Family

Christiana reading Little Bear to Noah...she was was quite shocked [and he was quite delighted] when he said some of the words before she even got to them because he had it memorized...

Practicing violin with Christi and Emma


Christiana

Noah watching what I'm doing...he has beautiful, relaxed hands...

Concentrating hard

Emily also with nice violin hands

Christi won the ride on the fire truck because she had the best child fire safety poster!

Carrie and Hilary

Here are some pictures of Carrie and me from the past few years...

Wednesday!

I found my camera cable!
This morning we had no milk (seriously, I know), so Noah and I walked to the store to get some...

We stopped at the car wash....

Then, as requested by Noah who was very excited about it, we went through self check-out...

Some nice lady who had noticed us earlier took the picture.

The next several pictures are from Tuesday, when we went down to make cider at Uncle Jims....

Charity and Mercy, champions of the press


Kate [Noah] Emily, and Christi helping put the fresh cider into jugs.

Trudy

Christi, Noah, Trudy

Working on the cider press...

Me sending apples through the shredder/grinder

These next few pictures are from the cider party, which was at the end of October

Becky, Carrie's wonderful roommate

This picture is taken from Uncle Jim's house looking up to grandma's house on the hill and then up to ladybug peak.

Christiana

Emily

Neil washing apples before sending them to be shredded and pressed.

Dad working hard on the grinder

Charity and Mercy were big helps with the cider making.

Mom and Mrs. C straining and jugging the cider...

Pumpkin carving.

These are from Noah's birthday party!

Christiana, Noah--with his new hat, and Kate

The dinner table and us singing before the meal...

More old pictures

I haven't found my cable yet, but I thought I'd post a few pictures from the American Trail hike that Peter and I did last August. It was adventurous, to say the least, and can't even be captured in the pictures...Peter has more and better ones, I'm sure.
We took off on the Crest Trail from the top of Chinook past and hiked up to American Lake for the first night.

Once we got to American lake we hiked up the big ridge behind it and had a stunning view of the Cougar Lakes...

Here we are at American Lake. It was beautiful. We got there early enough in the day to explore around and enjoy it a bit. The water is so clear you can see right to the bottom. We met some guys who were being hired by the Western University science department to collect goat dukey for some research. Peter went swimming in the icey water with them, and then we all ate dinner and roasted marshmellows together.

Peter has this thing with frosted animal crackers. Actually, when you've been hiking all day they're pretty good.

Here with Mt. Rainier in the background. This was the forenoon of the second day of the hike on American Trail.

Peter opening a can of food and trying desperately to keep the mosquitos off of his head. (I really like this picture, it makes me smile every time...mostly because of the amazing bandana)

Went up, up, up, and up for many hours on the second day. The view, though, was worth it.

So I don't many pictures up from this one to the end. The reason being that we kept hiking up for several hours and then lost the trail a couple of times after hiking the tallest ridge that we could see around us (we were really high up). I have to mention Peter's kind, manly deed: when we were a decent distance down this ridge we realized that the trail wasn't to be found, that it was already evening, and that we didn't really have much water. I'm not exactly proud of the fact that I kind of started hyperventilating, but Peter took my pack and carried both his own and mine up the ridge so that we could hike out a different way. We ended up finding some water in a high mountain meadow, then hiked out Mesatchee Creek trail.

Here we are at the end. Ben came and picked us up.