Penn State Chics Dig Nerds

This morning, Natalee played piano at church.  She started to take lessons 3 months ago and this was her first performance.  Another lady from the church agreed to play part of the piece as a duet.

This year our annual Christmas Eve day hike was more like skating.  Since it was so icy, we walked on a Rothrock State Forest road.  We only had one fall.  Of course, that was not Brady, the runner, who you would have thought would fall.  Natalee was the one who fell.  (We caught Amie several times and I thought Todd was going down one time)  Honestly, I thought dad was going to fall when he ran ahead to get this photo.

After Thanksgiving, the children and I ventured to Gordonsville, VA to visit with Scott, Colleen, and their family who were vacationing there.  We left early Monday morning.  Since we knew we would reach the resort before Colleen's family did, we decided to detour through Shenandoah National Park to take a hike.  Additionally, we knew that the forecast called for a lot of rain the next day. We hiked on the Appalachian Trail to Compton Gap.  This hike is only 10 miles south of Front Royal.  I've heard that this hike can be quite crowded.  However, on a Monday in November we nearly had the trail to ourselves. "Mom, we found a rock! Can we climb it?" "We found another rock!"  When we reached the gap, the trail to the two viewpoints crossed the AT.  Of course, my phone battery died, so I had no map available.  I knew that one viewpoint was .2 mi one way and the other viewpoint was .2 mi the other way.  Howe...

On this day several weeks ago (a month ago?), we returned to Rocky Ridge. The rattlesnakes were more likely to be denned up.  This is one small segment of the Standing Stone Trail, which is Pennsylvania's trail of the year.  I feel this is unfortunate because I don't want more people to learn of Rocky Ridge! This time we took Aunt Lois, Gram, and Pap along to explore with us. Two loungers We went up and down a lot of big boulders.  As usual, Brady was all over the place. Brady on the top of one section of boulders. Looking into Stone Valley

We hiked to Indian Wells Vista in Rothrock State Forest toward the end of October.  I had these pictures ready to blog, but then forgot about it.  But, since it was so pretty, I thought I'd still share it. This was at least a week after peak foliage, but there was still a lot of pretty foliage lingering. This hike involved traversing a lot of rocks at the top of the ridge.  This makes our children, especially Brady, very happy.  We were dog sitting.  Solomon very happily came along to enjoy the afternoon. That's a nice view.

Today we traveled to West Virginia to celebrate Thanksgiving with Todd.  While there, we took these pictures. Happy Thanksgiving!

Last Saturday following our morning and afternoon of soccer, we went to the corn maze.  We seriously spent two hours in the maze and were still missing two of the stamps for the game.  We had to give up since it was getting dark (and I'm not going in a corn maze in the dark). Part of the agreement with going to the corn maze was that they had to take time for photos.  However, we took so long in the corn maze, I didn't get many pictures.... This is it. At least it was fun. This would be a great picture if they goober in the middle would be a little more serious!  The mound of hay bales was fun, but there were too many big kids on it.  I felt like somebody was going to tumble off.

We had about 20 minutes one afternoon between an appointment and piano lessons.  We didn't have time to go home, so we stopped at a park. They were looking so cute that I had to take some photos.

Once again, we walked to the creek during Natalee's soccer practice.  We've done this quite a number of times this year.  I thought we were done for the year until we had an unusually warm couple of days early this week. This time, the leaves were beautiful. Unfortunately Brady skinned his knee on the sidewalk headed toward the creek.  He was being paranoid about Amie- you'll have to ask him about that one. Oh how I was wishing that I had my nice camera with me.  This is all just with my phone.  The yellow leaves looked on fire with the sun hitting them just right.  And the reflection on the water was so pretty.  The kids are cute, too :)  I just couldn't zoom in on them very well with my phone. They didn't catch nearly as many crawdads this time.  One reason was that Brady wasn't going as far in with his skinned knee open.  We read later that crawdads are less active and go to deeper water when it is colder, startin...