3-D sonograms that we have no way of seeing what she looked like, who she was. But in some ways, it is fitting. Mildred's legacy has always been her absence. She was the little girl lost, to her parents, to her brothers, to us.

Or so we thought.

Last week, Mom showed me some pictures that she, my aunt, and Grandma had been going through. Some I had seen before--Clint and Nettie's wedding picture, Grampa with Uncle Wendell as little boys. Among them, though, was one I hadn't seen before, of a sweet baby, around 9-12 months old, dressed in white. At first I thought it was a picture of Grandpa I hadn't seen before: the baby in the picture has the same tiny chin dimple that you can see in others we have of him. And then Mom called my attention to something I'd overlooked--the baby is wearing a necklace, and a ring. The same ring that sits on my dresser as a gift from my mother, tiny and gold with little hearts printed on the band.

Mildred's ring.

After nearly 100 years, our little girl lost has been found.

Making the old new again

Yesterday was a bit of an adventure.

It started out innocently enough. After a quick breakfast and a trip out to the strawberry planter to sample the first red berry of the season, we piled into the car and headed to my folks' for church and the girls' very first sleepover at Gramma and Pampah's.  I had such a nice time seeing the faces of those who loved me through my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, and I loved that Elaina and Ellie got to sit with my parents in the same pew where I often sat with my grandparents as a child. Josh and I agreed that for all the opportunities available at a church the size of the one we now attend, there is perhaps a bit of heart missing when loud guitars and drums and praise music replace quiet hymns and pianos and prayer requests said for those we know by name.

After church, we visited Mom's friend, Josie, who lives in a nearby nursing home, and then headed home for lunch. We relaxed for a bit, but when Elaina kept not-so-subtly asking when Josh and I were going to beat it so the sleepover fun could begin, we decided it was time to kiss them and head out.

Clearly, this decision devastated them:

When we first started talking to Mom and Dad about a sleepover, Ellie was a bit younger, so Josh and I decided we'd stay in Macomb "just in case" we needed to do a middle of the night rescue. Despite being home to a state university, Macomb is nearly as boring as Colchester (hard to imagine), where Feldos, an ice cream shack that made the best lemon ice cream and was the only thing Colchester had going for it, finally sold after being on the market for no fewer than 15 years.

Undeterred, we decided to make the best of our staycation and explore local attractions. Our first stop was Lake Argyle, which Josh knows best from the massive flea market sale that is held there every Labor Day. It is only a few miles from my parents' house, but we'd only actually driven around it once, the first autumn we were dating. I had decided the best way to blow a couple hours would be to rent a paddle boat or canoe, so after we drove the winding roads around the park, we headed back to the bait shop to get our gear and relax on the lake.

We walked into the bait shop at 2:02. We were back in the car at 2:05. Why? Because on a holiday weekend, on a beautiful Sunday where the breeze was just enough to cut the humidity of an otherwise gorgeous day, the bait shop closes at 3:00. And you can only rent equipment for an hour. And getting there two minute past "cut off time" is apparently not close enough. This information would have been nice to know before we spent 20 minutes driving around the park. And I'm pretty sure the young man who told us we couldn't go out on the lake was probably born when I was in high school.

So we did what any other self-respecting American couple would do. We took a selfie and left.

And thus began an afternoon of second choices and second chances.

I had a vague memory that Macomb had a lake, too, so we headed into town, to where I thought the lake was. Spoiler: it wasn't. There were, however, several ponds that Josh enjoyed bringing to my attention, in case, you know, those ponds were actually the lake we were seeking. We drove around for awhile in an ill-fated attempt to quell motion sickness and to validate the memory lurking in my brain, until finally we gave up and consulted God's gift to the modern lost, the cell phone.

Directions in hand, we decided to give this adventure one more go. Josh was probably ready to cash it and find something else to do (he had suggested a coffee and used book store--which would have been fine if Macomb had a coffee shop or used book store that were actually open on Sunday afternoon), but I was determined to make this happen. We were about a half mile from the entrance to the lake park when this happened:

Josh laughed. I think I almost cried. But I am nothing if not stubborn, so I insisted that surely there must be a detour, or a way around that would get us to the lake without much delay.

Silly, stubborn girl.

45 minutes later, through winding hills where the green rushed by at a nauseating clip, we finally found the entrance to the park. By this point, we both needed to clear our heads and stretch our legs, so we parked the car and took a walk. There were no canoes or paddle boats to be had, but the weather was so nice and we had had such fun getting lost that we made the best of it and daydreamed about what magnificent vacations await us in the coming years, perhaps even in the coming months.

After leaving the lake, we decided to really up the vacation ante and head to...wait for it...Farm King. Josh wanted to look for more drip irrigation equipment, because, after all, you can take the man out of his garden, but you can't take the garden out of the man. (I should note that we did this before checking into our hotel because Farm King closes at 5:00 on Sundays, and it was already almost 4:00). Josh was, of course, quite excited:

Me, not so much...

The trip was a success. Josh bought the stuff he needed to ensure that our garden will have plenty to drink all summer long, and he found some rainbow carrot seeds that I'm excited to plant this fall.

At this point, it was time to check into our hotel.

It was clean. It was quiet (mostly because I think we were one of two rooms actually occupied). And it was, for lack of a better word, a bit skeevy. This is a lesson for the future. When the price difference between two mid-grade hotels is about $20 a night, spend the extra $20.

By then, it was time to eat, so we headed to El Rancherito for dinner. I hadn't eaten there since high school, and it was yummier than I remembered, and certainly yummier than the last Mexican food we'd eaten which made 3 of the 4 of us ill. Josh got carne asada and I had carne verde.

My only regrets? Filling up on chips and salsa before the main dish came out, and not specifying corn tortillas.

After dinner, we continued our Tour of All the Summer Things Macomb Has to Offer and went to Ball Fore for some mini-golf. Josh will probably tell you that he won, but that, of course, would be wrong. Sure, he had fewer strokes at the end of the game, but I should have been awarded something for style points, not to mention totally destroying him on a hole where he gave up after 7 strokes and I successfully completed in the same. I'm in to creative scoring when it's to my benefit, but I suppose we'll just have to rematch to ensure the rightful winner (me) does, in fact, win.

When our mini-golfing outing was complete, we went to the one remaining locale where many of my Friday high school nights were spent with my friends because, after all, what else was there to do? That's right: Josh and I went to Wal-Mart. It turned out to be one of our most successful ventures of the entire day, because I got exactly what we came for (body wash, because 1) who wants to smell like hotel soap, 2) especially when said hotel is skeevy, and 3) I'd forgotten my soap at home), and also walked away with a new loofah, a big pack of Twizzlers (thank you, impulse section), and a box of Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuit mix, because who knew those were being mass-marketed, and what if Kroger doesn't carry them?

With goodies in hand, we headed back to our hotel, where we spent a relaxing evening reading, catching up on social media, and watching My 600-lb Life on TLC. This morning, we slept in 'til 8:15 (glorious) and had the "complementary breakfast", the highlight of which for me was a mostly tasteless banana and a bite of Josh's frozen-but-not-frozen waffles. You get what you pay for, folks. Then it was time to pick up the girls and enjoy the rest of our Memorial Day.

Really, I had a great time. I get to "explore" where Josh grew up every day--we go to his childhood home 5 days a week, and our church is held in his old high school. Yesterday, he got to explore the quiet little town I called home, and the town a few miles away that was vastly more entertaining when I was growing up. As we headed out of Colchester this morning, I repeated something I've often thought about my hometown: It's a nice place to grow up, and it's a nice place to grow old, but it doesn't hold much if you're in between. This weekend, though, because I got to share it with him, the in-between was actually quite a bit of fun. And maybe it's not so bad, after all.

TBT Stories {4}: Memorial Day Muddin'

I am participating in Throwback Thursday: Stories @ The Mom Creative

Memorial Day Mudding

For a span of about seven years, one of my favorite weekends of the entire year came as the bright green of spring mellowed into the blossoming lush of early summer, when Rachel and I would head down to Sarah's family farm for a weekend of camping, four-wheeling, and, no matter how cold or dry, mudding in the pasture creek.

I don't have words for what that time meant. I loved every single second of it.It always started Saturday afternoon. We would take the four-wheelers out to the hay hill and speed fast enough to hit the rill halfway up that would send us momentarily out of our seats. Our laughs echoed through the woods, and for hours we completely forgot how consuming and important things like telephones and technology were.

Sarah and Rachel on the four-wheeler

Apparently Sarah didn't trust me to drive :)

We'd spend the evenings roasting hotdogs over the fire built in an old tractor tire rim, making s'mores, and lavishing attention on Dana's poodle, Josh, who would paw and whine in a most pathetic and convincing way until someone picked him up and scratched his chest.

The next morning, we'd return to showers and civilization, and as a family (because really, Rachel and I were never treated any other way--we were adopted Wolfords, through and through), head to church where Mark, Sarah's dad, gave the message. After church, it was time to head back to the farm for a quick lunch, and then, my favorite part of the weekend started.

Freed of Sunday finery, we'd get dressed our grubbiest clothes and pile into the back of Granddad's pickup truck. Down the deserted county road where we'd go sledding in the winter, he'd pull into the cow pasture. The cows, familiar with the truck, bellowed their greetings and followed us over to where the creek (or, as Sarah always said, the "crik") babbled quietly through the country side.

We'd get out, the adults on hand would snap a couple pictures, and then the fun began.

Memorial Day 1999--the only year Rachel didn't join us

Clean...for now

No how warm the day, the water was always, always freezing. Like jumping into a pool, the only way was to get over it was to just jump in. And besides...waiting was dangerous.

Sarah never saw it coming :)

It was disgusting and filthy, and sometimes when I grabbed for a handful of mud, I found out too late it was sticky and darker and decidedly not mud at all.

But it was so much fun. So, so, so much fun.

When it was over, we'd clean up as best we could and then huddle under a tarp for the drive back to the farm.

We'd rotate showers, thankful for the hot water, and laugh about how sometimes we'd forget to clean our ears out before we were out of the shower and dressed in warm, clean clothes. Then it was time for more four-wheeling, more roasted hotdogs, more laughter and stories and heart-full moments, until the embers glowed and we had to retire to our tents and sleeping bags.

The next morning, we were sometimes woken by the suffocating heat blanketing the inside of the tent, or the piercing cold that made us retreat to Sarah's folks' camper for warmth. One year, a bull who was decidedly unhappy about his separation from his lady friends voiced his displeasure so loudly that it was the only alarm clock we needed. We'd eat breakfast, and maybe take one or two more rides on the four-wheeler before the weekend came to a close.

The cast of characters varied a bit over the seven years I got to be part of this, but it was always me and Rachel, Sarah and Dana. The last time we went was the year Josh and I were married, and suddenly, we were all grown up with husbands and jobs and then children of our own. But every time Memorial Day rolls around, a little part of my heart is back on Sarah's family farm, gearing up for four-wheeler trips up and down the hay field, donning my old clothes, and standing in the middle of a winding little creek with a handful of mud, aiming at the best moments of my early summer.

   

A picture that so perfectly captures a moment bears repeating :)