This year our crowd was made even more special with dear friends! That made the day a marvelous experience, and my wonderful niece-daughter (I claim part ownership of her) set up a FAIRY HOUSE creation experience in the garage. Let me add here that it poured all morning, the first major rainstorm in weeks, and there was no going outside in the thunder and the lightning, so the garage fairy house building was a huge success! God bless Mandy for taking charge of that (and not killing people, always a good thing!)
Grown-ups and kids created fairy houses to tuck around the farm gardens so that fall visitors will explore and find wee homes (and not-so-wee homes) tucked into places. We used tree stumps, flower pots, bark, branches, jewelry, rocks, polished stones, bits of moss and weeds, paints and a ton of acrylic caulk to fasten things in place because few glues work for exterior use!
Here are some fairy house pics!
And then there had to be cooking... and men gathered around the grill (which was just outside the garage in case of more rain) and people gathering and making things, and talking and laughing...
And kids, of course.
Beautiful kids!
Badminton.
Beanbag toss...
Candy! :)
And kid-friendly food including chicken nuggets and hot dogs and hamburgers and salads and veggies and a huge fruit bowl...
It was a great day. A marvelous day! And son Matt ended it with a few fireworks to enthrall those who made it to dark....
A perfect end to a beautiful day.
We have some far away grandkids who couldn't be with us, but we'll see them this fall and have fun with them... When the fledglings branch out to other parts of the country, we really, really love the few times we all get together. Especially if there's no funeral involved... and yet, funerals and weddings do have a way of pulling folks together.
Still working on the farm while finishing my first mystery for the Savannah Secrets series.... it will come out next May and it's just a delightful group of stories, set in old-world Savannah and points nearby! I am so honored to be part of this!
Until next week, where I'm going to talk about our pasta shop in town. Yes, our sleepy town has a pasta maker, and it's the most wonderful pasta....
But more about that next week! :)
Until then, have a great week as summer winds down to a cool and breezy September. And God bless you, every one!
More fairy houses!!! This is a fairy condominium complex, created by Mandy!
And then young and not-so-young artists at work:
Multi-published inspirational author Ruth Logan Herne is busily working on the farm during the day, books during the wee smalls, and looking forward to the busy fall season when all this hard work comes to fruition with beautiful displays of pumpkins and family fun! Find her on facebook, visit her website ruthloganherne.com or follow her on Twitter which is the oddest thing there is, isn't it? It's soooo Twitter-fied!
I look forward to "virtually" attending your cousinpalooza every year!
ReplyDeleteAnd what a great idea to make fairy houses! I have an indoor gnome garden that had to be dismantled because of our move. I hope to set it up again soon.
A gnome garden! I want to see pics of that when you get it back up, how fun, Jan! And the fairy house thing was a great inspiration from Mandy and she about fell-down dead at the end of the day because she maneuvered at least 452 children (well, ten, but some of our adults are somewhat childish, LOL!) and it was just marvelous... be we did exhaust her.
DeleteI'm so sorry for the rain, but God bless Mandy and her fairy houses. These are adorable. I just saw a commercial for Maine that included a child exploring fairy houses. They bring out the childlike part in all of us.
ReplyDeleteYay for cousinpalooza. I had over 50 cousins on my mother's side of the family alone. I used to love those big summer gatherings. Sometimes a bunch of the families went on vacation together, or sometimes we just gathered at a park or someone's home. Wonderful memories you are creating!
Oh, Cate, how fun would that be? Matt and Karen meet up with Sarah and Otto every summer at Hershey Park, a great half-way point but we couldn't get down there this year... Farm work needed hands on deck. It's so special for kids to get to know family. To create relationships. It's so delightfully normal.
DeleteOhhhhh -- fairy houses!!! I've been pintersting them for a while now. I have an old bird bath that I'm going to use to build a fairy house in...that's a next year project, I think. But I can collect things for it now. Glad your clan could converge on you -- rain or shine it's always grand to gather the family in.
ReplyDeleteOh, it was, Kav! And the rain was needed, absolutely. And don't we just love having family around?
DeleteWow, fairy gardens/houses were the perfect solution for a raining day. What fun for all of you. So glad this is an annunal event for your family. God bless.
ReplyDeleteYeah, on your new mystery series. Blessings, Ruthy.
Marilyn, didn't that work out perfectly? If we'd planned our usual outdoor games, that would have been a washout. But this gave us hours of creative fun... and food! :)
DeleteRuthy, what fun! Love the fairy houses! :) I'm so glad the rain stopped!
ReplyDeleteWe were, too. The bounce house took a bit to dry off after we got it blown up again, because we got a lot of rain, but we persevered! :)
ReplyDeleteAnd you simply cannot play badminton in the rain.
#impossible
#birdiewontfly
:)
It was a good day for all!