Sightings this Week

Peppa Pancake!

Publix Pilgrim People...Ring!

We were in CVS, not looking for discounted fall items, when we spotted this sign:

The girls have in the past snagged some super cute holiday beanie boos on clearance, so it caught our eye.

They decided that this time they would pass up the deal!

A Few Pretty Much Unrelated Pictures

Here are some pictures from the time we returned from our trip to Arkansas until recently - in chronological order I think.  I would like to get back into the routine of posting routinely, but for now a catch up post will have to do.

In the summer, we try to do a lot of wet activities.  Otherwise, the summer gets a little oppressive.  I know that it gets hotter almost everywhere else, but it stays hot here from April until October. 

One thing I appreciate about Miami is the availability of Caribbean products.  Champagne cola is a common Caribbean soda and it seems that every country has it's own version.  It is similar to cream soda.  This one is Haitian.

Natalie excelled in swimming lessons this summer - a big change from last year when she refused to go off the diving board!  She loves to swim.  Fortunately for Irene, seeing that change in Natalie was encouraging to me throughout her 2 weeks of swimming lessons, which accomplished very little.

Summer = Bufo Toads, this is a smallish one.

The Village of Palmetto Bay put up this unusual piece or artwork in a roundabout.  They have another one that is a very dramatic fish sculpture, so this one was pretty puzzling.  I think it was unpopular because they removed it.

For Irene's birthday we got her a pony ride - there is a stable in Davey where you can rent a pony for half and hour and you (the parent) lead the pony with your child riding.  They have a huge area to ride in, a big improvement over a regular pony ride.  Irene was beyond delighted.

We went ice skating on the first day of public school.   It looks like Annalise is alone, but there were several other homeschooling families with us.

We found this black racer at the park one day.

Natalie and our neighbor's maltipoo, Milo

Caleb went on a trip to the Cayman Islands with the church youth group and brought back a rum cake, it was pretty small, so we decide to try making one ourselves, this is it:

Some friends from Trinidad brought us some Trini hot chocolate.  It was not powdered, it looked like a  big chocolate bean and you grated it into hot milk.  It also has some spices and orange peel, so it wasn't exactly like Swiss Miss.

We did a unit on American history, I had wanted to make several recreated pictures, but this is the only one we did - it's the Gold Rush.

Annalise has been cartwheeling all over the place.  She even learned how to do a 1 handed cartwheel.

Irene riding off into the sunset on her balance bike - which I highly recommend.  She can already ride a regular bike without training wheels, but we don't have a small enough one currently for that to be safe.

Belated Birthdays

I'm overdue to catch up on birthday posts.  So here are a bunch of belated birthdays...

In July Irene turned 4 - she did not mind at all that I got the color scheme wrong on her Elsa birthday cake! 

Four is such a delightful age.   It seems like she is getting smarter by the minute...and she learns SO much from her older siblings! 

Also in July, Don came visit and we celebrated his turning the big 4-oh

Caleb turned 13 (13!) in September.

His cake was a chocolate hurricane:

And Annalise turned 11 in October - this is a dropped ice cream cone cake:

We learned that you need to let the ganache cool and thicken a bit before you pour it over the cake and also that you should make the ice cream part of the cake out of a light colored cake - not chocolate!

Her birthday welcomed two little cuties to our family - Peanut and Nutmeg, they are Robo Dwarf Hamsters.

The Last Week in Arkansas and Back Home Via Dallas

As promised, here are some highlights from the last week of our trip to Arkansas, which was in June.  One of my favorite things at home was to be there during a huge emergence of lightning bugs.  It was really amazing.

We visited some relatives and saw some old things of my Aunt Net's.  I spent many Sunday afternoons at her house as a child and as a teenager helped her around the house to make some money.  She had some old dolls that she had sent off to a doll hospital to be fixed up - this is one of them:

She died more than 20 years ago, this was at her daughter's house. 

Caleb got in some extra fishing!

My parents' dogs got some extra loving:

A few weeks after we went home, the dog next to Irene - Tuck - got lost and was never found.  After a few weeks my parents decided the other dog, Nip, needed a companion and stopped at a shelter to see if they could find a good one.  They had a little dog that is very similar in color to these two and about the same size, so they have two dogs again.

Annalise wanted to make California rolls for everyone, so she did!  I don't think my mom will ever use the rest of the Sushi rice :)

Then finally it was time to head back to Miami, we returned through Dallas, so we got to stand on the state line:

And we got to see the Giant Eyeball!

Irene had been very curious about a picture of this eyeball in the National Geographic for Kids magazine.  Not unlike Molly the Pony last year, we got to end our trip seeing something we'd heard about randomly. 

Rounding Out the Road Trip

On down the road we traveled and being in SW Missouri, it was very easy to stop off in

FAYETTEVILLE!

My name on senior walk.

Woo Pig Soowie, does that place feel like home!  It is every bit as beautiful as I remember it and I wish we could have stayed a few days to poke around, but we just spent the night and a long morning.

Heading south we stopped at my brother and sister-in-law's house.

And after a couple of nights in south Arkansas we headed west to Texas to visit my Aunt and Uncle and cousins.

They have goats:

And keep a horse - that is, this is not their horse, but it does live in their field.

This was supposed to be our last stop, but we ended up extending the trip by an extra week.  It is a good thing I did not know about the extra week until the end because I would have been tempted to fill it with more travels and by that time we were all pretty exhausted.  So instead we spent that week relaxing in the country.  And I'll post some of those pictures...eventually!

Laura's House

Another item on my bucket list was to visit the Rocky Ridge Farm & Museum in Mansfield, Missouri - aka  Laura Ingalls Wilder's house.  Well, houses.  It was a real treat for me, since I have enjoyed reading everything she wrote and everything I've found written about her. Still there were pictures I'd never seen, items I'd read about and didn't expect to see, and a few bits of Laura trivia I'd never heard.

So in short - for a fan of Laura, this place is gluttony.  For everyone else, it's an old house.

This is the farm house that Laura and Almanzo built - they started off with a 1 room shack and expanded it and expanded it for years.  The inside had a rambly quality that built onto houses tend to have!  Laura wrote the Little House books here and she died here.  If you picture her as a little girl on the prairie, she lived most of her life in this house.

Later in their life, Laura and Almanzo's daughter Rose had this home built for them.  It was built from a plan purchased from the Sears catalog!  The original plan did not include the rock exterior, that was a personal touch.  It was built in the 1920s, but is adorably modern. 

I think this was our last cemetery visit of the trip.  Laura and Almanzo are buried next to their daughter Rose.

Mid America Friends

It will take me until next May to post about all the things we did on our May trip!

One of my more ambitious goals of our trip was going to Kansas City.   It has been on my bucket list for a long time!  Probably ever since Meredith moved there.  It was such a delight to spend time with her family.  The kids were instant friends and for us grown ups, it felt like no time had passed at all.

It was kind of surreal to be all the way in Kansas.  We made the trip in so many small drives that it didn't seem quite as impossible as it does looking at it from Miami.   And then once we were that far away, we had the opportunity to stop off in Southwest Missouri and visit a family who lived in Miami around the time Irene was born.

This was a surprisingly satisfying stop!

By the way, when I was hashing out the details of the trip, I originally thought we might go as far as Denver, but after looking into every travel option, I could not make it work out, just too far away.  But I never thought I'd actually get to Kansas, so maybe someday!