Summer cleaning

Liz washing windows.

I'm glad she's not afraid of heights--because I am.

Great thing about having kids around unoccupied during the summer--stuff gets done!

Hard-workin' Men

Matt and Joe digging in one of my garden beds. It's so nice to get help with the hard labor. :-)

Kansas

I'm still trying to catch up with all the days I missed while on vacation. These photos are from our visit to Kansas to see Steve's side of the family.

Grandpa teaching Susannah how to back the lawn tractor.

Ben and Cody at the pool.

Susannah and Jordan trying on hats at the mall. For not seeing each other much, these cousins get along so well and are like two peas in a pod.

Going on a Romp

A "romp" in Cook Family parlance is a long trek over hill and up dale and through cow pastures and around ravines and under barbed-wire fences and amidst broam grass and wildflowers and cedar trees (that Grandma will eventually chop down) under the huge Nebraska sky, with family. A group of thirty or so off us took off down this dirt road: but soon left the road to wander cross-country through the pasture.


The terrain here is so hilly that erosion is inevitable, but that only makes the hiking more fun for these guys.

Shyer wildlife took cover, but Isaac found this little bugger and didn't want to let him go. I think he was planning to take him home, but after Isaac had carried the toad about a mile or so, the poor thing started looking a bit sickly, so I convinced Isaac that his new friend would be happier in a proper habitat near the cow tank. It helped that I had a little baggie full of candy that I was willing to share with any children who would first wash their hands at the windmill's pump. That was a pretty good incentive to put the toad down. :-)

The cows probably thought we were nuts, tromping around like boisterous hooligans.

At the end of the trail, Ben found a proper place to take a breather. Grandpa rigged up this his-n-her "rest stop" alongside a seldom-used, never-maintained-by-the-county (Grandpa's tax dollars not at work) road leading to family property in what we call "the mountains"(not to be confused with "the hills," which differ slightly in size but greatly in family history.) BYOTP.

DaCook DaCathlon

In the past couple of years my family (the Cook clan) has started a tradition of doing an "everybody" activity when we all get together. Last year it was a scavenger hunt/road rally taking us to favorite childhood haunts in the neighborhood; this year it was a multi-event decathlon-style team competition including events such as croquet, darts, jumprope, horseshoes, basketball, bead-stringing,....

...chopsticks... (I was signed up for it for my team, but Jeremy--shown here counting his beans--volunteered to take my place after hearing me whine about how bad I am at it. He hadn't used chopsticks before but turned out to be really good at it! But nobody was as good as Paul, who shoveled those beans into the bowl like he'd been born in China.)

...boggle...(Janet and John have a go at it here.)

..and giant jenga. (This is Susannah and Jeremy trying to pull out pieces without toppling the whole stack.)

It was a blast. I love it that the older folks and younger folks got to work and play together; the age span was 4 to 76. We all won prizes and trophies of some sort or other, but the biggest prize was being together.

At the heart of all the fun and joy and faith and love in our family is the world's all-time champion woman of the year--my mom, Carol Cook. It's all her fault!

Emo Jiwa (With apologies to Iwo Jima)

My sister Martha is an amazing gal. When she found out what it would cost to rent a party tent for a few days, she decided to design and build one herself. So she bought some steel pipe, bolts, rope, and a huge tarp and got to work measuring and drilling and cutting. It took about ten of us to get the tent up, but it was a thing of beauty and comfort once we finally did. Feeding and entertaining fifty people became much less complicated once we could move the whole production out of doors, rain or shine. I snapped this photo of Martha, Matthew, and Joseph as they were raising one of the long center support poles. It reminded us of the famous Iwo Jima photo, but we're a little backwards and a little screwy, so we titled it Emo Jiwa.


And here's Ben with our old dog Cotton, who now lives happily with Grandma and Grandpa on the farm. She still seems to remember us.

The long road home...

...leads here--a beat-up mailbox on a gravel road, a sharp right turn down the driveway past a red barn, a little white farmhouse, open arms and laughter.

Family Times

I spent the past couple of weeks visiting family in Nebraska and Kansas. I took hundreds of pictures; choosing which ones to post was hard! This first one shows part of the reason for the big gathering of family; three cousins graduated from high school this year. Here are Elizabeth, Becca, and Daniel with the jean quilts Grandma (my mom) made them.



I'll have a bunch more photos from vacation later, but, before I forget, here's one from a few weeks ago:

Elizabeth graduating from high school on May 25, 2007. We're so proud of her! During her speech, (which she nailed in front of an audience of a thousand or more--she seriously was the best speaker of the evening, bar none, and that's not just a subjective mom evaluation!) I had one of those classic mom moments of clarity when I saw into this child's future and knew she would be okay. She didn't want to do the speech, but she figured out what she needed to do to get the job done, and she pulled it off with a combination of grit, skill, humor, hard work, and poise that I don't think even she knew she had. My little girl has definitely grown up.

Strawberries

The first strawberries of the year from my patch.

May Portrait

This isn't a self-portrait, but it definitely captures me in my usual environment. Maybe it's the farmer's daughter in me, but I can't resist digging in the dirt on a fine day in May. I've spent hours and hours fighting the weeds lately.


Here's the flower bed I was working in:

Cousins

All of the cousins on Steve's side of the family were here for Liz's graduation. They all get along so well.

Ben meeting his cousin Seren for the very first time. It was love at first sight.


Goofing around for the camera. It's nice to see that college-man Joseph isn't too mature and sophisticated to get silly with the rest of the gang--he's still the instigator!