Monday, July 30, 2012

Visit to the (old) homeland

Last week the kids and I flew back to DC (well, Virginia really) for the week. I had a big meeting to run and needed to go in the office and the kids came with me to see family. It was just awesome, even though it was 99 and 90 percent humidity most of the time. The kids loved seeing their grandmother, sister, uncle and cousins. I had really good work stuff and it was fun to see old friends.
Andy, Margaret, Fafa and Jennifer playing Old Maid.Fafa wouldn't let them watch TV or play on the iPad (sacrilege according to them!), but they played other games and had a grand time.
The kids with our old neighbors Ernie and Doris. Meg looks like a demon zombie here. I think it's the candy coma she was in. The kids didn't remember our old house or neighbors, but they remembered that Ernie and Doris had candy and that recollection was rewarded with, well, lots of candy.
Our old house in Fairfax, which looks exactly the same. We talked to the new owners (who didn't invite us in, which was just as well) who said they love the house. Yay!
Our house before that in Alexandria. The whole Del Ray/Arlandria area looked good overall - lots of new construction and additional retail, etc., but the Warwick Village area looked like it had seen better days. Our old house in particular looked a little rough.
I just had to take a picture of the Wafle Shop, which clearly has a new sign since we moved in 2003, I think. I am amazed the new sign is still misspelled which makes it even funnier.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Cousin Camp

This week Andy and his cousin Megan have been in day camp together so my sister and nieces have been staying with us. It has been so fun to see all the kids together. I think we have all stayed up too late and gotten up too early but we can sleep later. Tonight Bjorn read to all the little ones who were so tired but so interested in his storytelling of Swedish fairy tales.

I have a whole trip to Ireland to blog about but it's so big I haven't been able to tackle it yet.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Of beautiful clothes and things

My cousin got married a few weeks ago. They are a beautiful young couple and graciously offered to let all four little cousins be in the wedding. Thus began a Bataan Death March trying to figure out what they would wear. It was stressful, y'all. Partly because I thought my sister who has way more fashion sense and attention to detail about this stuff than me had ordered the dresses back in February when we first talked about it. As such, we all realized about two weeks out that we didn't have anything planned. Fortunately, she came through and found something perfect. Dressing for weddings is always a challenge, and dressing for the Unitarian wedding of an atheist religion professor to a minister made it that much more interesting.
Seriously, folks should get married every weekend just to make little kids look this damn cute.
The wedding party. The wedding was in the morning, the most formal time of the day. I suspect it was actually to cut down on the drinking and swearing the comes with weddings though. A few still managed to knock back a dozen drinks at a formal luncheon, but imagine how much worse it would have been at 7 p.m.?
Let the record reflect even the adults dressed for the occasion. I like that dress - I just got it. An added bonus was that it looks like Julia Roberts' dress in Pretty Woman when she goes to the polo match and Jason Alexander calls her out for being a hooker. Fortunately, no one called me a hooker this time. Unfortunately, no one accused me of looking like Julia Roberts either.
The whole family. Bjorn is standing on a step lower than everyone else and he still looks taller than everyone.
All four grandchildren. I loved how the outfits turned out. Andy is wearing a hand-me-down suit. There was some debate as to whether he needed something black but I think this worked out. I did call around everywhere (naturally on the Thursday before a Saturday morning wedding in another state) trying to find a bow tie. I finally found a Christmas tie on sale at Janie and Jack. It's too big so my dad stole a paper clip from some flowers in the church to fix it. He's MacGyver for wedding outfits.
Andy's job was to hand out programs and he was quite proud of himself for having such an important job. All sixty guests needed those programs. Bjorn was there to make sure he did it because while he recognized the importance, he was a little shy to just shove them into people's hands.
He knew how cute he was and was posing. That kid ain't always shy.
So Nashville (randomly if you ask me) has the world's only life-size replica of the Parthenon in Greece. Despite our mocking, it was actually kind of cool and impressive. Loads of people were there taking wedding pictures that day. There were also a lot of men wandering around with their shirts off and jean shorts.  Bjorn and I agreed that straight men, even in the south, don't wear jorts and no shirt.
Andy was dancing for us. That kid has white guy moves, but he can really move it.