Cottage highlights

Back and exhausted!  Here are a few pictorial highlights:

• Arriving!  Everybody marvels at the irony that a cottage is supposed to be smaller and less luxurious than your regular home.  This is a mansion compared to where we usually live, with TWO floors (up AND down!) and TWO nice, clean bathrooms!



• YM found both a frog and a (garter) snake in the first 5 minutes… and then no other wildlife in the ten days thereafter.

  

• Ahh… Shabbos.  “It’s time to order a honey glazed ham!!!”  The magnet was on the fridge, but I thought it looked better with the candles.  (mine aren’t lit yet; I was busy taking pictures)

  

• It just wouldn’t be a vacation without Rainbow Monkey… and Aunt Sara to sweep up after him!

  

• Schlep half an hour to the gorgeous, sunny beach and marvel cuz we have it all to ourselves… oh, wait, what does that sign say?  “Warning:  Unsafe for bathing.”

• Handy free WiFi hotspot.

  

• Boys being boys…

 

• When she wasn’t showing off her mad swim skills, Naomi wove and sewed a coin purse with this Loop n’ Loom weaving kit my mother surprised her with.

• Fishing with Abba:  worms and all… (I stayed inside – ew!)

  

• Thursday night:  staying up late making “cottage challah” from scratch.

• Not pictured:  the walk the kids took with Abigail yesterday afternoon (Shabbos).  I think they left around 2-ish and came home around 7-ish.  They walked all the way to town, normally about a 15-minute drive, but maybe a 2-hour Shabbos walk in lousy sandals (Elisheva) and ballerina flats (Elisheva’s friend).  In town, apparently they fantasized about ice cream, which they couldn’t have, and then walked home, arriving minutes before a terrible primeval thunder-and-lightning rainstorm. 
• Lastly, and kind of irrelevantly… Okay, here’s a weird one.  Coke cans this summer have a gimmick my mother says they’ve borrowed from beer:  a Coke-bottle shaped logo with the words “Summer Ready When Red.”  However… when chilled in the fridge, freezer, glacier, Antarctica, wherever, the logo never gets any darker than THIS smeary pink shade.  Definitely the same stuff they use to make the double lines on pregnancy tests:  so faint it leaves you peering for hours, buzzing with questions.  “Could it be?  Is it summer-ready?  Can I drink it yet???”

  

Well, I for one am “summer ready”!  What?  It’s August 22nd?  Summer’s almost OVER?

Nonsense. 

As my sister Sara always says (she can be as tedious as me when she tries), “there’s more summer in September than in June.”

We almost didn’t make it back – too much STUFF.  We drove up last Friday, eight people, in two cars.   (us, plus my mother and Sara) 

Both cars last week were stuffed to the rafters.  Then, my mother drove home on Monday and came up this Friday with three people:  Abigail, Elisheva and Elisheva’s friend, making it NINE people this weekend.  And the car was quite full this week, too.  But then we had to get it all home today – nearly three carloads’ worth - in one trip.  With only Ted apparently possessing the wits, energy and intact legs to actually pack the stuff up inside the house and load it cleverly in every available millilitre of space in and around the car (ie bunjy-strapped to our rackless roof).

Despite crashing rain torrents and whiny kids, we made it back.  It’s nice to be home; I doubt I could have survived any more relaxation with the family…