hey boys! well we had quite the weekend, celebrating the memorial day. your mom and i were trying to wear you guys out but we wore ourselves out more. by monday you were all getting pretty pooped too but that was two days after i hit pooped. one of the really fun things we did was to go to this little park with a little river where people were loading into their canoes and kayaks. we took a picnic lunch to the, shoot, i want to say kissing tree. maybe you called it the loving tree. i don't remember. it was the tree with all the carved names. anyway, we had lunch sitting in the sand there. we ate cherries and spit the pits out as far as we could, not very. gross. we took pictures on the tree. you guys threw sticks and sand into the river while your mom held onto your shirts to keep you from sliding down the steep bank. abel laid down face first in the sand, running his hands through it like it was the softest blanket. i think he even laid his head down on the sand but he had a huge grin on his face the whole time. we tried to find a path to what turned out to be an island. good luck finding that path. kobe and lincoln painted the rocks with mud while abel yelled at me because i wouldn't let him down to do the same. everything kobe and lincoln do, abel insists on doing. it was the best and filthiest picnic i have ever had. at one point we were walking down a path past this little group of huge bumblebees. so i said we had to pass through bumblebee alley. your mom started laughing saying we must be the most creative or dramatic family. we can't just walk past the bees. no, we're passing through bumblebee alley. earlier, kobe found some bits of tape out of a video cassette and your mom thought it was thrown away evidence of mob stuff. ha ha. we are creative. i don't know if that's because we all crave adventure so we have to turn our everyday lives into something better or maybe it is just part of being creative. maybe it's a learned trait we have all developed to deal with our hardships in life, turn them into something magical instead. i don't have the time or money to invest into that kind of therapy. to tell you the truth i like it. i think it's funny. now i grant you that it can get out of hand. sometimes what we dramatize probably shouldn't be. whatever the reason for it, i hope it makes your childhood more enchanting. i wish everyone could at least have that, an enchanting childhood. i know i fought hard to hang on to mine probably longer than i should have. but i hope you look back at your youth and laugh at the funny stories we created for you and the grand adventures we went on together. just remember that your mom and i are girls and sometimes girls and boys have different ideas of what a grand adventure looks like but we are trying. thank goodness for uncle nate and uncle matt and their male influence. God knew what He was doing when He put the four of us together. i am so thankful that i share so much with them, especially our creativities. boy are you three lucky to have us. i love you guys.