Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Leave of Absence

Here is installment number one of my Reader's Digest Condensed Version on the events of the 3 months since my last post!

The beginning of August brought with it a wonderful 10+ day vacation back east. The main purpose of our trip was to attend the 2011 Frischkorn Family Reunion, but we managed to squeeze a couple trips into one. So, while busy, every minute was very enjoyable!


Our first stop, of course, was Grammy & Grampy's house. Knox thoroughly enjoyed himself on "the farm"...playing with my old tricycle and Auntie Am's old Radio Flyer wagon. The metal kind, too...not those plastic numbers they try to pass off on kids today.

Grampy got out all his toys...the tractors, his log truck, and his new Harley.Grammy enjoyed herself, too!

Knox was quite the helper, checking out everything in Grampy's garage, from the RV to the bulldozer.

Country life suits him well!

Grampy also made sure we got plenty of authentic hayrides, and Knox got to check out the cows up close and personal.

Then we were off to Great-Grandma & Great-Grandpa's house in the lovely Ohio River Valley. We attended the family reunion and got to see lots of folks that we hadn't seen in years. Cousin Andy did a fabulous job planning and organizing the event. And Knox, again, proved that he is definitely suited for country living in all that wide open space.

He did stop running long enough to enjoy a special moment with Great-Grandpa in the rocking chairs. Knox's seat has been in Grandpa's family for over 100 years.

But we didn't stop there! A 5-hour road trip across the state of Ohio led us to the Martin family residence in the cornfields of Northeastern Indiana. My dear friend Amy and I hadn't seen each other since October of 2008 when we had a Girls' Weekend in Chicago.

Since then, Amy had added 2 little ones to her clan and we were 5 weeks away from the arrival of our second! It was so cute to see Knox and AJ become fast friends.

And, as if all that weren't enough excitement, a third member of our girls' quartet joined in the fun. Mish flew in from Portland for a long weekend. Good, clean fun was had by all!



We definitely missed our Jen Price, but it was still great to spend time with my girls and catch up on the last (busy!) 3 years.

We took the boat out on the lake every day, went for walks in the peaceful lakeside neighborhood, got our start in GeoCaching and took the kids to visit a "petting zoo" where we actually got to pet a baby tiger.


Though we would have liked to stay (forever?!) the open road was calling and we had to head back to Pennsylvania for our final boarding call.

We spent one last evening at Grammy & Grampy's, complete with lawnmower rides and ice cream cones at TJ's.

On our way to the airport the next morning we stopped by Goodell Gardens to say goodbye to Auntie Am. She and Knox walked through the gardens and then we were off to the last leg of our journey: the flight back to Arizona.

Pennsylvania definitely gave us plenty of reasons to smile. We're looking forward to being [much!] closer than a 5 hour plane ride to all those reasons.

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