Reveling in Art, Nature, and Lollipops

This past week we’ve been able enjoy the neighborhood and the weather here. We strolled over to the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival last weekend. It’s a big festival with a lot of high end art and some middle-of-the-road art. I think my favorite was the “found object robots” (here is an article about them), which are made of all kinds of old things like bottles and tins and baseballs. Not because I want them decorating my house but because I think they would be fun to make. I suppose that’s the gingerbread architect in me speaking.

Clark and a lot of nut-juice taking in some festival music

For the boys the highlight was the roasted and candied pecans that they ate with abandon while letting the juices dribble down their chins, in their ears, up their noses, under their fingernails, etc. They liked watching the lady roast and coat the nuts because she did it in a big bowl that went “‘round and ‘round like a ceiling fan and a mixer.” Fortunately for me a woman was handing out free hand sanitizer with little bungee clips that hook onto my stroller, so that made the whole nut-juice thing much easier to deal with and I’m pretty excited to have that nifty bottle.


A couple days ago we went to Meadowlark Botanical Gardens with Aimee and Nick and another mom and 2 year-old son. What a beautiful place! In the main building there are four ceiling fans whose blades look like giant leaves, so it took awhile to pull the boys out of the building and into the gorgeous gardens. There is a lot of room for wily youngsters to run and beautiful plants and flowers, lazy butterflies, unnaturally large goldfish, tiny tadpoles, moderately-sized turtles…you get the idea. It’s a place we’ll return to, even though Cal did a face plant in the mud and had to go change mid-visit. 

giant ceramic ants in the gardens!

watching tadpoles and a baby turtle

the Fearsome Threesome with their fearless (and sightless) leader

walking to Lake Anne

We made it over to the Lake Anne farm market yesterday morning. The weather was beautiful, without that thick Virginia sweat that characterizes most of the summer here. (Today, on the other hand, the humidity is 82 %) The four of us got to enjoy the walk through the trees, ran into both an old friend and the executive director of Reston Community Center who we happen to know through her nephew, bought some plump sweet peas and a basil plant, and donated to the Herndon Braves Little League team, which, in turn awarded Cal and Clark with their first lollipop experience. It was a very long experience, I might add, whose end I brought early because they had:

1. stained their white shirts with purple splotches
2. started eating the paper sticks
3. transferred sticky grapeness to their hands and stroller parts

Cal in a grape lollipop haze

I’m loving life in our neighborhood these days! So much constant green and bright flowers. I have only one beef with nature: I’ve been attacked by an overly protective momma bird on the way to the library TWICE. I swing my computer bag at her and run. It’s terrifying! So now I walk to the library another way, which incidentally takes me past the coffee shop where it is hard to deny myself an iced cup of joe on the way to tutor.

Pools opened this weekend so we’ll get the boys out soon, and there’s a live bug display at the Natural History Museum so we plan to get downtown soon too. Last night Brian and I got to dress up and go on a date to the Kennedy Center while Uncle A watched the boys. Fun stuff!