Roxbury Weekend

Friday we went up to the Thrush cabin in Roxbury for a night and most of Sat. It's the cabin that Gma W's family has owned since the 1920's, I think. Chad's parents came also. Not a very big cabin, but it worked fine for one night.

Here you can see the girls were painting sugar cookies shaped like leaves and pumpkins. Micah even sort of painted one, and then Gma quickly baked it so he could eat it. :)

It was a great time to be there-- weather was cold but not rainy, and there were hardly any other people at the camp. We had the playground to ourselves.

I don't know if Micah tried the slides, etc more than once-- he saw the large sandbox and spent the whole time there.

This playground has an unusual balance beam-- sort of S-shaped and not sturdy-- it's made so that it can turn-- makes it pretty hard to get across. Katie was a whiz at zipping across it, but I still beat her in chicken fights! :)

Claire showing off her new winter coat-- I had gotten new ones for her and Katie last March or so when they were deeply discounted... $70 coats for $15. I had left the tags on so I could enjoy that price again when I got them out this fall. :)

This is the only pic that I got that really shows the Roxbury area much. Very wooded. Great stream to play in and around. Chad helped girls catch a crayfish; Katie found a log across the stream that she could run across; and Claire by mistake steps into the water up to her ankles. A little cold for that!

Someone found this salamander (Gpa and Claire?) on the scavenger hunt Gma planned. Katie and Claire both wanted to take it home as their pet, and they were almost fighting over it-- I told them it would be much happier staying here, so Claire just spent the rest of our time there (1/2 hour or so) holding its dish and talking to it and touching it. Right before we left, we all went with her back to the stream, and she picked it up to put it on a rock by the water. I think Jenna was horrified that Claire was touching it. :)

Here are the scavenger hunters.... Besides the leaves and strings and rocks they found, Gma had brought along more than a hundred pennies that she also tossed around the ground for them to hunt up.


We asked the kids what their favorites of Roxbury were. Katie said the food and the stream, Claire said the salamander, and I think Jenna said the game we played-- an idea Anita brought from a magazine-- write a question on a paper, pass it to next person, they write answer and fold down the paper so the next person can't see the first person's question, and it keeps going around-- got really silly.

There are a few cabin videos at the end of this. After leaving the cabin, Chad took K and J to the annual Mummer's Parade in Hagerstown. It starts at 6pm, so it's dark, and cold, and long, and late-- fun if you're dressed warmly and you don't have any little kids along, so I took C and M home for baths and a video. Our parade-goers only stayed for part of it, long enough to see the Grace float.

Her'es Katie showing off her new winter coat at the parade.