Happy Birthday Lucy!

Lucy Hannah Gray turned six today! We celebrated by taking cupcakes to Lucy's class and having a family party at home. Lucy requested a special dinner -- spiral mac n' cheese, of course!


Lucy got some great presents. She especially liked her Webkinz Chipmunk from Grandma, her new (used) ski boots from Dad, and her jewelry box art kit from Sam and Heather. Sam and Heather also sent Gavin a prize, which he was thrilled about. Lucy has also been enjoying her Ariel DVD from Gram and Papa.

Last Saturday, we invited Lucy's friends over for an Art-y Party. The kids had a great time doing art projects and going for a nature walk through the backyard looking for paintable rocks and rubbable leaves.

In other news . . . we had a guy come today from the Vermont Historical Society to take a look at our barns. It turns out the hay barn dates to the construction of the house -- around 1840! He dated it by the fact that the timbers were hand-hewn with an axe and the sawn boards were done with an up-and-down rather than circular blade at the saw mill. The carriage house (probably originally a horse barn) dates slightly later, and the small wooden barn out front was originally an ice house from the early 1900s. The guy was amazed that they were in such good condition, particularly the old hay barn. We're just amazed that they're all so old! We're going to try to get a preservation grant from the state and put the hay barn on the historic register.

Fall in Vermont

For the past several weeks, the local NPR station has been running a "Signs of Fall" series where people write in and share their signs that fall has arrived. http://www.eotsweb.org/blog.php

We thought we would share our own Gray Family Signs of Fall. . .

• Wood stacked up by the barn, all dry and ready to bring into the basement.

• Brother Young coming to do one last cut of hay in our field, with Gavin's help.

• Friends coming to help pick apples from our apples trees. (Like our ladder?)

• Back-to-School night at Lucy's first grade class.

• Finding really interesting gourds for sale at Ellie's Market (with Berit Price!)

• Picking out the very best pumpkins to make into Jack-o-Lanterns at the Pumpkin Party.
  

• Dense thickets of trees thinning out as the leaves fall to the ground.

• Lots of wonderful dry, crunchy fallen leaves for Lucy and Gavin to stomp through!
  

Becoming a grown-up

On Friday, I drove down to Boston to attend the Exponent Women's Retreat (more about that later). On the way, I found a mall. This might not be particularly exciting to those of our friends who live near malls, but for me it was very exciting. I don't think I've been to a real mall in more than a year! I had to stop. The kids needed jeans, I needed a new watch battery, and I was in desperate need of some casual pants that weren't jeans that I could wear at work when I didn't have to be in uniform.

It didn't take me long to discover that the mall wasn't quite the place I remember.

I wandered into familiar places like the Gap, Abercrombie, H&M, and American Eagle and quickly realized that I was in strange and foreign land. What are these awful clothes! I don't want to wear this stuff! I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Then I went into Banana Republic -- surely Banana Republic would be the same! -- and told an overly-helpful saleswoman what I was looking for. She gave me an appraising look. "How OLD are you, if you don't mind?" she wanted to know. Aha! The lightbulb came on. I am almost 35 years old. I am too old for the Gap, and Abercrombie, and H&M, and even, sigh, Banana Republic. I am a grown up. I have to find grown-up clothes.

This began a quest to find the grown-up store. I had no idea where it would be. I had a lot of scary and distressing experiences, going into this store and that and looking around for people shopping there who might look kind of like me. I went into one store that looked like a grown-up store but everything in the store was a size one, two, or three. The saleswoman explained that a one is really a six, and a two is really a twelve . . . and while she was doing so I realized that the place was full of old women with perms so I beat a hasty retreat.

I did eventually buy myself some clothes at something called J.Jill. I found a nice pair of pants on sale, wore them for a day or two, then ordered a pair in every available color off the internet. I think I won't go back to the mall for a while.

I've had a few "wow, I must be a grown-up" moments in the past few months. Picking my own berries and apples, and bottling jam and applesauce -- that's seemed weirdly grown up. Owning a beautiful grown-up home with fruit trees and a garden and perennials still seems unreal. Realizing that my students this year were born in 1990 and, worse, that they put me in the same age category as their parents totally freaks me out. Then, yesterday, I found my first two gray hairs. Gray hairs!!!

Going to the Exponent retreat made me feel a lot better. The was a wide age-range of women attending, from an 18-year-old high-schooler to an 80-year-old retired biologist. There were grad students and grandmas, and moms in their 30s like me. Everybody stayed up all night chatting like teenagers at girls' camp. Maybe grown up is a state of mind.

Spending the weekend with the Exponent ladies was delightful. I had some trepidation that hanging out with Mormon feminists and intellectuals and liberals might turn into a gripe-fest. Not at all. I left Exponent with a strong sense that the church is great and I have an important place in it. I also left with a renewed desire to love and serve the ladies in my ward, even though so many of them are so different from me. As one participant put it, it's amazing who you can love. If I have to be a grown up, I hope I can be one that turns maturity and experience into patience, compassion and wisdom. And I hope I can find a J.Jill store closer to home.

Tunbridge World's Fair

Friday we braved the rain and took the kids to Tunbridge for the World's Fair. (For LDS trivia buffs, Tunbridge VT was Lucy Mack Smith's hometown.) It felt like we had jumped into Charlotte's Web, or maybe the movie "Babe". We missed the sheepdog competition, that was on Thursday, but we made it for the tractor pulls and the piggy races! We also caught the Yoked Oxen competition, where people showed off the skills of their ox teams. Each ox weighed between 2500 and 3000 lbs and had horns. Wow. Gave me a whole new appreciation for the pioneers!

The kids visited lots of animals, but their favorite animal celebrity was Lady, the horse belonging to Jeremy Young's girlfriend Ashley. Ashley and Lady won several awards in the Western-style riding competitions. Lady is a lot smaller than Aunt Christina's horses! All the horses we saw at the fair, and even our horse-friend Zeb that stopped by the other day are tiny compared to the ranch horses.

Lucy learned how to card fresh-shorn sheep's wool with some ladies spinning yarn for sweaters. They said she was a natural.

Gavin's favorite was the Giant Pumpkin competition (772 lbs.) There were also prize potatoes, tomatoes, and squash. I wonder what makes for a prize-winning potato?

It wouldn't be a World's Fair if there weren't rides, balloons, cotton candy (made of maple sugar, of course!)

Cow-Kids

Here's the kids in their Cowboy and Cowgirl outfits from Montana. Gavin wanted a tan cowboy hat "just like Co-Chad." Actually, all the cowboys at our house have tan or white hats because Uncle Chad only wore those kinds of hats. Gavin's western shirt is from Montana too, but his vest and chaps were birthday gifts.

I'm not sure Co-Chad would approve of how far back Gavin wears his hat on his head -- Lucy tried to fix it but Gavin wasn't having it.

I guess he'll just have to look like a poser until he gets big enough to go help Aunt Christina in the summers, and he learns how REAL cowboys dress!

Granby Zoo

For Gavin's third birthday, we told him he could either have a friend party or a family adventure. Gavin went with the adventure option, and decided he wanted us to go to a zoo. The timing worked out well -- with everything that has been going on lately, the kids (and their parents!) needed a day of kid-centered fun. So we took the kids to the Granby Zoo in Quebec on Saturday, and it was fantastic. It's a little weird to have to cross an international border and even weirder to have everything in French, but it's only two hours away, and they accept American zoo passes, so we can go as often as we'd like.

They had all our favorite big animals -- Elephants, Giraffes, Tigers, Hippos, Gorillas -- in these really wonderful outdoor settings, usually with several types of animals mixed in together.


My favorite were the nuzzling Rhinos. It's kind of hard to snuggle when you have two big horns sticking out of your nose, but these Rhinos were doing their best!


Lucy went on a camel ride. She said it was really bumpy.


The animals were so fun. They even had sharks, and they would let you pet them if you were brave enough (we weren't -- though we were impressed with the guy standing in the shark pool in his hip waders. Too bad we couldn't understand what he was saying in French. Maybe, "help me get out of here!"?)

When we'd had our fill of animals, we went to the amusement park that is part of the zoo. Almost all the rides are free. The kids went on the motorbikes, bumper cars, and ferris wheel, then Lucy decided she needed to take me on the scary rollercoaster. Naturally, she chose the very front seat, and begged me to take her again when it was over! All zoos should have fun rides. And a waterpark -- closed for the season, but we will definitely be back next summer!

Montana

Christina lives on the most beautiful ranch in all of Montana. I am so glad we were able to be on the ranch this past week as we try to come to terms with Chad's death. It's so peaceful, and so BIG -- the vast landscape brings a certain kind of perspective to mere human tragedy.

The flower girls-to-be looked so beautiful in their dresses.

On Saturday morning, our family worked together with Chad's family to plant a tree at Chad and Christina's house. Even the kids helped. Notice the beautiful green lawn -- Chad's pride and joy, perfectly manicured for the wedding.

We've all been so wrapped up in our own shock and grief and aching for Christina it's kind of amazing that life continued to go on this week. The Republican convention . . . hurricanes in the Gulf . . . people going about their everyday lives. Don't they know that everything has changed? This decoration hanging on the wall near the ranch office seemed to me to represent this paraox -- a cattle skull, but with a fragile bird's nest built inside it. In spite of death, life and hope persists.

We love you, Christina! You are brave and amazing and wonderful. We miss your Chad. Thank you for making him a part of our lives.