Author: Romilly

Yes, it has been five months since I last posted.  Five months and one day, to be precise.  To put this in perspective: my last post here was called Summer Is Coming, and now it’s November, 40 degrees outside, and nearing the holiday season.  So yes: a lot has happened since my last post.

For time’s sake, I won’t list everything we did over the summer.  That would be time-consuming, and probably fairly repetitive.  We only went camping one or two times because Dad broke his foot back in June.  He had to take two months off work (which was lovely) and so we enjoyed a relaxed summer at home, chilling and hanging out.

Milo turned one.  Actually, he’s sixteen months old, which is really insane.  He is a fully-fledged walker now, knows a lot of words including the names of all his facial features, “ball,” and “go,” and is generally still the sweetest and happiest little imp ever to walk the earth. We did have one or two other camping trips, including one in October which, like last year’s, included staying at Howard, staying at Twin Fawn House, and staying at an actual campsite (this year in Gifford Pinchot State Park).  That was of course a lot of fun.

A (sort of) brief photographic summary of our October trip:

It was a lot of fun, albeit sort of damp and chilly at times.  We did a lot of hiking, particularly while staying at Twin Fawn, and biking, and other fun camping-y activities.

Of course, even that was a month ago now.  Since then … well, let’s see.

We had a few birthdays.  (Actually, since my last blog post, we’ve had nine birthdays.  But only two of them were since we got home from camping.  Verity’s was while we were staying at Twin Fawn.)

We did a few terrifically fall-y activities, like making scarecrows at Pop-pop’s house:

We also went apple-picking! 

That was also really fun, and the apples are ever so much better than storebought.  Junie made at least two pies with them, and they were scrumptious.

One last photo, and then I’ll be done here.

This is our most recent picture of all the kids.  It looks sort of blurry here, but it isn’t really.  I like this picture for all of the little stories I know were going on while we took it.  Like that Lewis and Teddy were holding Milo’s hands because whenever they let go he ran out of the picture.  And that Teddy is standing on my foot because he didn’t like to step on the mulch.  Besides, it’s rare that we get a photo where nearly everyone is smiling nicely.

I could obviously make this post a lot longer if I wanted to recite everything we’ve done in the past five months and one day; but I think I’ll leave it off here, else I’ll be overwhelmed by all the writing I have to do and this will never get published.

You know what, I’m not even going to bother giving myself a posting goal this time.  (Last time my goal was to post again by the end of June, and we saw where that got me, didn’t we?!)

(Well, sort of.)

Okay, I admit that it’s not summer till later this month, and it’s not really fair to call this post Summer Is Coming.  But we went camping the other week, and we’ve eaten water ice and run a 10K; and school’s out for the summer (or at least wrapping up this weekend), and I’m going to a pool party this evening, and I am starting to feel very summery.

Summer is always a really nice time.  Now, I am not a fan of excessive heat (get it? a fan? okay, sorry) but I like summer.  We do a lot of camping, and this year we’ll even have the pleasure of getting home to an air-conditioned house.  We do some gardening (well, some of us do) and biking and hiking and whatnot.  Sometimes we even get to swim.

As previously stated, we went camping a few weeks ago.  We went to Hickory Run State Park with a group of homeschool friends.  There wasn’t swimming (which was pretty disappointing), but the weather was amazing and we did a lot of hiking, biking, and plain old hanging out.

We arrived Friday evening and mostly just set up our tents and otherwise got ready.  Then the next day, the Saturday, I was on my feet basically all day.  We hiked to see Buttermilk Falls, which was really beautiful (but got a little old after half an hour there).  I don’t have a picture of the actual falls, but here’s a picture of (left-to-right) June, me, Delia, and Pippa hanging over the railing to look.

Another photo from that day:

Verity and Teddy, walking back.  They were being so sweet on the hike back to the van, walking hand in hand (with Teddy breaking into a skip every few steps and almost bowling Verity over at times).  When they realized Mom was taking pictures of them, they turned around and we got a few really cute pictures.

Speaking of Teddy being ridiculous:

A most efficient way to ruin a selfie, I should say.

Since I’m sharing pictures of Teddy anyway, he had a lot of fun scooting around on his bike.  It doesn’t have pedals yet, but he was delighted to walk it around the camping loop and coast down the hills.  He could get going surprisingly fast!

Teddy wasn’t the only one on a bike all weekend, either.  Annis finally got pedals on her bike, which was a milestone we’ve been trying to reach for I think two summers now:

Verity (who is only four!) is already catching up to big sister Annis in bike-riding prowess, though she doesn’t have her pedals yet:

By the way, this isn’t Annis’s fault.  She barely got to practise on a bike last summer (thanks a lot, pandemic) and so she’s been bumped back a year.  At least she’s still learning to ride before Verity does.

Milo had a good camping trip as well.  He wasn’t really old enough to be aware that anything was different from normal, last time we went camping, so it was fun to see him enjoying the grass and the novelty of being outside all the time.

Sorry for the overload of Milo photos.  Trust me, though: I could have done more.

We also visited Boulder Field, went wading in a nearby creek, and hiked quite a few miles over the course of the trip, but I don’t have any pictures of most of that.  Sorry!

On Monday we went home and celebrated our Shadyversary (two years since we moved into Shadywood) in style:

It’s hard to tell in the photo, but we’ve moved the table out of the way and we’re eating pizza on the floor.  Two years ago, on Settlement Day, we didn’t have a table yet but we ate pizza on the floor.  Now it’s tradition.

Mom, Grandmom, and I went to visit Mom-mom (my great-grandmother) in her nursing home for the first time since February 2020.  It was nice to see her after so long.

A brief hodgepodge of other cute photos which I couldn’t fit in anywhere else.  (And yes, a lot of them will be of Milo.  What can I say? He’s the baby!)

Apart from all these, I don’t have that many photos of everything we’ve been up to lately.  We had our homeschool evaluations on Tuesday and I officially finished school on Wednesday.  We’ve been doing a regular amount of running and quite a bit of outside time as well.  I’ve been crocheting a lot (like a lot-a-lot.  Like, my room is going to burst at the seams if I don’t stop soon) and drawing a lot too.  I would add photos, but I think that would feel too smug.

One more cute Milo picture before I’m done here.

Just about sums up how I feel right now.  (I ran four miles this morning, and it felt as though I was running through hot soup.  No exaggeration.  At all.  What, you think I’m not serious?)

Anyway, I think that’s enough updates.  It still hasn’t been too long, so this post doesn’t need to be too long either.  Shall I set myself another blogging goal? Publish something more by the end of June.  Should be easy … (You would think, wouldn’t you?)

My goal was to publish another post by the end of May.  Well – if I actually get this one published – I’ll be well under that, which would be amazing (especially because I’ve absolutely failed at all my other blog-writing goals).

Anyway, we’ve had a fairly busy few weeks which seemed to call for another post.  What might be called the “biggest deal” was probably Mother’s Day, last Sunday (the 9th), which was our attempt to spoil Mom as much as we possibly could.

Pippa and I (it was Pippa’s idea, and she paid for it, so she gets all the credit) took Mom out for lunch after church on Sunday, and then we went to Joann Craft Store.  For lunch we went to Salad Works, which was surprisingly delicious.  I mean, I know that salad can be yummy, but not that kind of yummy.    

A note to myself: next time I get to go to a restaurant of my choosing, go for Salad Works!

Then, as I said, we went to Joann Craft Store.  Mom and Pippa spent the entire time browsing the sewing patterns, then purchasing fabric to make dresses for Verity and Freya (my two youngest sisters, four and two respectively).  Meanwhile I looked through all the books they had on drawing, water-coloring, calligraphy, and anything else which catches my interest.

Apart from that, our Mother’s Day festivities were a lot less extravagant.  We did our best to “sprinkle” Mom with little surprises all throughout the day (fancy coffee, ice cream, things like that), and I think we succeeded and gave her a nice day.  We had a lot of fun organizing it, anyway.

The day before that, the eighth, was Teddy’s four-years-home anniversary; four years since he became officially “ours.”  We celebrated that with ice cream and cake in the shape of his favorite creature, the dragon:

I got to make the cake, which was actually a lot of fun, considering I’ve always thought that I hated baking and have only done it three or four times in my life.  Teddy was pleased with the dragon on top (it’s made of fondant, yum) and I was pleased that he was pleased.

Beyond those, the last few weeks have been low-key.  We’re getting air conditioners installed, which is pretty exciting, seeing as before this year summers have been accompanied by drowning in one’s sweat and other such miseries which heat brings.  (Well, I’ve had a window unit for the last two summers, so I really don’t get to complain.  But the rest of the house was uncomfortably hot!)

We did some work in Dad’s garden, putting up a little stone wall which I think will enclose his blackberry bushes (?).

It’s sort of hard to see what’s going on in the picture, but we had to dig up a whole bunch of uneven ground and smooth it out, then build the wall onto that.  It was a lot of fun, but I’m glad we’re getting all the strenuous work done in the spring before it’s too hot.

Also, our family had its first-ever broken bone! (Well, Dad’s broken his arm before, but I mean out of the kids.  And I digress.)

Verity broke her collarbone the other week, falling off Dad’s lap.  It was actually a little bit exciting for us to see her in a sling, since we’ve never had anyone wear one before.  Bea has been pretending to be annoyed with Verity for breaking her bone in such an unexciting way.  (“You’re going to break a bone, you have to do it well! Falling off Dad’s lap isn’t nearly cool enough!”)

Naturally, there have also been plenty of springtime photo ops.  Milo is ten months old, which I think is pretty close to insane, and he gets sweeter every day.  He loves to power-crawl all over the house; he has quite a mind of his own when it comes to when he’s fed and how much.  Overall I would say he’s the sweetest, happiest, smartest baby who has existed, well, ever.  But I guess it’s possible that I’m biased.

On the subject of cute small siblings, Freya is approaching her third birthday at an alarmingly quick rate.  (Her birthday is in July, like Milo’s.)  Freya is a sweet little imp and has the unfortunate combination of (a) knowing that she’s cute and (b) seeing nothing wrong in using her cuteness to manipulate people into giving her things.  For example, my Altoids stash has halved in the last few weeks.  I have not eaten that many mints.  Freya asks for one every day.  Hmmm. 

And, since I’m sharing cute photos right now anyway, how about the whole trio of my youngest siblings:

This post isn’t nearly as long as my last few, but I’m going to take that as a sign that it hasn’t been as long since my last post and I have less to talk about.  And that is, absolutely and completely, a good thing.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  Writing blog posts is harder than I imagined when I first got my blog (which was more than a year ago now – wow!).  I do have several drafts, but I’ve been too busy (or lazy, depending who you ask) of late to publish them.

Anyway, spring has now officially arrived and the weather has changed to comply, and that seems to constitute another post.

Since my last post we’ve had five birthdays in my house: June’s (she turned twelve); Niko’s (fifteen), and Dad’s on the same day (I guess I don’t need to share his new age); Lewis’s (fourteen); and Annis’s (seven).Turns out that I don’t have a picture of all of them, but I do have a picture of Annis from her birthday, and it seems to capture her pretty well.  She was delighted with all the fairy-related gifts she received!

With Annis’s birthday, the birthday season officially ended, and now we haven’t got another until Milo’s birthday in July (!).  Of course, birthdays weren’t all we got up to in my overlong break from blogging …

Easter also came and went.  We celebrated a lot more extravagantly than last year, thanks to no longer being in quarantine.  The day before Easter we dyed eggs, which is always actually more fun than I expect it to be.  Even though my egg has looked the same for the past four years running.  (No, seriously.  It’s a blue-green ombre with a loopy R on the side.  This year the only difference was that I got a smudge of pink on it.)

On Easter Day, we had our church service in the parking lot, and Pippa (my only older sibling) was baptized.  It was sunny and hard to get a good view, but it was really cool to watch.  After church we dropped by our house so some of us could change out of our dresses; then we headed straight to Pop-pop and Debidee’s house for more festivities, including several games which were quite ridiculous and surprisingly fun.  The first of these was a relay race wherein the competitors had to wear enormous cardboard bunny feet.  Another included three “Easter Bunnies”: people wearing shirts covered with Velcro-ed candy.  The younger kids chased them around and stole as much candy as they could grab.  I didn’t play, but it was fun to watch, and Miss Freya managed to get an impressively large haul of candy:

We’ve also had several other goings-on and outings.  A friend of ours celebrated a birthday quarantine-style, so we all drove out to have a masked, social-distanced, outside birthday party.  Teddy had some fun with the chalk we were offered.

I guess it’s not that obvious from the picture, but he drew what looked like a fanged blob.  And then he drew another.  And another.  All over their sidewalk.  And he was very protective of them, too.  Any time anyone stepped on one of his creations, he would carefully retrace the smudged lines.  It was very sweet.

I had the chance to paint at my aunt Chelsea’s church a couple weeks ago.  (Actually, I’ve done a lot of painting recently, since my youth group is redoing our room, but that’s beside the point …) Anyway, Chelsea is painting a mural along the hallway, and it’s basically an enormous paint-by-number, so (almost) anyone can pitch in and help. 

We had to wear masks the entire time we were painting (yes, I pulled it down for the photo), but it was still really enjoyable.  I hope I get to go again.

Oh, yeah, and I went camping! (I had forgotten, since that was so long ago now.  I should really make an effort to blog more.)  I don’t have any pictures from the camping trip, so you’ll have to take my word for it.  We (Bea, Coraline, and I) went to central PA with our friends the Weavers to help them put a roof on their new barn.  It was extremely fun.  It would be nice to have pictures, but I can’t access them without the cameras we took them on, so I’ll have to live without.  Sorry.

The Weavers have also come over a few times and given us various science and music lessons. 

You can’t really tell from the picture, which just looks like a snapshot of our messy living room, but this was halfway through a “concert” as everyone played some folk song on various instruments.  I don’t really play an instrument, so I was exempt, but you can still see me (the closest one to the camera, on the couch) trying to stop my ears from bleeding too much.  Sorry, that was mean.  They could have done with a bit of practice, that’s all.  And I can’t judge anyway, because I don’t play an instrument.

We also did a memorial 5K for our uncle-in-law (I suppose that’s not a real thing.  He was our aunts’ brother-in-law), who passed away last January.  As runs go, it was pretty miserable, but the social event itself was nice in its own way.

Apart from all those things, the last month has been fairly uneventful.  There’s been a good amount of school; lots of playing outside as temperatures gradually creep upwards; more crocheting than our storage space can handle; and a lot more running than I would personally prefer.  I’ve also done more than my fair share of gushing over Milo as he gets cuter with every passing day.  He had his NINE-MONTH birthday earlier this month.  Which is absolutely crazy. 

Sorry for gushing and doing a photo overload, but he is seriously the best.  I really can’t help it.

Aside from being super cute, Milo also has eight teeth, loves food, and can (and does!) crawl all over our house.  He’s still working on standing up on things, but his crawling is very impressive.  He just figured it out one day, took a few hours to perfect it, and took off.  And now we never know where he’ll be.

Normal stuff, too.  I don’t know where this photo came from, but it’s pretty cute, in my opinion.  (Left-to-right it’s Teddy, Lewis, Coraline, and Verity.)

Mom and Dad celebrated twenty-one years of marriage on April 15th, and we got to have a beautiful cake, compliments of Junie.

Not the best picture in the world, but I really like it.  Annis is pretty sweet for a photo-bomber.

All right, I reckon that’s about enough updates.  We haven’t had a particularly busy month (fortunately for me, or this post would be even longer and I’d still be going!).  My goal this time is to publish another post by the end of May (and you would think such a long time would be pretty easy), but we’ll have to wait and see.

Before I begin, a caveat: I didn’t want this to be my first post since Christmas, but I sort of expected it to be.  While it would have been preferable to be more on top of this, I’m forcing myself to write this even though it’s been longer than I would like.  I don’t know if my logic just then made sense, but no matter.  Now I’m done, on with the post.

If I were any more cliche, I would have called this post “Snow Much Fun.”  Of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing that.  But we did have an awful lot of snowy fun over the past week.

We have gotten a LOT of snow this winter.  I mean, we’ve had more in the past, but it’s snowed substantially at least three times, enough to play outside in, plus flurries.  Every time we’re “running low” on snow and patches of grass show through, it snows again, and our snow supply is replenished.  It’s pretty nice.

I’ve always loved snow.  Watching it come down, watching it land, going outside in it, the crunch of it under a pair of boots, the freshness and whiteness it drapes over the neighborhood.  It makes everything feel calmer.  And when you live with twelve siblings, that means a lot.

I believe I already mentioned the snowfall we had back in December.  Since then we’ve had two which we played outside in, plus a few “top-off” flurries which were enough to cover the grass.  In fact,  it’s snowing as I write this, and we played outside in the snow just yesterday.

“Pics or it didn’t happen” is one of Mom’s many mottos, so I’d better prove myself.

Poor Freya doesn’t love the snow as much as I do, I think.  She came out both times, but ended up crying, with snow crusted onto her gloves and down her boots.  Poor thing.  But I think she enjoys the hot chocolate.

Niko made a pretty cool-looking snowman.  The snowman didn’t last long (when the first batch of snow melted, he was reduced to a pair of legs), but he was neat while he was standing.

Both of those pictures were from the first of our 2021 snow days; the second was similar, but there was less sculpting and more piling snow into a sliding hill on our lawn.  Here’s Junie enjoying the slide:

It looked more fun in real life, but that gives you some idea of what was going on.

I planned on having this post focus solely on snow, but we’ve had enough other things going on this week that I’d best mention them as well.

Milo turned seven months old, already.  He is the sweetest, happiest baby in the world.  And I’m definitely not biased, or anything.

Milo, apart from being adorable, has the fairly hilarious problem of only being able to scoot backwards.  He gets himself into all sorts of predicaments backing under things, such as our ottoman:

We also had a lot of fun burying him in clean laundry the other day.  Normally this wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but we got such a cute picture I need to include it while I’m gushing over Milo anyway:

On the subject of cute people, Freya had some fun trying on Grandmom’s glasses:

I guess I’d better be done bragging on my siblings now, since another (fairly) important thing happened this week: my birthday!  It was a marvelous day consisting of present-opening in the morning, then a drive to Paigie’s house to drop off Pippa for her babysitting job, then a trip to IHOP with Grandmom (yum).  It ended with a birthday movie (Harry Potter, of course).

A collaboration between Junie, Cora, and Niko (I think – I’m sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!) yielded my birthday cake, which was stunning, not to mention tasty:

I guess I’d better put in a picture of myself opening presents, too, for Mom’s sake.

That was me opening my crocheted present from Mom.  This year she’s crocheting each of us a mini-me, in an outfit of our choice, with an accessory of our choice.  This is mine, side-by-side with the photo it was based on.

Those dolls haven’t been the only thing Mom’s been crocheting of late, as busy as they’re keeping her.  We also worked on a Valentine’s Day MCAL (Mystery Crochet-Along) as a family.  It only lasted two weeks, but it was a lot of fun.  Every Saturday we were sent another part of a pattern, but we didn’t know what the end product would be until the MCAL was over.

The first week was the doll’s body and hair, which was about a million tiny curls.  Mom and I (well, Mom, anyway) had fun pretending to be mad at the pattern designer for assigning us to make so many curls.

The final product was supposed to be a Cupid doll, but I didn’t love how it was supposed to look, so I sort of went off-script and made a more modern-day Cupid, named Tristan.

I like how he turned out, even if it wasn’t quite how he was supposed to!

I guess I’d better post this and stop “post”-poning it now.  (And my apologies for the terrible pun.  It was unintentional, but then I noticed it and thought I should acknowledge its presence.)

Maybe this time I can post again within the month! . . . Hmm, or maybe not.  We are about to enter a pretty crazy birthday season, after all.  We’ll have to wait and see.

Now that Grandmom’s Christmas is securely in the past (in fact we started school again today … Sigh) I probably ought to write my promised Christmas Post.  Even though it’s already the 4th.  Better late than never, huh?

Anyway, Christmas was wonderful as ever.  Actually, Mom observed that this year’s Christmas was maybe better than most.  Not in the way of gifts, per say (though I am delighted with all of mine!) but in the air of joy and peace which filled our house.

Christmas Eve Eve (which we refer to as “Christmas Adam” in our house) had our church’s candlelight service.  I’ve always loved candlelight services.  It’s so pretty: the specks of glowing light, the wavering beauty of a handheld flame.  Like stars in the night.  Of course, the effect was someone detracted from by the fact that I had to wear a mask.  (It’s a lot harder to see a candle through fogged-up glasses.) But I still enjoyed it a lot.

Christmas Eve the oldest four of us (which is Pippa, me, Bea, and June) got to go to Grandmom’s church’s candlelight service.  That was slightly less enjoyable for me, mostly because I didn’t like the music as much.  But it was still good.

Afterward, we had some friends and family at our house for a small party.  We exchanged early gifts and ate dinner, and had a generally pretty fun time.  Also, those of us who can crochet presented Mom with the Nativity we’d been secretly making her for the past few weeks.

There was also a Milo photoshoot which might be worthy of note.

After the party finished, Pippa and I were allowed to help Mom stuff stockings:

The past couple years we’ve been allowed to help her arrange the presents under the tree, too, but this year we were sadly excluded from that.  Still, Mom managed to do a pretty good job without us:

Then it was off to bed, and the next day was Christmas.

I’ve said already that Mom thinks this was our best Christmas in recent years, perhaps ever.  I feel similarly, even though I couldn’t quite muster a festive feeling for myself.  We moved at a slower pace than we have recently, opening presents one at a time and exclaiming over each one before moving on.

First there was the Waiting, which occurs every Christmas morning, but never gets any easier.

Then we opened our stockings, which were great, with gloves and chapstick and a TON of candy.  (Mom made us pause there for a photo, which I was not happy about at the time, but is actually pretty helpful here):

On the very first present opened (apart from Secret Santa presents, which are rarely very exciting), which was a storybook for Freya, written and photographed by Pippa, everyone crowded around Dad to hear him read it.  Everyone forgot about their own presents and listened.  I don’t know why it happened, but it was lovely.  And apparently, Mom took another picture while I wasn’t paying attention:

We spent much of the morning/early afternoon playing with our new toys and trying out anything else we’d gotten.  I crocheted during that time, not because I’d gotten anything to crochet with, but because, exciting as my presents were, there wasn’t really anything I could do anything with.  Yet.

Then we headed to Pop-pop and Debidee’s house, which was absolutely delightful.  Debidee had prepared a sort of one-sided gift exchange, where we all pulled a card with a number corresponding to a small gift bag.  We opened the gift bags; they each contained a pair of festive socks and some chocolate.  Then there were larger wrapped gifts, also randomized and corresponding to the numbers we’d been given.  They all held LEGOs.  (Mine were Harry Potter, which is perfect because I love Harry Potter.  Such a coincidence!) Then there were yet more – personalized this time – gifts to be unwrapped.  I was given a “Draw-Through-the-Year” workbook and a blank book and guide to write your own children’s book.  I’m excited about both of them! Actually, that entire half-hour of gift opening was awesome.  I opened the socks and chocolate, and I thought, “Oh, good, I love socks.”  Then there were more presents, and I was like, “Legos? Cool!” and was perfectly ready to be done opening presents; and then I was given yet more, which was even more exciting.  It was crazy and terrific.  And the dinner (crab bisque, I think, which I didn’t try because I’m a vegetarian; and rolls and veggie meatballs and vegetables) was delicious.  And then we went home and that was that.

The next week passed uneventfully, I suppose, but it was great because we didn’t have school and I could literally spend the entire time writing and drawing and having a generally good time.

Then came New Year’s Eve, which was nice but equally dull.  Some of the older kids (it’s Bea, Pippa, June, Niko, Coraline, then me in the picture below) got to stay up until midnight, watching The Great British Baking Show and then The Truman Show.  We didn’t really properly hail in the new year, but it was still fun to stay up late, eat popcorn, and watch a movie we were promised last year but still hadn’t seen.

The next day was “Grandmom’s Christmas,” which was as exciting as, if not more than, the real thing.  She sent most of us out of the house to buy donuts and prepared Christmas while we were gone, stuffing her stockings (mine is black and grey, which is perfect) and arranging presents all over the place.  I received a new mug (it’s very pretty, sort of blue-green), a box of Earl Grey tea (one of my favorites!), a beautiful leather-bound sketchbook, and a set of socks.  We spent that afternoon lounging about enjoying ourselves (actually, Niko hosted a very serious Connect Four tournament, but I didn’t participate) and then Christmas was done.  And what a lovely Christmas it was!

And there’s my Christmas post, written in a single evening.  I am so proud of myself.  Now I guess I don’t need to write again until my birthday? (Just kidding.  Maybe.)

As Christmas draws dangerously near, I decided it was about time to post something describing the Christmas season in the Young household.  (And hopefully I can get this published before Christmas this time!)

December is always a festive month.  Maybe less so this year, due to COVID, but we’ve managed to have a remarkably joy-filled season.  We bought our tree way earlier than we normally do (seeing as the fire department was down to about a hundred, disappearing fast, weeks before we normally would have bought our tree).  The fact that we bought our tree early didn’t really mean we decorated early, and it waited for nearly a week before we got around to putting on the lights and ornaments.

Here’s a picture of Lewis decorating the Christmas tree, and down there is a picture of Niko, doing the same thing.  I couldn’t find any pictures of the finished Christmas tree, but it is particularly pretty this year.

Milo had a lot of fun with the lights on the tree (or at least, Mom and Pippa had a lot of fun with him and the lights on the tree).  This one’s a keeper, in my opinion . . . The second one . . . Not so much.

So that was that.  We (well, Dad and Grandmom) also put lights up on our house, which is still fun because we never used to do it at our old house.  Isn’t it pretty?

Also, we got snow the week before Christmas! This was super exciting for me because I love snow and we’ve never had it before in this house.  The picture was taken early on; it actually snowed a lot more than that and we were able to play outside in it.  Bea made a really cool snowdog which I’ll include a picture of, if I can find it.

Isn’t that pretty impressive?

Anyway, we enjoyed the snow (even though it was gone by Christmas Day … sigh …).  Apart from decorations and the general air of excitement waiting for Christmas, we don’t have many yearly traditions.  Pippa made a sort of advent where we opened a new Christmas children’s book every day, and Dad read them aloud to us.  That was fun on the few days that we actually had time to and remembered to do it.

The above is a picture of most of us crowded around him listening.  I was sitting on a chair behind the photo-taker, but I was there.

I made a countdown to Christmas, where every day you pull off a little bit of paper and it has a Christmassy dare and a snippet of a drawing behind.  Here’s a picture of what it looks like behind all the scraps of paper (and since I made it, I always got to know what the next day’s dare was).

We got a family photo taken at church a few weeks ago.  I don’t think that was because of Christmas, but it’s still a decent photo, so I’ll put it in too.

And because, surprise surprise, Christmas has come and gone (and I haven’t published this), I think I’ll leave this off here.  We’ve still got “Grandmom’s Christmas” coming on New Year’s, so I’ll post about both “real” Christmas and Grandmom’s then.  (Maybe.)

First of all, special thanks to Coraline for the title of this post.  Second, I’m ever so sorry I forgot about my blog (again).  My memory about this is obviously not too great.  Normally I can keep on top of things like this, but having no system in place makes my blogging scarce at best.

Anyway, this past week (actually several weeks ago now … Whoops) held Thanksgiving, which has always been one of my favorite holidays.  Getting the family together, talking and laughing over a particularly enormous and delicious dinner – it’s the best holiday, to me at least.  Well, second to Christmas, of course.  However, this year I liked it slightly less than normal, because of a five-mile run in the morning.

I think I’ve mentioned before that running is very much not my strong suit.  We (Mom, Dad, Pippa, and I) started in September 2019 with the Couch-2-5K training program, which literally starts you at one-minute running, one-and-a-half minutes walking, then builds up to 25 or so minutes running without any walking breaks.  We completed C25K in time for a 5K last November (2019, that is) and haven’t stopped running since.  Then, sometime in early November, we were informed that we would be jumping from the longest we’d ever run being 5K to it being 5 miles.  Which was a LOT of training for about three weeks. Pippa and I built it up a half-mile at a time until we could run the whole five miles.

Here’s my family’s corner of the group photo at the run.  (I don’t think we meant to all stand next to each other, but it was convenient for sure.) It also includes Aunt Paigie, because there was no easy way to crop her out.

As you can sort of tell from the photo, it was wet and dreary and overall NOT good running weather.  Though it could have been worse – at least it wasn’t too cold.  (*Trying very hard to be positive, since I like the cold.*)

I came in twelfth, I think, which sounds like it could be impressive except that there were only eighteen or so runners.  Anyway, we were done running by 10:00, so it really wasn’t that bad.  But not the best way to start Thanksgiving, in my opinion.  I can run (slowly) but I still haven’t found a way to enjoy it – though I don’t hate it as much as I used to, so I hope it’s growing on me.

All right, moving on.  After the run (and the pumpkin pie and Gatorades which followed) we spent a long time at home, doing not-too-much-of-anything.  I’m pretty sure I did a lot of crocheting and typing.  But, as I said, Thanksgiving was a while ago, so I’m not entirely sure. I think it was about four when we headed to Pop-pop and Debidee’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.

Which was fun, as always.  And tasty. 

We got plenty of photos there, but I don’t have space for all of them, so I’m just going to include one or two (okay, or three) here.  Above is a picture of Pop-pop and Milo.  I really like that picture, because you can tell they’re so genuinely happy, and it’s bad enough quality it doesn’t look staged.  Also, Milo is making this sort-of happy, sort-of terrified expression, like he’s not sure what he ought to think of Pop-pop.  It just makes me smile.

The second photo is Mom and Dad in their Puritan costumes.  This is the one they smiled for; they also took photos where they made fake serious faces.  The funny thing about those was that Dad’s looked real, and Mom’s was ridiculously affected.  I’m including the smiley one because I like it better, since it’s a better representative of Thanksgiving.  (In my opinion.)

The last photo (above) is a selfie of (from left to right) Pippa, Junie, and me.  I included it because it has me (and I think was the only photo from Thanksgiving which did) and it’s a selfie, which I never take.

Anyhow, that was Thanksgiving.  A fun day, particularly after the 5-miler was over.  And, more excitingly yet, it’s now officially the Christmas season!

(And, since it’s now closer to Christmas than Thanksgiving, I’d better end this post here and get on with a Christmas-season one!)

To begin with – I am so, so sorry that I’ve forgotten about this.  Well, not forgotten, but not written anything, either.  Life has been hectic, what with finally coming out of quarantine and our school starting (back in very late August), and a retreat one week and a camping trip the next, and trying to get in at least twenty minutes of typing on my novel every. single. day and going on runs and – You get the picture, don’t you?  So, anyway, I apologize that it’s been so long since I last posted anything.

As I spoiled above, life has been fairly crazy recently.  We “officially” came out of quarantine back in July, I believe, but nothing really started up until September.  School started on August 31st.  Now, my siblings and I have been homeschooled our entire lives (except for 6th grade, when I chose to try public school for a year) so school hasn’t changed much this year, except that my brothers Lewis and Teddy, who were public schooled the past two or three years, came home again.  I find my schoolwork fairly easy and usually manage to finish it by Wednesday or Thursday (yay for homeschool, that that’s possible!) but it still adds a lot of pressure to my time.  Especially on science test weeks.  Also, Pippa (age 16) and I go for three runs a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so we get up early on each of those days.  I don’t hate running as much as I used to, but it still makes those days significantly less enjoyable when I’m starting school already worn out.  I’ve also been doing, as stated above, lots of typing.  I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned the book I’m writing before.  Quarantine has been really, really great for my productiveness, and it’s now … 467?-ish pages long.  Give or take.  It outgrew Google Docs, so it’s now on several documents, so I don’t have a page number without unnecessary math.  Which I detest.  (Unecessary math, that is, not having my book on several documents.  Though that’s not my favourite, either.)

Three weeks ago, my sisters Pippa, Bea, June and I left for a two-night retreat with a girls’ club that we attend; it was at a Christian camp with a river and canoes and forests and a rope bridge, and I don’t have any pictures of it, but it was enjoyable.  And then – a mere six days after getting home from that – our entire family departed for an eight-night camping trip, in three separate places with two different groups of people.  That was lots of fun, even when it rained the entire first day in our tents and was bitterly cold each night.  The first leg of our camping trip was three nights in tents, with two or three fellow large (ish) homeschooling families.  Here follow three photos from that first (very rainy) leg of the trip.

The first is Lewis and Verity on Boulder Field (at Hickory Run State Park, where we camped), the second is a contingent of Youngs and several friends next to Boulder Field, and the third is me on Boulder Field (Don’t I look like I was having so very much fun?!).  Boulder Field is not all we did there, but it’s all we got photos of.  Oh well.  We also hiked (in the rain.  Figures, right?) and biked lots and lots.  Then, after three nights of sleeping in tents over lots of rocks, we drove three hours to another state park, Blue Knob.

I’ll admit that I enjoyed the second bit of our trip much more than the first.  Dad had rented a “cabin” which was really closer to a house, complete with beds, bathrooms, heating, a full kitchen, and, well, everything, really.  (See below.)The entire first day we were there it rained (I will admit to having prayed for that.  I wanted nothing more than a full day of nothing) and most of us stayed at the cabin, crocheting and chatting and doing crossword puzzles.  Dad took several crazy people on a sopping-wet hike in the rain (I did not go.  Do I really need to say that?).  Fortunately, photos were taken so that I could know I had made entirely the right decision – they all look so wet!  They say they had fun, though.  Well, good for them.

Meanwhile, we stayed home and had a lovely (and dry) time.  Junie and I walked around in the rain a bit (see below again) but didn’t stay out long – it was so nice inside!

The following day was dry and cold, and we drove to Gravity Hill.  I’m not convinced it wasn’t an illusion, but our car did definitely roll entirely the wrong way when Dad put it in neutral, so it was maybe worth going.  Maybe.  We had a picnic (yum) on a nice chilly field under sunny skies, then parked halfway up Blue Knob Mountain and hiked the rest of the way up.  Dad took a picture of us at the top.  We’re not all in it, but it gives you some feel for how beautiful the view was. 

The day after that we had to be packed up and gone by 9:00 in the morning!  Maybe that’s not too hard for most people, but when there’s thirteen children and they all want breakfast … We might have been a little bit late. 

After leaving Blue Knob we drove for about an hour and a half, and spent two nights at our friends the Weavers’ parents house in Howard (in central PA).  It was very cold sleeping (and not quite as comfortable as a sofa in Blue Knob, I admit) in a tent, but I like the cold, and I enjoyed the last bit of our trip as well.  The first afternoon I spent reading Agatha Christie’s book N or M?, which was very good and I recommend; then the second morning I read another of her books, Black Coffee, which I enjoyed as well only maybe not quite so much.  The second afternoon we went for a mile or so long hike and an even shorter bike ride.  Unfortunately my bike wasn’t working properly (it was making all sorts of strange noises.  Hmm) and the bike ride was not as much fun as I hoped.  Then the following afternoon we went home. I don’t think we got any photos of Howard … Wait … Oh!  Here we go!Sweet Milo with some sweet Milo’s tea … (above, though I probably don’t need to say so)

Pippa, who recently turned sixteen and got her learner’s permit, riding the four-wheeler. (I will admit to being a teensy bit jealous.  But not much.  The four-wheelers are LOUD.)

Aaaaand I’m not sure where this one’s from on our camping trip, and it doesn’t show everyone at all (for instance, I am not in it.  I’m hiding behind Pippa.), but this does give some idea of what it’s like in our car.  You’ll have to imagine the smell when we’ve all been in there for three hours.  Though it’s not really as bad as I just made it sound, especially once all the littler kids have fallen asleep.

We arrived home last Saturday, and, however much fun we had, I was glad to see my bed again, and have my daily cup of tea.  Not to mention get back to working on my novel.  Though getting back to school and thrice-weekly runs were somewhat less exciting.

I’d better leave off here before this post gets too much longer!  My life is obviously not quite as dull as I sometimes think it is.  I will end here, with two photos, one of each of our cats (Puzzle and Inkling), just in case I ever mention them later. (And yes, because I think they’re adorable.)  Puzzle is on top (sporting a Santa’s hat I crocheted), and Inkling is under him.

All right – now I really, really, really have to be done!  Thanks for reading!

Since my blog is new and I haven’t posted much yet, this won’t mean quite as much to my readers as it does to us, but anyone who knows our family will understand exactly what these words mean and how incredible they are:

We had a BOY!

After eight girls, my first biological brother is finally here.  Not, of course, that we haven’t had boys before – we have three boys, and they are wonderful, but they are all adopted, so this is my first biological brother and I am incredibly amazed and delighted about it.  And so it is with great, great joy that I introduce to you all …

Milo Walter Young

Born July 3rd, 2020

Weighing 6 lbs 13 oz

What’s particularly crazy about the fact that Milo is, well, a boy, is that we specifically asked God for a boy this time.  After eight baby girls Mom began to realize that she might never get to have a baby boy, and then, more than nine months ago now, she asked God that, were there to be another baby, could it be a boy.  He answered that prayer, all those months ago, and we didn’t even know about it until a few weeks ago.  I am still filled with awe every time I think about it.

We met him on July 4th, as he was completely healthy.  Apart from Mom’s spiking blood pressure (which I think is maybe a bit more under control now, with medicine?) and a bit of worry over how much weight Milo had lost, we are doing very well.  Maybe a little bit in shock, though.  After all – if a Young baby can be a boy, then it seems as though anything should be able to happen!