A Post Every Follower Should Read :)

I have left our poor readers in the dark long enough. I have mentioned this topic far too many times to leave you without an explanation. I blush at what some of you must think. And now I must put your minds to rest on a certain subject. I've meant to do it for ages, but the topic is so integrated into my daily life that I forget. This ought to be an interesting post for some of you who have had the wrong ideas the whole time we've kept this blog. Get ready to have your minds at ease about us now! :)

Ready?

Okay. I'll build up gently to the stunning climax.

Most of you know that The Gentleman From Virginia

Is our dearly beloved brother, Daniel. (And that's a cookie he's eating, by the way! :)

But we have left you wondering, doubting, and finally jumping to conclusions about the other young man who frequents this blog. He leaves very familiar comments, calling us by nicknames like "Rach", and others. You know him as Oldest of Many, and to make things more shocking, he isn't our brother...

No, Matthew is....

Our cousin! :) (This is his Mr. Thornton pose, courtesy of Sarah ;)

So there you have it. We haven't gone off the deep end and got any sort of beau. It's only Matthew...as harmless and honorable a personage as our Gentleman. I just sorta thought I should explain that for any inquiring minds! ;) ~Rachel

The Scare of The Century, As Told By Rachel

I have been comissioned by Abigail Taylor to relate to you the story of the way Matthew gave Sarah the scare of the century. So settle back, and enjoy a simple tale of a little wit, a tad of quick-thinking, and a dash...funniness! :) Meet the Villain of the story:

Well, three of him. Could you ask for a better creep? Long claws, buggy eyes, whirring wings... *shiver* It all began yesterday evening. Like the good girls we are, after chores, Sarah, Leah, Anna, and I all went out on the porch in the cool of the dusk to shell these:

Only it was not so glamorous and pretty-looking. Our version is more like piles of this:

We quietly shelled the lima beans, singing as we went. That is when the Villain first came onstage. With a whirr of wings, he hit a shutter of the house, then fell to the ground. I screeched, I confess, and tucked my skirt tightly around my ankles. I do not get an overly loving feeling over praying mantises! :) We stood up to do something, and as I prepared to sit down, I saw little Manty, clinging to the back of my rocking chair. This would not do. So we girls took turns shying shoes and baseball mitts at all three of the creepy insects. (there were 3 at this point in time) My goal was to knock them off the house and chair. Anna's goal was to clock them. She hit the biggest guy, (twice the size of the picture of there) and he fell to the porch with one menacing wing sticking out funny. I ran off the porch, thoroughly disgusted. The third one persisted in staying on the house. I took the baseball mitt, and chucked it at him, hitting him off the siding, and causing him to fly through the air, chasing me the whole length of our front porch! :P That excitement being over, we returned to shelling Limas, thinking that the Villains had been vanquished for sure and certain.

Enter Matthew Walker. Good cousin, he. But mischevious lad at times. He sits on the porch, talking to us, and watching his good, house-keeping cousins shell the beans. He declines the offer of helping, and prefers to watch our deft fingers do it. Scrapes a pile of beans off his lap that Leah put there, and continues to chat about many things. He laughs over our praying mantis story. We girls continue to sing.

♫ "Some bright morning when this life is o'er

I'll fly away

To a home on God's celestial shore,

I'll fly away...." ♫

Sarah utters a little squeal, and ducks her head, for one Villain, the poor injured one who had meanwhile climbed up the front door, hits a porch post near her vicinity, and falls into the flower bed. While she is shuddering over the thought of that nasty creature coming anywhere close, Matthew the Brilliant, Matthew the Quick, Matthew the Witty, takes a lima bean shell, aims, and quietly throws it, hitting her chest perfectly on time. Her eyes take on an expression like this:

And she utters the loudest scream I think I've ever heard coming from her mouth! "AGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!" She falls back into her chair, and continues writhing about, looking as if she is in the depths of an apoplectic fit while we all collapse in laughter. The joke is explained. She is relieved. They repair to a movie inside, while I brave the Villains, and sweep up all the shells. And that, dear readers, is the tale I have to tell! :) -Rachel

Who Can Spell Mud? :)

Alright. Matthew has been bugging me to write this story on here so I will! ;) Saturday, Daniel, Matthew, Sarah, and I went to Lone Star Park to go hiking. Usually we go on the little trails back in the woods when we host church there sometimes. But that day the usual spot was closed. Having seen a sign for horse trails, we departed in that direction on foot. We first tried to get across into our favorite woods at the boat dock by hopping across some rubbery ground that was all cracked like towers. But Daniel, Matthew, and Sarah began sinking into the black goo so we gave that up. We continued on the gravel road. At each new little road we'd travel down it. One was only about 5 feet wide and went out as a dam in between two lakes. From what I could tell it was made of a bed of gravel and some wooden pallets. Very adventurous. But his led to nowhere unless we desired to tiptoe across a super thin metal wall. Uh-uh. Not a chance of that for us girls! :) There were still no more signs for the horse trails. We trudged on. Daniel tried to convince us girls and Matthew to go down a 15-20 foot perpendicular wall of dirt to the beach on the lake below. That didn't go over. "Matthew," I reasoned with him as he almost agreed to the wild prospect. "We all must die at some point, I know, but please live through this walk!" he just laughed and they abandoned the idea. Still we walked on. It seemed miles. "Where are the horse trails?" we wondered. We finally came to a lovely overlook and gazed into the cool blue water below longingly. We girls sat on a bench to rest. Daniel continued down the road without us. Seeing that there were no horse trails in the near vicinity, we called Daniel on his cell-phone and asked him to come back our way. "Come on back to us." I teased, "We'll be sitting here eating honeysuckle!" (The only form of liquid accesible to our parched tongues! ;) Sarah and I consumed a branch of honeysuckle each, and then Daniel joined us. On the way back down the road we met up with a park ranger. Daniel stopped him, and politely asked where the horse trails were. "Did you see a chain across the path?" he asked, eyeing us gruffly. I had the vague feeling that I personally had reputation as a renegade or an arsonist. I am sure I looked guilty, though perfectly innocent in reality. Turns out even if we had found the horse trails, they were "strictly for horses." Ho-hum. Way to ruin a long hot tramp! ;) But, determined to make some lemonade out of the lemons, we decided to go into some woods by ourselves, seeing a dock in the lake to one side of the path. Daniel charged through the underbrush, we girls in his wake, escorted by Matthew. As he helped us down a slippery hillside we heard a strange noise, seemingly coming from a den-like hole in the hill. Matthew and Sarah convinced themselves it was a bear. I was inclined to think it a bullfrog, but we never found out. We swung ourselves across a ditch, and tiptoed over the mud. It was one of those spots that feels like thin ice. Balance your weight the wrong way, and you'll plunge through. After being scared by numerous Spring Peepers catapulting into the water, we reached the dock. It was so rotten as to be quite dangerous for walking on. It was unanimously decided to return to the main road. Daniel made himself rather a "Legolas" and light-footed over the treacherous mud to the safe terrain on the opposite side. I followed. My leg promptly plunged through the crust up to my knee. I screamed, (almost gleefully. It felt good!) and Daniel yanked me out with a sturdy stick. It was Sarah's turn now. "But where do I walk?!?!" she wailed. Daniel grinned. "Just step where I did!" Well. I suppose Daniel must have weakened the ground, for no sooner did she take a step or two then both her legs plunged in. I helped drag her out, and mine up the shoe that was still stuck. Matthew made it over with a very narrow escape from the mire. There was still the poison ivy on the hill to brave. It felt rather like stepping over laser-beams to avoid triggering an alarm or something. We did a queer little dancing-thing through all the poison ivy (which I am not allergic to) and arrived at the road breathless and bedraggled. "Yuck!" Sarah cried, half in satisfaction an half in dismay, surveying her feet which were now uniformly covered in a layer of black, skunky-smelling mud. "Well, at least both my shoes match now." Daniel fumed about the poison ivy, but still admitted it had been fun. Matthew and I just laughed. "This will be something to blog about!" we both agreed. And so it was! We washed up in the lake and returned home without further incident. Voila. Our little muddy-saga. :)
-Rachel

Crawdads and Excuses

"You get a line,

I'll get a pole honey!

You get line,

I'll get a pole babe!

You get a line, I'll get a pole

And we'll go fishing in the crawdad hole

Honey, baby mine!"

This morning, ignoring the fact that it is raining, Anna, Leah, and Benjamin crept out of the house, careful not to be followed by everyone and their brother, and went crawdad fishing. Basically, the old gentleman at the feed store, a Mr. Udell Butler told Mama that those tall stacks of mud along the side of ditches are crawdad towers. They dig down in the earth and stop once they find water. I had always assumed that you would catch a crawdad in a creek. But Mr. Butler told us that you take a string, tie a piece of raw meat onto the end, and drop it down the hole. When you feel a tug, you yank the string back up, and in theory, you should have a crawdad. Unfortunately, those wee beasties simply eat the meat and drop off halfway like some natural claw-machine. (those ones that you pay out the nose to use at the grocery store and then it drops the ugly teddy bear right when it gets close to the hole! ;) Nontheless, after unlucky fishing yesterday, the kids went out again this morning and still didn't catch a thing. But Daniel is as excited as any Tom Sawyer to go out and try his luck. He says he is determined to catch one. And when Daniel is determined to do something, it generally works. Too bad he can't debate the crawdad out of his hole, or something equally logic-minded, for then he'd be sure to win! :)

The other day when Matthew was on a walk with me, and we had the two little girls, I was picking a glorious bouquet of swamp honeysuckle and ferns. I LOVE flowers! I fill my hands with them at any chance I get! I cannot thrive very well away from them. And I don't like the hothouse ones. I like the wild ones. Anyway, these ones smelled particularly good. Shame on me. A bit later, Matthew quite politely informed me that I had pollen all over my nose. Blast! I spend half my life with pollen on my nose, because where there are flowers, I must be, and where there are scented flowers, there's my nose, and where there is my nose, there ends up being pollen. Ho-hum. So I wrote this poem as an excuse.

"My Excuse"

By me!

"I have pollen on my nose

From the smelling of a rose

And the sniffing of the honeysuckle bloom.

And a yellow sort of dust

That is transferred on there just

`Cause I stopped to smell the rich perfume.

I was happy as a bee

Buzzing round the apple tree,

And I paused to take a sniff from every bud,

And I really couldn't care

That the branches pulled my hair--

That my toes were sinking quickly in the mud.

Yes, I'm brushed with powdered gold

In a fashion quaintly bold

From the smelling of the flowers in the lane.

And I know I am the type

That forgets her nose to wipe

So my dear, you must remind me o'er again!"

What do you think? -Rachel