Abe Darais – Page 86

Charlotte

Today I worked in Charlotte at a Hilton while the family went to breakfast, a Nascar museum and an art museum.

The kids later told me about the simulator practice with excitement

Then Lily took the kids to the Mint Museum in Charlotte (art museum). A lot of her pictures are crooked because one of the first things Ammon did at the museum was jump off of a chair and he got a stern look from the lady selling tickets. So Lily tightly held his hand throughout the museum, thus affecting her photography.

Lily loved this exhibit the most. Normal every-day objects (behind the vail) with tricks of lighting and a vail of glass make them look beautiful and mysterious. Lily relates this to how things in life are not always as they appear.

Lily also loved learning about John Leslie Breck. He was an American impressionist who was tutored by Monet. His work is incredible, but it was not highly regarded in his time and that influenced him to commit suicide.

We all ate dinner at a place we LOVED called Oh My Soul. It was a vegan restaraunt started by people who lived in South Africa and had a vegan restaraun there, and then moved to Charlotte and started one there. The food was amazing and Lily got a turmeric latte and lavender latte that blew her mind. After that, we drove to our foggy bottom cabin, and I worked on the adorable porch until early in the AM to get a handle on some work items.

The restaurant had lots of pig art which of course Mary loved!

Andrea texted me this picture, and I loved receiving it. I think of Christina a lot. She is one of the most constantly kind people I’ve ever met. She was always unfailing kind to me, giving me compliments and always reminding me to take care of myself. I always felt so loved by her. She even cooked meals for us right after my parents divorced. She was and is a true angel. I’ve also really enjoyed getting to know Ed more recently. He is a great man, and he and I get along very well. I’m not quite sure who the 3rd person in the photo is.

Flying to Raleigh

Today was mostly a travel day, but we did get to have delicious (huge) slices of pizza at Benny Capitale’s once we arrived in Raleigh.

My dad and Suzanne picked up our car from the parking garage because the lot where I arranged parking didn’t have a shuttle and we almost missed our flight because of it! Thank goodness for my dad and Suzanne and also for Lily for coming up with the idea at the last minute to park in the garage and have my parents pick up the car. I wanted to do the economy lot, but that would have been more expensive in the end, and we likely would have missed our flight!

Eating at Shake Shack was fun since Ryan Powers on my team just closed a deal with them.

Happy Birthday Mary!

Today Mary turned 9. Mary wanted to have a pig themed birthday, and I think that wish came true! We celebrated Mary’s birthday at Color-Me-Mine. Lily ordered her a pig cake from the Sweet-Tooth-Fairy.

We had 14 friends come help Mary celebrate her birthday. Everyone picked out the statuette they wanted and started painting.

When people started to finish painting, we had yummy Jimmy John’s subs, carrots, jicama, figs, chips and drinks. Mary didn’t want to have pizza, and I think dinner turned out fantastic (thank you Lily!).

After dinner, Mary blew out her candles on her pig cake.

After cake, Mary opened presents from her friends. They gave her such wonderful gifts!

At home Mary opened presents that Lily picked out for her and she got more pig themed things like a pig pillow, and a pig-shaped glasses holder.

Mary, we adore you and we are so profoundly grateful you are our daughter. My favorite thing about you is your deep desire to be good. You are helpful, kind, loving, creative, artistic, sweet, smart, forgiving, thoughtful and hard-working. Even if you weren’t all those things, we would still love to the ends of the earth because you are ours, and always will be. But thank you thank you thank you for being such a wonderful child. You, Lydia, Ammon and Clarissa all make us so so so proud!

One more sweet thing to note about Mary is how much she loves Lydia. I started a practice within our family that starting on our kids 9th birthday, the pick one value per year that they want to proclaim as their own, so that they will have ten self-proclaimed values by the age of 18, when they are ready to go off into the real world. For example, Lydia chose determination on her 8th birthday and fun on her 9th birthday (incredible values Lydia!). Mary revealed today that her value is…..(drumroll)……Lydia! I thought that was so cute, and sweet, and also very deep. Mary is very connected to Lydia, and loves her immensely, loves her to the point of it being one of her core values. Those sisters truly have a bond.

In other news today, Basil got shaved, and now looks like a beagle, pointer, dalmatian mix. He was also incredibly hyper today and chased his tail more than I think I’ve ever seen him do. I love that dog!

Mary’s Birthday Celebration with the Marshall’s

Mary baked and decorated her own birthday cake. More on that later!

Yesterday I was exhausted beyond belief recovering from the work week. Today, Lily felt sick (sore throat, very tired and generally feeling ill). Fortunately, I had some good energy today. I got up around 8AM and worked steadily on the house until about 1:30, when I picked up Basil and ran some errands.

About that time, Lily started being more active. Even though she still wasn’t feeling great (she has a hard time not being active), she got up to help Mary bake her birthday cake, and help clean the house.

The cake, as you can see above and below, was a complete masterpiece! It makes me so happy looking at it!

My dad and Suzanne were going to join us for dinner, but my dad is sick and it seems like it might be Covid, so they didn’t come. Dad, I hope you get feeling better!

We wanted to still make it feel festive for Mary by having a somewhat large gathering, so we sent out some texts and happily for us, the Marshall’s were available to come over!

We had the most wonderful time chatting with them. Derek’s mother passed away recently which was very sad, but he and the family seem to be doing well. Also, their dog passed away recently, but they bought a new puppy that looks just like their previous dog (Red Golden Retriever) and they brought her, Dakota, to play with Basil. See below!

For dinner we had Lou Malnati’s pizza (ordered and shipped to our house), salad, cake, and cookies that the Marshall’s brought over. It was delicious!

I had fun making a number 9 out of cucumbers. I’ve been craving vegetables and this salad really hit the spot. It had some of the last tomatoes from our very productive tomato garden this year. I took down the plants to prepare for our upcoming travels.

We had such a great time with the Marshall’s! Here is everyone singing to Mary!

When the Marhall’s left, Mary opened some presents that she got from Georgia over Facetime. They were two sketch-pads and a book about how to draw. Thank you Georgia!

After all the festivities, Mary and I took some pizza and cake to Cindy, our friend across the street. Lydia and Mary love talking to Cindy and they have become friends with her. We invited Cindy to the party, but she didn’t make it because she was working on a contract for selling her travel trailer. When we dropped off the food, she had a gift bag for Mary with water-balloons and a 3-D puzzle in it! Thank you Cindy!

It was sooooo fun celebrating our sweet Mary today. She is creative, helpful, sweet, responsible, smart, hard working and so adorable. Here is something I photographed while I was cleaning. She made it a few weeks ago:

Mary did this on her own for fun after everyone watched Wonder Woman and Lily taught the girls about WWI history.

I also want to mention Lydia did an amazing job getting her harp finished off for the week without anyone asking her, and for getting her homework done before looking at screens. She’s really on a roll!

A Fun Family Day

Today Clarissa and Ammon played at the park while Lydia and Mary had tennis practice. I love the video below of Clarissa having fun on the zip line.

After dinner, I played magnetiles with Ammon and Clarissa. It was so fun, and we did a little dancing/throwing kids when we were done!

At night, I caught Lily reading to Ammon and Clarissa, as she so often does, and I grabbed a quick video of it. I love how much she reads to our children!

Hiking Out of Kolob Canyon

This backpacking trip was a complete dream come true for me. I’ve been dying to backpack with the family, and it has felt difficult to pull off from a scheduling, and weather perspective, but we finally made it happen. Even still it almost didn’t happen because Lily tripped and fell an uneven piece of cement at night the night before. I went to bed thinking it wasn’t going to happen, but in the morning Lily felt ok going forward. We bought her ice packs and an ankle brace. I was very worried about having her hike on it, and it did hurt and it was sore, but from what we can tell, her ankle did ok. That was really the only concern. The rest of the trip was pure bliss for me.

The only other semi-concern was that we drank way more water than I expected (probably about 16 bottles work) getting into camp. I had brought a filter as a backup, so I left camp before 6AM to go a little over a mile up the trail to filter water for all of our bottles for the trek home. I’d never used the filter before and it was a gravity system that took a very long time, but fortunately I got back before Lily started to worry. It was fun to be out on a survival mission for my family (running out of water would have been a huge problem!)

This is campsite 6. We were in campsite 4. Campsite 6 has a nice area in the stream for dipping, so took the picture here for future reference. I had to go to the spring by campsite 7 for water pumping though because apparently this stream has bacteria in it that can’t be filtered out and it’s very dangerous to drink in significant quantities.

Back at camp, Lily was already packing up and getting the camp ready to go, which was a huge help! Before packing up, I took sentimental pictures of our cooking area (the tuna casserole was soooo good last night!) and took videos of the kids singing and dancing in the tent. I don’t know what I love more, the singing and dancing or the smile on Lily’s face while she’s watching them.

While I finished packing up camp, Lily took the kids to the river where they had a wonderful time playing.

Then we hiked back. Hiking back was easier from the standpoint that most people’s packs were lighter, and I did a better job distributing weight according to people’s abilities. It was also easier from the standpoint of knowing the trail. But it was much much much harder from the standpoint that now we were mostly hiking up, instead of mostly hiking down. The family did amazing. I am so proud of them! Part of what I love about backpacking so much is you don’t just get a beautiful immersive experience in nature and the people you are with, but at the end of it, you all feel proud for achieving something difficult. I’m so proud of how everyone did! Part of what made the way back doable was we took a few nice long luxurious breaks.

This was our longest break, and Clarissa took a full 20-30 minute nap.

After finishing we went and got ice-cream at a gas station. This was one of my favorite experiences I have EVER had with my wonderful family. Thank you all for going with me!