Horse camp and more berries

This week Rea, Sara, and Timmy had horse-camp, where they learned how to ride horses. Timmy told me that he rode a blue roan, Sara said she learned how to ride all by herself, and Rea said she didn't want to talk about it.

Since it was a long drive, Alison, Gideon, and Elizabeth all hung out at a nearby park during the lessons. Gideon liked the park and loved eating apples and nuts and pepperoni, and playing. When I asked Elizabeth what she liked about the park, she just signed "more water", and handed me a water bottle.

We celebrated Elizabeth's first birthday, and Timmy's 6th this week. Elizabeth loved three dollies that the Browns got for her, and Timmy loved all of his presents a lot, though we have already had to repair his treasure chest.

One night the Dalyias invited us over to pick their cherry tree. The tree was insanely huge (30ish feet tall), so we also brought over our pole chainsaw and hacked at it from the roof. Some branches were too high to reach even then, but at least the thing is no longer growing into their house. We got 3 or 4 gallons of cherries out of the deal, and they also got a lot of cherries.

Our nature group did what they call faux camping, where we gather at a fire pit and roast marshmallows and we stay there until dark. the kids wandered off in the woods with their friends, Alison talked to her friends, and Mike wandered in the woods and did foraging. It was a lot of fun.

During the other evenings, we played at home and worked in the garden. We are getting excellent salads from it as much as we want.

Friday we played Pandemic Legacy because our RPG was cancelled. We had a lot of fun, and barely won. Timmy has really wanted to play it with us, but we don't let anyone interrupt our date night, so we "had to" play again on Saturday.

Timmy thought it was fun for a few minutes and then got bored and asked to be able to go to bed. We went on to finish the game, and though we haven't lost yet, the victories have been getting more and more pyrrhic with each progressive victory.

Some day we will fail, and then see what happens. It is fun to see how each game changes as we continue the campaign.

On Saturday we picked strawberries, currants, and mulberries. We need to get more pectin to make them into jellies and jams. We also went to dimple dell to look at the red currants because we have never picked them before. They weren't ripe.