Turkey Tracks: Making Your Own Fun

Turkey Tracks:  August 15, 2018

Making Your Own Fun

My two families have come and gone, and summer is winding down slowly up here in Maine.  Container pots are looking scraggly, and the garden looks like someone’s uncombed head.  We got some good rain these past few days though.

One of the things I love about my two families’ visits is that we all “make our own fun.”  There was very little tv and no entertainment consumed that someone else did for these children.  Both sets of parents spent their vacation being with their children.  I suspect that this kind of thing is a rarity these days.

For the younger crew, their visit always starts, once they’ve been retrieved at the airport, at the LLBean boot in Freeport—for the annual family photo.  Inside LLBean are a whole range of stuffed animals—huge ones—so the kiddos can really see the size of a bear standing up.  Or how big a moose really is.  There are all sorts of wild cats as well.

This crew plays hard in Maine.  They hike, picnic, swim, and nap or have quiet time after lunch.  They hit the Ducktrap river estuary at low tide at good times this trip, so a lot of time was spent poking about tidal pools and capturing green crabs.  Buckets were filled with beach life many times this trip.  Their grandmother didn’t get many useful pictures of this endeavor as she was too busy playing.  The raspberries came in strong while they were here, so there were some “breakfasts at the bushes.”  Also, it was REALLY HOT and humid during part of their visit.

The older kiddos are now old enough to work adult puzzles and play serious card games with their grandmother and parents.  They, too, swam almost every day, either in the lakes or at Ducktrap, where the water is MUCH colder. They do like to ride the incoming or outgoing tidal current in the river though.  Thank heavens parents were taking some good pictures because the grandmother was playing or organizing food.

Ducktrap river:

Warming up after swimming in Megunticook lake at Barett’s cove:

There are two card sharks in the foursome, but all four learned a Kelly family ELABORATE card game called Hand and Foot.  We played as late as midnight once or twice.  The competition is fierce and hard!  I didn’t win a single game.

We had ongoing puzzles–which will be saved for the younger kiddos who will grow into them very soon now:

And this one below which had very hard pieces–so they had to learn to look at the shape of the piece in addition to the color.  We lost a piece along the way.  It probably stuck to someone’s arm and fell off somewhere.

There was time for relaxing:

And for the first time, they all ate lobster.  Well, Mina tasted lobster at least.

And time for art work:

And time to love on No No Penny, who is 15 now.  The girls have decided that Penny needs a dog friend.  She misses Miss Reynolds Georgia who died at 15 last August.

The girls went with me to the Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild’s reveal of our mostly completed traveling quilts (see other posts).  We strolled through the harbor with ice cream cones after the meeting.  The boys were “rolling” at a local Brazilian martial arts meeting.

I found lots of secret notes left for me in my quilt room and in the garage, along with art work made especially for me.

It’s been a really, really good summer.