Summer 2019

This summer flew by with a potpourri of camps occupying the kids. Weekends were gloriously free of sports and could be used for more important activities like driveway scraping.

Teeth came and went. Tessie took so long to pull out her front tooth that it started turning black

Much better

 The day before leaving for sleepaway camp, Erin pulled out a filling while chewing a blow pop 

 There were many anxious nights before she finally left for the multi-night trip away from home

It was a cooking camp run by the MasterChef FOX TV franchise that Erin's friend Georgea talked her into. Going into it, Erin's skills in the kitchen started and ended at Mac'n'Cheese, but at the camp their team learned and cooked complex meals 

while enjoying perfect weather at a gorgeous private school in Connecticut

 That same week Caroline had a 2-night camping trip, leaving us with one kid for 2 Tessie-rific nights

The first camp meal that Erin prepared was pork schnitzel, spaetzle, and pickled cabbage

 We learned about the space program and celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11

The garden was kind of a bust this year. Look at these lame peppers 

compared to the real thing

The potato crop fed about 1 1/2 people. If only there were a place in the US where potatoes are so plentiful that one finds piles of them on the side of the road.

 Caroline bravely attended a chamber music camp as one of the youngest musicians

and spent a week in North Carolina with her cousin Lyla 

 that entailed an unaccompanied flight back to Boston

At home she remains cell-phone free and worked on her miniature bakery made out of Sculpey

And then there were the butterflies. Enhanced egg recognition coupled with a bumper crop of milkweed in our yard led us to raise and release over 50 butterflies starting from eggs

 The biggest crop was timed to hatch in time for the fall migration down to Mexico

 and this year we signed up with Monarch Watch to tag the migrating generation to see if any complete the 2,500 mile journey to central Mexico. The tags are recovered from dead butterflies that don't survive the winter, but one hopes that fellow travelers make it back to Texas in the springto lay eggs and start next year's cycle

I could probably make a boatload of cash off of this video