Maine! Vacation!

Lucy has cried every day since we've returned to our house. Well, of course she has cried, she is two. But what I mean is that she has cried to go to "Bumpa's Lake House" every day. And then we all say "Me, too" (after Finn reminds her that it's Grammy's lake house, too). Vacation was beautiful and wonderful and fun and why, oh why can't we still be on it?

The last time I visited my parents lake house in Maine I looked like this:

I was 8 months pregnant with Finn, and it was September 2006. FIVE years ago.

At the time, the house looked like this:



Now it looks like this:


Like me, who has managed to birth two children, among other things, the house has changed a lot. Like me, it's seen a lot of chaos and confusion during the past few years. And (like me?), the house has definitely improved with age (not to mention care and work and money). While I am ecstatic that my parents have this wonderful retreat now, I'm also sad that we live too far away to enjoy it very often (hence the 5 years between visits). So, we tried to cram in as much as we could in our week-long stay to make up for it.

Photo by Natalie
Lakeside fires and cocktails. Accompanied by lots of nerve-wracking child wrangling on the large, sheer drop off rocks. Probably resulted in more than one gulped cocktail to handle the stress, stress that I'm sure will go away as the kids get a bit older.

And late afternoon cocktail cruises on the water :-)

We have a lot of pictures like the ones that follow - happy, relaxing people on the boat. I think my favorite thing to do the whole vacation was to sit in that boat, no matter where we were going:






Lucy was our little peppy cruise director, waving "hi" to every person and animal we met with.

There was "fishing," an activity that Finn adored, though he didn't actually catch anything. Kind of hard to do when you are casting with a plastic Transformers medallion :-)

Can you believe this is the same kid that was in my belly in the first picture of this post? Because I'm having trouble.




On their way to a father-son fishing excursion

There were visits with cousins:

From left, Finn, Ned, Lucy and Penny

Finn and Ned getting a tube ride (pulled by hand, not boat - not ready for that much speed, yet)

Somehow things ended up a bit gender segregated, with the boys on one float and the girls on the other.

Me and the lovely, energetic, demanding Josephine

There was a too-brief visit with my grandmother, Mimi, and my awesome cousin Katie (not pictured):



There was even a blogger meet up, as I finally met Drew and her cute little boys (she's toward the back of the photo, holding the adorable James):



There was jet skiing (not me, but Finn, courtesy of his Uncle Andrew), beach-going, swimming in the lake, moose-sightings (admittedly as a nature reserve and not "in the wild"), a date night for me and M., sleeping (we slept!), stupid family joke telling, a "we'll be talking about this for years to come" crane crash, lobster-eating, and a little bit of shopping. Someone even managed to score a moose t-shirt from her Grammy...


And as for the 5K I ran with Natalie and my brother Andrew, well, it was a success all around. Natalie finished her first 5K with flying colors, I made my goal by running the race in 32 minutes, 9 seconds, and Andrew kicked both of our butts by finishing in around 27 minutes. It was fun, and we celebrated with an indulgent diner breakfast, hot-tubbing, napping, and cocktails. The Portland Raccoon Race 5K may have to become an annual tradition...

What do you think, do we look like siblings?

Me and Nat stretching before the race.

A post-race soak with Finn

Enjoying some relaxation and wine after a post-race nap (well, at least for Nat. I didn't take mine until the next day)

And a couple of bonus pics to end with, before my eyes cross from all this blogging (there must be a faster way to create a blog post with 3 million captioned pictures?):


Picture by Natalie

And that? Is all she wrote.