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whenever there's a weekend as full and fun as this one was, i have a hard time posting about it on the internets because i want to be able to tell you everything, make you feel the way i felt and see the things i saw and hold the hands of the people i was with. but this full and fun weekend has left me a very tired girl at 11:30pm on a sunday, so instead i am crawling into bed and directing you to the highlight list and photos below. goodnight.
this was sydney's first camping trip, first nature trail, first marshmallow over the fire. we saw a huge black snake in a tree, nearly blocking our path on the trail, and larry walked up to it and said "so you're telling me that if we eat this apple..." every time we saw a toad, saw a daddy-long-legs, heard a strange call from the trees, syd would run ahead and tell the next people he saw all about it. there's a snake here, people he said before we passed, directing traffic with his tiny hands. we played in the pool, sydney squealing for larry to chase him, oh no! it's jaws! and then when larry left the water, oh no! it's jaws' girlfriend! the boys played basketball on the courts at larry's old jr/sr high school; we stood in the place where he first breakdanced as a child, on the playground to impress a girl. we set up a tent and inflated mattresses and had a dinner over the fire with part of their family, including larry e. gates the first, who was confounded at first by the thought of feeding a vegetarian, but showed up with a cooler of boca burgers, vegetarian baked beans, and leaned in over the table: this potato salad here doesn't have any eggs in it. the kids played wiffleball, i knitted and talked to larry's mother quite a bit. s'mores and a sunset; everyone else left and it was larry, syd and i at the campfire when the fireworks started just a few miles away, us running through the already-damp grass to stand in a tiny row silhouetted by the lights, syd saying over and over this is amazing.
and this morning we went to an indiana flea market and bought old-timey liquor bottles for our new kitchen, a children's school desk for my new computer. sunburns and air conditioning and lemon shake-ups, kickball and how cold movie theaters get in the summer. sleepy, happy, good.
the whole set is here.