It's fall ya'll!

Man oh man it is already the middle of October and I am still procrastinating on the September post.  What is wrong with me?  Might it have something to do with the fact that it is already the middle of October and our year here in Newport is rapidly coming to a close?  Or perchance it has something to do with the looming of the Holidays and I have done NOTHING to prepare for them?  Maybe a little of both.  SIGH, I know that my little act of rebellion will not keep the pages from flying off the calendar, but I still can't seem to get motivated.

But since you are here and obviously in need of a good laugh at my expense, I will press onward.

September started out with plans!  BIG BIG plans!  Involving a road trip and all the camping gear we could muster.  Then as it drew ever nearer, the plans began to fall apart until all we could muster up the energy to do was drive over the Jamestown bridge to go to a beach.  Now much has been said about the beaches up here by us.  Apparently we ARE beach snobs.  I mean come on, if you are going to call it a beach at LEAST have sand!!  I don't mind a few rocks or mounds of stinking seaweed if you have some nice sand.  Throw in some shells or in the case of Rhode Island, sea glass, and you have managed to please us.  So when Jim said he was going to drop us off at a beach while he went to a "meeting" I was dubious to say the least.  Well shame on me!  The beach was an actual beach!

I mean if I didn't know better, I would swear this could be anywhere in North Carolina!  Look how crowded it is! Don't let the multitudes of people in summer attire fool you.  It was not warm!  Well maybe for about thirty minutes it was warm.  Of course my fool children have jumped on the "I'm not cold" band wagon.  But they aren't fooling me one bit!
 

Why yes, that is a 5 gallon bucket Lilly is filling with sand.  You see, none of our beach toys made the move from Florida and the few new ones I had purchased met their early demise on the shores of Chatham earlier this summer.  So we have been reduced to filling 5 gallon buckets.  Takes all three of them to carry it when it is filled with either sand or water! 

This was about as close as they got to the frigid water - BRRR!

We spent about 3 hours playing around and then Jim came back to take us home.  I was ready!  By the end of our trip, I was wrapped up in all our towels to keep from shivering!

One thing we decided to do this fall was check out as many mansions as we could.  Newport was once the summer vacation spot on the east coast for all the rich, famous high society.  In one section of town (Bellevue Ave) there is mansion after mansion after mansion.  After the "Gilded Age" the summer cottages (as they were called) fell out of vogue and one by one were auctioned off and their contents sold.  Some were even scheduled for demolition!  Luckily, that didn't happen and we have been enjoying visiting them when we had guests in town.  On a whim one day, Jim took the kids and surprisingly they really really enjoyed it!  Most of the bigger mansions give you an audio and headphones set when you arrive and you can work your way through the house at your leisure while following a basic tour.  There are numbers you can press to gain additional information about things in each room if you are so inclined.  I have no idea which "tour" the kids were listening to, but I can assure you it wasn't of anything Jim and I heard on ours!

Lilly at The Marble House's Chinese Tea House

Lilly and Ben in the trees at The Elms

Lucy hanging outside The Elms

As previously stated, this is the year we decided we were going to reduce our household goods weight.  We move too often to be lugging around all this stuff!  I mean, how many bed frames does a family of five really need!!  Not ten!  So we teamed up with some like-minded neighbors down the street and put on a yard sale.  I would rather drive cross country with my children then put on a yard sale, but we are desperate people.  Also, Jim LOVES a yard sale.  He also enjoys buying cars and houses so go figure.  When we moved into our house this time, Mom and I packed several boxes of items that we decided we could live without and that is where the majority of our yard sale stock came.  I was surprised at how easy it was to part with something that we had forgotten we even own because we hadn't seen it for five years!!  
We have had so many yard sales in recent years that the children now think that "yard sale" is a verb.  I made the mistake of telling them that any money they made from selling old toys, books and clothes they could keep and purchase something new.  They are constantly asking if they can "yard sale" something in order to finance some new toy purchase.  They even wanted to yard sale Oscar, our cat, when I told them we could not get a dog because we already had a pet!
While we were doing our prep work the day before the event, I noticed that I could not find any of my stickers and suddenly it had gotten extremely quiet, never a good combination ... 
A short time later we were greeted with this:

The day of the yard sale just so happened to be the first day of soccer!  So I was basically spared the pain of having to actually man the sale.  Of course that meant I was on the soccer field for almost a total of four hours, but I still say I came out the winner!!  We made a little money, got rid of a lot of things, and the kids really enjoyed haggling with the customers.  Although it was in reverse sometimes.  Lilly had priced a Buzz Lightyear doll at $1.00 and one grandmother told her the price was too low and wouldn't pay less then $5.00 for it!  WHAT?!? So Lilly grinned and happily took that lady's money!  Lilly must get that from Jim!

I will spare you the details of our soccer season.  If you have ever watched a group of inexperienced children chase a ball around a field then you have a perfect representation of what we have been seeing every Saturday morning.  There are some bright spots to be sure, but mostly it is an exercise in extremely good manners.  Ones they would never show to anyone in their families, especially siblings!  The children almost seem to ask if the other child is finished kicking the ball and if they might have a turn.  Of course all the parents are jumping up and down yelling "get the ball!!."  I am sure it is confusing for the kids to be encouraged to do something that they would be scolded for at any other time of the day! Aah, sports!

 One afternoon I was outside talking with my wonderful neighbor when she happened to mention that the monarch butterflies were in the area en masse.  Seems a nearby lighthouse, Beavertail, is in their migration path.  She and her husband then went into great detail about how they had just gotten back from the lighthouse and had seen thousands of them.  They cautioned that since it was late in the day, we might not see as many.  I mentioned it to Jim and he said, "well let's round up the kids and check it out!!"  So we did.  Beavertail is the southern most tip of our island and only a few minutes from our house.  We all had visions of what we would see.  Mine was something like this:

Unfortunately what we actually saw was this:
 

I kid of course.  There were lots of butterflies, but nothing like we had thought.  I mean there might have been a couple hundred fluttering around in the wind.  Oh well.  Can't dwell.  Moving on.

The end of September finds us in the car headed south to Annapolis for Jim's college reunion.  We were EXTREMELY grateful that his parents could meet us there to spend time with the children freeing us up to see friends and catch up.  Of course this is Jim's reunion, so what are the chances that I would see someone that I hadn't met through him?  100% apparently!!  We got to see our neighbors from Niceville!!  It was so great seeing Reeda and Jim.  Too bad we couldn't make it happen for the children to see each other.  Next time!

Jim's brother and two nieces came down for the day to join us in the festivities which included a tour of the Naval Academy. Here they are in what is probably the world's largest campus cafeteria.  It extends as far as you can see in the picture in three different directions!!  Truly mind boggling if you think about all the moving parts that have to work together to get a meal on a table.

In front of the Tecumseh Statue

with the cousin in front of the Herndon Monument

All in all it was a great weekend that went by too quickly!  Before we knew it we were back in the car and headed north!  Next stop - OCTOBER!

While we are still enjoying relatively warm weather during the days, a sure sign of chilly nights is when Oscar stoops to sleeping with the children.  They are little heaters and he knows it!