e, painting a shirt at a neighborhood art show
Today we did three really fun things, and all were connected by a single street, with a short stroll between them. We had our annual school picnic which was lots of fun even though it felt like August rather than October. The kids were hot and sweaty within moments, but it didn’t seem to slow them down. They only stopped running and playing to eat. And to eat, besides the regular picnic fare, we made the little cuties below for the class. By we, I mean me, and I did it in the late hours of the night, long past Letterman…but only because I came up with the idea around ten. For some reason I just didn’t have this planned ahead. We’re still catching up from being gone so much of September, and from having such a busy work schedule lately. Plus, there has been a lot of baking around here. We had some blueberries from E’s great-grandmother’s farm that needed to be used, so we made multiple recipes of scones. We’ve had apple pies to make and take, and of course the dinner shower is coming along quite nicely. We’re finishing up the second week, and everyone has been really excited about participating. We have meals organized and being delivered every other night through Thanksgiving for friends of ours who just had their third child. So food is never far from our minds (it rarely is anyway!)
After the picnic we walked over to the playground with E’s best friend O and the two played for a little while. Then we said goodbye to them and headed through the rest of the park, and on several more blocks to a lovely art show that was hosted on one of this city’s great residential streets. Although it was ninety+ degrees outside, the tree-lined street was shady and had a great breeze, and we browsed and commented and created and snacked and painted and were painted on for the better part of the afternoon. E had her first face painting done (she’s been too shy and reserved to ever do it before, but this woman won her heart) and she revelled in the admiring glances of the under four foot set for the remainder of the afternoon. When we picked up our drying handpainted tee and headed back on the couple mile journey to our car we found an incredibly large leaf, watched two people tight rope walking between two trees, saw the biggest wedding party we’ve ever seen, and got a nice blister on each of our ankles. We threw ourselves into the car and then the suggestion was thrown out from the backseat of the car – “Hey, let’s get a smoothie and a muffin at our best coffee shop.” It was just around the corner, but we couldn’t walk another step. So we drove over, devoured an apricot-pear smoothie and read a bit of the paper with our feet up for awhile.
A lovely day all around.
