Forgive me, followers, for I have FAILED - it has been over a year since my last blog post! I started to get really overwhelmed with how "behind" I had become with missing posts, to the point where I just gave up. But we so often refer to old posts to remember little tidbits of information, and we're so, so grateful that it's there (to replace my failing memory, for one thing) that it seems like a really bad idea to give it up altogether. So I'm back! Let's hope I can keep it up. So many things have happened since my last post -- our entire trip to "Hot Spain" in the summer of 2013, Ollie's 1st grade year in school, Halloween (fireman and "Spanish dancer," for the record), Ollie turning 7 (mining museum; volcano cake!), Christmas in Maine (lovely as always), Maddie turning 5 (five!! Frozen party, pretty fab Anna and Elsa cake, if I do say so myself), and a most fantastic trip to England this May, to celebrate Grandma Carole and Granddad Maurice's 50th wedding anniversary - I will do my best to return to that here, with photos.
Now it is July 6, and we're a few days away from heading to Maine for 5 (five!) weeks. We just celebrated a really nice 4th of July with the Felch clan, starting with the parade in Sparta, and ending with a fun bbq back at the house, which culminated in a full showing of the Lego Movie, currently both Maddie and Ollie's TOP movie of choice. The day after that, we drove to Stony Creek, CT for a blissful overnight at the Linden House B&B, where it's really easy to pretend you're a millionaire for 24 hours, tucked at the end of a little point right out of town, surrounded by ocean, all the Thimble Islands poking out everywhere you look. We visited some of our very favorite local haunts, and the kids went swimming twice (in Ollie's case, much of the time was spent on hermit-crab catch and release). Because it had rained on the 4th of July in CT,
lots of people were setting off fireworks all up the Branford coast on Saturday night, and all the way to New Haven, actually, so the kids were BEYOND thrilled to stay up very, very late, perched on rocks at the tippy end of the property, with the best view in town as they watched them explode at random. This was following an exquisite sunset - the photo here shows Maddie and Ollie quite mesmerized in the last seconds of the sun falling out of sight. My favorite part of the fireworks display was hearing Ollie exclaim, quite a few times, "This was the best day of my life!" and "We're lucky we didn't miss these!" It seems that Andy and I are doing a good job of raising Ollie and Maddie to marvel at life's simple pleasures, something that we're both quite good at ourselves, I like to think. What a lovely weekend.
