Our Day at Ludlow

Hey everyone, Wrennie here!

Wow it feels like a long time since I posted. We've been so busy. Several things happened since the last time we talked but the biggest one is that we moved! To a new house. It's huge and there is a park really close! Chloe and I are really excited (Chloe thinks the boy next door is SUPER cute) (WRENNIE! SHHHHH -Chloe) BUT we'll have to show you the new house later.

Today I want to tell you about one of our EPIC adventures this summer. We had so much fun in Colorado, but my favorite part of our whole vacation was visiting Ludlow!

Small.

Hello friends, it's Penny! School is back in session and we've been pretty busy but we are not going to ignore this blog anymore, I promise!

Today, I had a post all planned out, but instead I just want to say... today I feel small.

I don't mean that I've been put down or that I'm sad, but just that the world around us is so big and grand and we are so... well, small. 

We saw some really awesome things this summer. Big things. Mountains, and ghost towns, and training centers. 

It was a really great summer. We're looking forward to telling you about it, I promise. 

My sister Callie looks so pretty in bright colors like these.

Wrennie looks tiny next to this big abandoned building. 

Chloe sparkles like always. 

And then there's me, surrounded in big rocks and red leaves.

I feel like it's good to feel small sometimes. Later on I'll feel big again, but for today, I'm just going to take all this in.

-Penny

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! We have been busy having lots of adventures, and we will be blogging about them soon, but we wanted to share photos really quick to give you a preview of what we'll be talking about soon, and to say that we are thankful for you, all of the friends we've made here!! 

Love, Callie, Wrennie, Penny, and Chloe

Atoka Museum & Confederate Cemetery

Hey guys, Callie here again! School is in full swing and it's got Penny and I thinking about how much fun we had last summer. We still have a few adventures left to cover and we wanted to share one with you today... along with some news!

Last year, my aunt and uncle went on a vacation and our cousins came to spend a whole week with us. We packed in all these trips, including the one I'm about to tell you about and my poor mom and dad were really good sports about everything. But! This year! It's my mom and dad's turn to go on a trip and WE ARE GOING TO GO STAY WITH WRENNIE AND CHLOE! Our brothers are coming too... not that they want to be on our blog just yet. But we're working on it, I promise!

Last year, one of the places we went was to the Civil War Museum and Confederate Cemetery in Atoka, Oklahoma. We didn't get to go in the museum because it was closed, but we took a couple of pictures of the cemetery.

This is explaining about the battle site. We were walking around at dusk and it kind of got creepy. There were a lot of woods nearby and something rustling around. We were kind of worried about ghosts.

Most of the graves looked like this. They weren't really very big, either.

This was almost the whole cemetery.  We didn't get a lot of pictures because of that creepy noise.

We tried to take a few. We found this little cabin that we didn't feel uncomfortable around. (Taking pictures on someone's grave seemed kind of disrespectful so we didn't.)

With a little stone fence.

And a small wood one! This was one of the fences on that big long sort of trail behind the first marker up there. It went off into the woods into nowhere so we didn't follow it.

We got this picture of me in front of the small cabin...

One of Penny on the fence...

Wrennie over by some rocks...

And Chloe with the cabin in the background.

There was kind of an off-putting guy in a truck watching us this whole time which made us nervous so we decided between that, the ghost and the fact that it was dark, we wouldn't stick around to learn much more about the property.

Have you ever had an adventure go awry like that?

-Callie

PS - We did figure out what it was. Turns out it wasn't a ghost after all. 

  That's one mystery solved!!

Marisol got a new haircut, and meet our new friend Ruby!

Hi everybody, it's Callie again! Are you tired of me yet? I hope not.... ;)

The Olympics have started and Penny and I have been living in our leotards--well, not really; that would smell kind of funny I think!--but we have been loving everything! We spent some time practicing in the back yard today.

Penny is getting really good! I'm pretty proud of her!

While we were practicing though, our friend Marisol came over and guess what! SHE CHANGED HER HAIR!!

I was so excited I gave her a hug!! And then yelled for Merlin because I think her hair looks great and I wanted pictures.

Doesn't it look fantastic? I really think it suits her, and she'll be able to do lots of great hairstyles for dance, too. (I'm not sure though, is she allowed to have bangs or will she have to tie those back?)

I love this side braid that she had her hair styled in! Note to self: borrow this hairstyle ;)

I love this picture. I have to say that my baby brother is getting to be decent!!

While we were taking pics, our brand new friend Ruby heard the commotion and came over to say hey! I haven't introduced her yet, but guys, she made it home safely!

She wanted to know what was going on so I told her that Merlin was taking pictures, and since she hasn't even made an appearance on the blog yet (I know right?) that we needed photos of her too! She was happy to comply.

Ruby comes all the way from the New Orleans area. Her mom is Cajun, and her dad is Latino/Black from the US Virgin Islands. Ruby's family goes on vacation to St. Croix every year! She's adopted, which we think is really neat. She wants to be a doctor when she grows up. She's been hanging out with our friend Anne and her company over at Dreaming of Dolls, and she's really excited to join us here. She got to ride a train all alone!

Her hair!! I i just love it.

And her bright colors! Oh, she and I are going to get along really well.

I wanted a picture of my sister's awesome leotard.

She's so photogenic, I love it.

I hope that everyone's having a great wrap-up to the end of their summer! We still have lots of posts left to talk about, PLUS something very exciting coming up in just a couple of months! In the meantime, is everyone enjoying the Olympics? Our favorite sport is obviously gymnastics, but what's yours?

Love, 

Callie

PS: Penny says I have to put one more picture of myself to make this entry fair.

Gotta Catch What?

Hi everybody, Penny here!

It's time for the summer postcard exchange again and today we wanted to go out and take some pictures for our postcard! Last year, only Callie participated because I was still visiting Aunt Aggie in Texas with my cousin Chloe, but this year we're sending one together! I'm super excited.

Here's Callie's with one from last year!

We've been really busy this summer, so we felt really excited for the chance to get to connect with some of our online friends! Just as a sample, here's some of what we've been up to.

We planted a garden! This was from when we first put it in, but we got a really good yield from our small number of plants and it turns out that everything grew something really well. We have an eggplant, two zucchini plants, three roma tomato plants, an okra, and two bell peppers. We have never grown eggplant or okra so we weren't sure how it would turn out but it ended up being fine!

Besides the tomatoes, the bell pepper actually ended up being our favorite plant. It just smelled so good.

We saw live eagles! (still need to blog about this, callie....)

Trinity took a road trip to Dallas. She had lunch with some friends and then came back and told us all about it. She brought us a couple of souvenir cups and saucers too! She's a big food person and she runs a food blog, so she was pretty eager to judge the food at the restaurant. She said it was cute and that they went out of their way to make it look special!

AND we got caught in a really scary storm that knocked out our power for a couple of days. It got realy hot after the storm and it was pretty miserable for us.

AND we have a new friend coming to join us! This is Ruby. We've been pen-palling for a while so we're super excited to get to show her around. Right now, she's hanging out with our friends Anne, Zia, Nani, their big person Beth, and the whole crew of their friends over at Dreaming of Dolls. She says she's having a blast and that she gets to see the circus town. We're SUPER jealous, but we're glad she's having a nice time!

So today we got up so we could go take some pictures at the river nearby, but we ran into a problem. There weren't any parking spots!!

these are pictures from the same river! We thought we'd go there again.

There aren't very many to begin with because here, there are small areas a few miles apart all along the riverbank, and people bike or run on the trails that travel along beside the river. It's very pretty, but usually we see one guy with a bike and maybe a couple of joggers. Today, there weren't any spots anywhere, and the riverwalk was packed with people all staring at their phones, getting excited over things that they could only see in their cell phone cameras, and muttering that they had to catch everything.

Catch what?? We had no idea! So we went to another park nearby with some pretty landscapes that's usually pretty empty:

Wouldn't that make a nice postcard? But it was packed too! With people doing the same thing!!

I know we sound kind of mad about it. We're not. There's been a lot of nasty going on in the world lately that makes us and our friends very sad. We stood and watched these people walking around, looking for their invisible little creatures, using all of these public places the way they were supposed to be used--and most importantly, they were so nice to each other, talking to each other even though it was pretty obvious they'd never even met. Laughing, getting along. It was really nice to see when we've had so much hate shoved down our throats lately.

So we asked our uncle what was going on and he explained Pokémon to us and now we're kind of totally into it.

We're making it a family game since we're all a little young to go roaming around by ourselves, and we're really enjoying seeing what the game leads us to see!

And by the way, we did finally find a place to take a picture for a postcard! Here's one we didn't use :)

We can't wait to see everyone's! 

Love,
Penny