Happy New Year’s Eve, friends!  In lieu of my usual Monday post, I am getting sentimental (you’re not surprised, I know) and looking back on the year that is wrapping up today.  2018 was a year of extreme highs and lows – we had some really joyful times, but we also had an unexpected death in the family that left us reeling for the latter half of the year.  I think if there was a theme or a lesson to 2018, it was that life is short and you should hug your loved ones as much as possible.

January was a hectic month.  I entered a particularly busy season at work and had several 70-hour workweeks in a row – ouch.  Poor little Nugget also got hit with a yucky stomach bug that we’re pretty sure he picked up while playing at a local children’s gym.  And the weather was super-weird, fluctuating from 65 degrees one weekend to below freezing for weeks on end.  But we managed to get outside a couple of times, even in the cold weather, kicking off the 52 Hike Challenge at Theodore Roosevelt Island in D.C.

February brought more cold weather, more indoor time, and more hectic weeks at work.  We only managed to hit the trail once, but we did host Peanut’s BFF and her mom for a fun play date.  The girls baked raspberry crumb bars (with some help from the moms) and we all enjoyed them with tea.  I had some grown-up fun, too, attending a rosé tasting event at the Embassy of France with my BFF and doing a bit of book shopping.

March means one thing – my sweet baby’s birthday!  We celebrated THREE YEARS of Nugget with a Star Wars themed birthday party, and true to his nature, Outdoor Boy chose to mark his birthday with a hike.  We hit the trails a few times this month, since the weather finally started to thaw, and we also made a trip to the National Zoo.  I also made a trip to Boston to work on a union campaign (my favorite part of my job) and spent an evening chatting into the night with sweet Katie.

April was a banner month, because I saw my favorite band, the Decemberists, in concert!  They don’t tour all that often and even more rarely come East, so it was a special treat.  The rest of the month was just as celebratory.  We marked Easter with a service at our church – joined by Aunt Rebecca – followed by egg-dyeing and a vegetarian feast with a Aunt Rebecca, Aunt Jenn and Uncle Robert, and Peanut’s very first friend (Jenn and Robert’s daughter).  Hiking was good, too – there was the Bluebell Loop Trail, naturally – a can’t-miss April tradition – a Mason Neck hike with Rebecca and her dog Brandy, and a muddy good time at Great Falls.

May saw more family fun – a visit from Grandma, who we don’t see nearly as much as we wish we did, and a Mother’s Day hike at Mason Neck.  We also started our garden for the year (dubbed “Squirrelbait”) – spoiler: this wasn’t the most successful year.  We visited Mount Vernon and petted the baby animals, and Peanut said lots of hilarious things.

June was a month of highs and lows.  We started with the highs – first a trip to Cornell for my fifteenth reunion.  How is it possible that so much time has gone by since graduation?  It was fun introducing the kids to the place where Steve and I fell in love.  After Cornell, we stayed upstate for a bit longer and swung by my parents’ house, where my brother Dan and his wife Danielle were visiting from Colorado.  We never get enough time with them, but we made the most of the few days we had – sailing on the Adirondack lake where my parents have a camp and hiking at Lake Minnewaska.  The end of the month brought great sadness, though – the sudden and unexpected loss of a beloved family member.  We’re still working through the grief that followed.

July was a sad month, while we grieved and tried to adjust to a new reality without someone we all loved in it.  We’d been planning to make a trip back up north to spend the Fourth of July with my parents, and we decided that we would keep those plans, because we wanted to be with family.  I didn’t recap most of the trip – too sad – but we made it to the lake again and my parents distracted us with an afternoon of hiking at Bash Bish Falls and dinner out in nearby Lenox, Massachusetts.  (Western Massachusetts is so lovely; I wish I got there more.)  We kind of drifted through the rest of the month; I don’t remember much of what we did, other than camp runs and play dates – and I finally learned to bake bread.  It didn’t occur to me at the time, but looking back I think that maybe my obsession with bread-baking this summer might have had something to do with needing an outlet and to do something with my hands when my heart was feeling so sad.

August was the month we reserved for our summer vacation, and we managed to have a pretty good time.  We drove back up to New York (three trips to the Empire State in three months!) and spent a week in the Adirondacks with my parents.  We got a cute Airbnb apartment right in downtown Lake Placid and used it as base camp for a week of hiking and water fun.  Steve and I climbed our fourth Adirondack high peak (Big Slide Mountain this time); the kids splashed and played at the Lake Placid beach, and we celebrated Peanut’s sixth birthday on the trail.

September was quiet after the wild swings of summer, and that was what we needed.  We hiked at Great Falls with new friends who just recently moved to the area from San Francisco, and the kids went back to school.  Most of my month was taken up with back-to-school activities – as kindergarten class mom, I had a lot to do with back to school night, first PTA meetings of the year, and more.  Volunteering in Peanut’s classroom was one of my fall goals, and I have loved being around the school more.

October is my favorite month!  It’s my birthday month, fall splendor is everywhere, and Halloween is the best way to close out a month – if you ask me, which I realize no one did.  I cashed in my birthday authority by dragging the family out for a cold picnic and hiking in Shenandoah National Park – Nugget’s happy place.  During the week, I treated myself to a lunchtime excursion to see No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man at the Renwick Gallery with my friend Susan, and it was fabulous.  The rest of the month, we fit in several more hikes, watched the beginning of the fall foliage changing (it’s really a November phenomenon in Virginia, but it starts in October) and celebrated Halloween at school and in the neighborhood.

November was Steve’s birthday month, and we celebrated on the trails, of course!  Governor Northam had recently opened a brand-new state park – Widewater State Park, near Stafford – so we headed down there to check it out.  Even with the very barest beginnings of a trail network, it was lovely.  I also changed jobs in November, after a long search for a new opportunity, and enjoyed three days of “funemployment” – which I spent reading and chaperoning Peanut’s field trip to the weirdest farm ever.  And of course, one of my favorite holidays – we shared a Thanksgiving feast with my parents and our beloved next door neighbors, then spent Black Friday working off the mashed potatoes on the trail at Great Falls.

December – we made it to the end of the year!  I started the year with a business trip to Philadelphia, which was a lot of fun – and I got to see the lovely A.M.B. into the bargain!  Back in Virginia, we tried out a new tradition and cut down our own Christmas tree, then decorated it with all of our favorite ornaments.  We filled the month with other holiday fun – like a trip to the Christmas trains at the U.S. Botanic Garden – and even made it up to Baltimore to spend a day at the National Aquarium.  We ended the month with a little over a week at my parents’ place and managed to squeeze in almost everything we wanted to do – lots of friend time, hiking, family fun and playdates.  A good way to bid the old year farewell.

And now, it’s 2019!  Here’s hoping for lots of joy and adventures this year – we need them.

FINALLY!  A season packed full of fun, with every.single.item crossed off my seasonal to-do list.  After the Summer of Torrential Rains, I really needed a few months of good weekend weather.  We were sorely in need of family time and we made sure to pack the autumn season full of it.

• Pick apples at Butler’s Orchard (and maybe some raspberries too?).  Done!  Well – not at Butler’s, because it was closed on the day we wanted to go.  And not berries – we were too late in the season.  But the kids and I drove out to Bluemont with some friends on Columbus Day and enjoyed a day of apple picking at Great Country Farms, followed by a hike to Bears Den Overlook – a lovely way to play hooky from work.

• Hike Big Meadows at Shenandoah National Park – moving this one over from the summer list.  Done!  I cashed in my birthday rights for a day trip out to Luray, and we had a picnic (hot soup in the chilly fall air) and hiked Big Meadows and the Story of the Forest Trail.  Big Meadows was absolutely magical!

• Roll up my sleeves and do some fall baking with Peanut.  Calling this done, even though Peanut only helped with taste-testing this time (ha!).  I had fun whipping up a cranberry-apple spice cake with maple buttercream and candied cranberries to take to the neighbors’ house for Thanksgiving dessert.  And there’ve been several batches of sourdough bread, sourdough rolls, and spiced apple cornbread – yum.

• Catch up on the 52 Hike Challenge before it gets really cold.  Done!  Well – I’m calling it done.  The next hike I do will be hike 52 – wahoo!  (I’m saving it for something special.)  I have loved spending so much time on the trails this year.

• Read cozy mysteries – as many as possible.  Calling this done.  I have had a great year of reading, now that it’s almost over, and there’s no season like fall for curling up with a blanket, a big cup of tea and a cozy mystery.  I visited with Lady Georgianna and Hercule Poirot, two of my favorite sleuths, and had fun experiencing a different kind of mystery novel in The Floating Admiral.

• Run the Wonder Woman virtual 5K (and maybe the Alexandria Turkey Trot).  Done!  Not the Turkey Trot – I was too busy cooking all day – but I did manage to squeeze in 3.1 miles on the Potomac Yards trail for the Wonder Woman virtual 5K run.  I made the plans to do the run “with” my fellow Wonder Woman fan, Katie – she got it done sooner than I did, but I made it happen eventually!

• Volunteer in Peanut’s classroom.  Done!  I made a goal that I would be more present and visible at school this year, especially for Peanut – Nugget is such an easygoing, happy-go-lucky guy that he doesn’t really need me at school, but Peanut does.  It’s been a commitment, but I have been around a lot more in Peanut’s class and I think it’s been helpful.  I am a class mom, so I helped to lead Back to School Night for the kindergarten parents, co-hosted the class Halloween party (and was in charge of the Halloween art project – superhero pumpkins!), chaperoned a field trip to a nearby Colonial farm, and helped serve muffins and open applesauce cups during the Togetherness Feast before Thanksgiving.
• Get back into Barre3.  I could have done better with this, but I’m calling it done.  Getting to class has proven too hard to fit in, but I signed up for Barre3 Online and have done some workouts from the comfort of my bedroom.  Hoping to keep this going over the winter – I really do enjoy Barre3, I just don’t enjoy the fact that my kids are already awake before I have to leave for the 5:45 a.m. class.

• Pumpkin picking, of course!  This is an easy one to put on the list, because it’s guaranteed to happen.  We went back to Wegmeyer Farms this year and the kids had fun choosing their pumpkins and snacking on apple cider donuts.  The best!

• Take the kids trick-or-treating (they already have their costumes!) at Mount Vernon and in the neighborhood again.  Another easy one, because Halloween is coming whether I’m on my game or not!  We actually didn’t make it to the Mount Vernon trick-or-treating this year, but the neighborhood block party was bumping as usual.

How about that for a seasonal list?!  It was a great fall.  In addition to all of the fun above, I changed jobs and we hosted my parents for Thanksgiving.  We really did need this bright and happy season, and I feel a bit more human again after a summer that left us all pretty emotionally banged up.  Here’s hoping we can keep this momentum going and get more joy and more family bonding in over the winter.

It’s pretty much become a tradition that we celebrate birthdays on the trails.  I think that in the past year, every single member of the family has had a birthday hike, and November was Steve’s turn.  With all the choices in the world – well, all the choices in northern Virginia, the District of Columbia, and the close-in Maryland suburbs, anyway – he picked Widewater State Park, a brand new addition to the Virginia state park system (as in, Governor Northam officially opened it eight days before we put boots on the trail).

So on the Saturday before Steve’s birthday, we found ourselves driving down to Stafford to check out the new park.  The visitors’ center and the trail signs all smelled of new wood – mmmmmm.

Locals have been hiking around Widewater for ages now, but the park itself is still fairly bare-bones.  Many more things are planned – including a souped-up canoe and kayak launch (we will be back) and additional hiking trails.  There’s only one fairly short loop trail at the moment, but it was lovely and we felt very in the know, being some of the first visitors to a new state park.

The water views are always the best part, right?

I mean, look at that.

Eventually, the trail skipped across the road and continued through a stand of trees and by a pond – nothing particularly dramatic or earth-shattering, but lovely and peaceful all the same.  Sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

Happy birthday, handsome!  I hope you enjoyed your celebratory hike.  I sure am glad you’re my permanent trail buddy.  

Happy Thanksgiving, one more time, friends!  I hope that my American friends had a wonderful long weekend and you had a chance to celebrate however you like to celebrate.  I love Thanksgiving – what’s not to like?  A holiday to celebrate food, togetherness, and gratitude – sign me up.

I don’t have many pictures to show you of the day itself, as I spent most of it cooking.  ‘Tis the season of my current state of life.  But I did snap some pics of the food.  Which is the important thing, right?  (Kidding.  Maybe.)

I started with “three generations of appetizers” – a concept I came up with when it occurred to me to see if google had any recipes for “nuts and bolts,” a party mix I remembered my Grandmama making for Thanksgiving when I was a little girl.  No surprise here, but of course there were recipes online.  I picked the one that I thought came closest to my Grandmama’s, and my mom said she thought I did well.  To represent my mom, I made artichoke dip – of course.  We’ve been making and serving artichoke dip at every family gathering since I can remember.  I’ve been making it myself since I was about nine.  And for me, a new recipe for pesto and sundried tomato goat cheese spread – I need to come up with a catchier name – that I just recently dreamed up.

Gather ’round, turkeys!

After dinner, we went to our next-door neighbors’ house for dessert.  There was Persian tea, two kinds of pie, and my contribution:

Cranberry-apple spice cake with cinnamon maple buttercream and candied cranberries.  It went quickly.

As I mentioned on Monday, we chose to #OptOutside (thanks, REI!) on Black Friday – something we’ve done for several Thanksgivings now.  My parents were in town until the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and we took the opportunity to show them Great Falls Park – they’d never been, can you believe it?

Our first stop, naturally, was the overlooks above the roaring rapids – the ‘rents were suitably impressed.

After the overlooks, we split up – Peanut was complaining about being cold (perhaps she should try pants sometime, #justsaying) so Steve took her to the visitors’ center while the rest of us hiked.  It was chilly, but so beautiful.

We spotted a little blue heron drying his wings out in the winter breeze.

Altogether – a beautiful, if cold, way to spend the day after Thanksgiving.  I felt very grateful, indeed.

How did you celebrate Thanksgiving this year?

This year, I was lucky enough to have my birthday fall on a Saturday – hurray!  Steve asked me what I wanted to do on my day, and I knew that I wanted to hike and that it was a golden opportunity to drag everyone out a little further than our usual orbit.  I mulled over a couple of different options, including Harpers Ferry and Shenandoah River State Park, before deciding on Shenandoah National Park – and specifically Big Meadows, which I’ve been wanting to hike since last Thanksgiving.

We drove out to the park in the morning on my birthday.  My original plan was to get a nice early start, hike Big Meadows, have a picnic lunch and then hike the Story of the Forest Trail before heading home.  Of course the early start didn’t happen, and we rolled into the park around 11:30 with two hungry kiddos in the back seat.  Lunch first, then!

I packed us a picnic with a thermos of homemade soup, a baguette, sun-dried tomato and goat cheese spread, sliced veggies, and some fruit for the kiddos.  There was more to the picnic, including cheese sandwiches for the kids, but that stuff got inadvertently left at home.  Fortunately, the kids were happy to chow down on my homemade vegetable soup and the baguette, and Nugget – who loves vegetables – crushed the cucumber and cherry tomatoes.  So no one left hungry.

After tummies were filled, we headed back across the street and started our hike through Big Meadows.

There’s no actual hiking trail in the meadow – just a cris-crossing network of herd paths with a few entry points.  We found one and plunged in.

The meadow isn’t flat – there are lots of little rises and dips.  I was reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of the prairie in Little House on the Prairie: “Laura and Mary looked around them.  They stayed close to Pa.  Low bushes grew on the sides of the hollow—buck-brush with sprays of berries faintly pink, and sumac holing up green cones but showing here and there a bright red leaf.  The goldenrod’s plumes were turning gray, and the ox-eyed daisies’ yellow petals hung down from the crown centers.  All this was hidden in the secret little hollow.  From the house Laura had seen nothing but grasses, and now from this hollow she could not see the house.  The prairie seemed to be level, but it was not level.”

As we got deeper into the meadow, it got wetter and muddier.  We encountered a few standing mud puddles and several mucky areas that we couldn’t squelch through without covering ourselves in mud (pro tip: don’t wear your hiking sandals to bushwhack a meadow on a cold October day after a summer of near-constant rain; learn from my mistakes).

Certain people LOVE puddle-stomping.  Not naming names, but I’m grateful for kids’ wellies.

Onward!

There were also a number of large boulders in the park.  It was necessary that we stop at every.single.one and either take a (long) rest or do some singing and dancing on top of the boulder.  This is why hiking with kids takes forever.

But it’s so worth it!  I love watching them grow and explore and learn to respect nature – hiking has given our family so many gifts.  The thing about hiking with kids is that you have to let go of distance and time expectations and just go with the flow.  If we dragged them through at an adult pace, they’d quickly grow to hate hiking.  So we go at their pace, we stop and admire the plants and flowers they like, we play tracking games, pack snacks, and don’t worry if a hike is shorter than we’d like or if we turn back early.  If it had just been adults in our party, we’d probably have circumvented the meadow.  Instead, we just wandered and poked around – and we all had fun.

We also found a cool painted rock nestled in a little hollow on one of the boulders:

So pretty!  The kids took turns holding it, and then we put it back for the next hikers to find.

Big Meadows was lovely!  Definitely worth the wait of almost a year – and we’ll be back.  I’d love to see the meadow a riot of wildflowers in spring!

What’s a hike you’ve been anticipating?

Shall we take a few turns in the way-back machine?  Somehow I’ve gotten terribly behind in sharing monthly trail reports – whoops!  It’s time to catch up, so I’m wrapping up in a sweater, grabbing a cup of hot tea and looking back at a few pictures I snapped on a hot day in early September at Great Falls.

Great Falls is one of our go-to haunts in northern Virginia – I don’t need to tell you that we love it there, because I’ve written about it so many times you surely know all about it.  We also love taking out-of-town visitors and newcomers to the area to see the park, because it’s one of the great beauty spots of northern Virginia.  So when a new friend, who just moved to NoVA from San Francisco, asked for trail recommendations for her family of avid hikers, Great Falls was near the top of my list.  We decided to get our families together for a hike on Labor Day Monday – at first, we considered a drive out to Shenandoah National Park, but our friends had visitors in town and couldn’t get out until late morning.  So we decided to stay closer to home, and Great Falls was the obvious choice.

The waterfall was sparkling in the sunshine!  Our friends’ jaws dropped and they immediately remarked on the beauty of the river, the gorge, and the surrounding scenery.

We decided to walk upriver toward Riverbend Park, rather than downriver along the edge of the gorge, because we had three small hikers on foot (our friends also have a one-year-old, but she was riding along in an Ergo on her mom) and the downriver walk includes some ledges.  So upriver we went, and the decision paid off immediately when we saw a Great Blue Heron soaking up the sun on a rock.

We didn’t actually get very far, but that was okay.  The kids found a bubbling brook and the shoes came off immediately.  They had fun wading, splashing, and moving rocks from one side of the stream to another (kids are so weird).

After the hike, we stopped by the visitors’ center and picked up Junior Ranger booklets for the older three, then filled them out together at one of the picnic tables.  (Nugget’s was a lot of scribbles, but the rangers let him through anyway – ha!)  They turned in their booklets and took the Junior Ranger oath.

Two proud Great Falls Junior Rangers!

What’s your go-to local hike to show off your area to visitors and new residents?