Will's 8th Birthday

Planning Will's birthday parties are difficult during normal times, so when people are not supposed to be gathering was a challenge. We were supposed to be at my parent's house in Washington for his birthday, so I thought I had it covered. Instead the cases of Coronavirus skyrocketed here in Texas and we decided we had to cancel-- again. Huge bummer. 

By some miracle I came up with the idea of having his birthday at a lake we went to a couple of times last summer with some friends of ours (Dean and Aleece Wilcox) and their son Cooper, who Will loves. I called Aleece and what-do-ya-know they were planning to be there with some family that day. I was so glad we had a plan. Sarah & Sage came, we did sandwiches and cake, a pinata, and Will and Cooper made awesome birthday memories with glow sticks in the lake.

 

4th of July

It was a different sort of 4th this year with all the normal festivities cancelled. Our city still held their firework show, which was great. People who got tickets had to sit by their cars and then fight their way out of traffic (no thanks). We made a good call and found a place to park a ways away where we could get out easily. John didn't come because he insisted he was going to have a friend over. (Didn't happen.)

Sarah showed up later with Lucy and Tucker and we all sat around in the parking lot of an auto parts store enjoyed the show. With the reduction in formal celebrations the sales of fireworks skyrocketed this year and people were having their own personal shows all over the place. I think that was happening all over the country.

June 25, 2020 our 26th wedding anniversary

Our 26th anniversary started out with a morning Zoom appointment to talk to our doctor about Peter's test results from his 3rd biopsy, 2nd with DNA testing. We had been anxious about it for a while because waiting for test results are always the worst part, and we were concerned that if we got bad news it would cast a shadow on our anniversary trip. The news wasn't great. They feel that the condition has progressed and we have entered the phase where we need to start planning the bone marrow transplant. We weren't expecting that, but in a strange way it was a little bit of a relief for Peter to have a plan instead of the lingering uncertainty about when this is going to happen. We left directly afterwards and it didn't taint the weekend for us. Instead we had two glorious nights in Fredericksburg, TX, walking through the town and the shops, eating delicious food and sleeping whenever we wanted.

Outside the Museum of the Pacific at dusk

The museum had a system of keeping the numbers of visitors to a certain quota for Covid, so it wasn't crowded. It is a museum of a lot of words, but I love stories about the people who fought in the Pacific and the story about Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Nimitz who served as Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas during World War II. A portion of the museum is in a hotel that was run by the family.

The houses in the downtown are all made of this type of stone. They are gorgeous and go back as far as the 1850's. I love the carriage entries in the yards. There were so many adorable cottages and stunning yards and plants. I was wishing I could grow a lot of it in my yard and took a lot of pictures of plants I hope I might be able to. I think the climate here is a little different than where we are in Austin.

While we were there we wanted to go back to an art gallery to buy some work by a watercolor artist we met 2 years prior. He was a 

On the way home we stopped in Marble Falls to see if we could purchase some paintings from an artist we met back in 2018. On my birthday that year we met Johnnie Fields, an architect and artist who's work I fell in love with. A WWII and Korean War vet, Mr. Fields was 90 years old, married 67 years, and at the time was still working, driving, and golfing. We first went to their shop we had visited in 2018, only to find that it was gone. We found the new location only to discover it was closed. Unbelievably I knocked and found his daughter had come into the studio to do a little painting that Saturday and she let us in. Turned out that he had died only weeks before and all of his paintings of bluebonnets, which we had particularly been looking for, had been sold. They were closing the shop and selling off the remainder of his paintings and we were able to buy several at discounted prices and I was so glad we were at least able to do that. It was such a shame we didn't come earlier. I had a feeling we might miss out if we waited. 

His daughter let us take our time browsing the shop and these are the paintings we purchased. I love them all.

This is actually a painting of a house in Fredericksburg.

I love the little nuns in this mission painting.

As usual, Peter spoiled me.

Neverending summer

Will & I back when it was cool enough to go on walks earlier this summer. This was the second wave of wildflowers and I was so happy to see it.

Peter's biking pictures

The boys basically have endless time on their hands. It was a real challenge to figure out what to do with him when I was in four classes and there was no place I could take him indoors when it was so hot outside. All of the kids play areas are closed due to Covid and we've been home since March.

 This is just a hilarious picture of Lucy. She's really struggling through this all as you can see.

My friend Courtney got adventurous one day and did a hike with the kids out to see the dinosaur tracks. She was a gem and helped me talk through my study guide for a history exam I had. She knew way more about US history than I did and could have probably taken the test for me without studying.