When your husband spends hours and hours of the very few days a year he gets at the cabin weeding and even incinerating sections of the gravel driveway, only to have them regrow by the next time you get to the next section, it is time to do something different.

Pave the damn driveway and get my husband back so he can go play with me now!

And doesn’t the garden look delightful in early summer? It will only get better as the flowers bloom.

(And then two weeks later, it looked like this!)

Esther graduated from Cal-Tech, SLO the day after our last full day of school, so we hopped on a plane and headed down to California to spend a long weekend with family. Piper was almost cheerful the entire time because we rented The Turtle House, a wonderful, large house that fit the 12 of us and had two resident tortoises in a pen in the back.

I really enjoyed the entire area. Downtown San Luis Obispo is charming, the different beaches are great for exploring, and we had some fun exploring the inland parks, zoo, and waterpark.

But mostly, we were there for the family. I love getting updated pictures of the cousins! These are some of my favorite people in the world.

We did get some family shots–the first is the direct Need line. “Not a drop do I have, but the name,” probably said Shakspeare, or maybe just a bunch of monkeys with typewriters.

Grandpa and Grandma with the youngest six of their eight grandchildren.

And the whole fam-dam-ily, at least the Dan and Dwayne branches, from ages 13 to 80.

School’s almost out, and luckily, Rochelle and I made camping reservations back at Christmas time for Leavenworth now!

My youngers are wise to my ways, so they did not join us on the bike trip that everyone else volunteered for. I really enjoy the Icicle Irrigation path and for a path along an elevated ledge, there are very few places you feel like you might die. Mabel may have disagreed and I think she had new empathy for my younger children.

I hope we made up for it in snacks and games later.

PS She’s 15.