Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Family

Fiona’s First Birthday

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Birthday Girl

Today we met in Bedford to celebrate Fiona’s first birthday.  It was really a wonderful family get together.  We all met at “Aunt Ruth’s” house. which was sort of a central location.  Zach, Rachel, Toben and the birthday girl drove in from Ohio. Anja and Lief came from Boston via Pittsburgh (where Anja had spent most of the week at the University),  with Samantha (who was in Pgh to babysit), and Tina and Lars came from Carlisle.  Grammy, Rose and Jessica, Cayden and Cohen (all residing in Bedford county) came as well to help celebrate Fiona’s special day.

Birthday Party in the Barn

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Our grandson Toben turned 3 today! And fortunately for us, his birthday party took place in our barn.

Rachel arrived with a complete birthday party in a crate!  Favors, decorations and games galore.  All we had to do was clean up the barn to get ready.

This ended up to be a family pig roast as well  – no use not utilizing our pig roaster, and Zach and Rachel got half a pig for roasting.  We had lots of potatoes, corn and rolls with jelly, as well as cakes, muffins and jigglers.

Overall, we had about 40 people, including a dozen kids – all under the age of 4.    Caleb brought over his hay wagon, with some hay bales, and took all the kids and some parents for a ride around the farm. 

Gracie brought a pinata – which we hung up outside of the barn.  None of the small children were able to break the pinata, though not for lack of trying.  It took Lars to break it open 🙂

Other games included “pin the tail on the donkey”, and “go fish” – with quite an elaborate set-up.  And the of course there was birthday cake, balloons, presents and treats for everyone.  What a fun day!

Birthday Cake
“Go Fish” setup

Meatloaf Football

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To celebrate the first win of the season for the Big Spring 8th & 9th grade team, Jeff made his special meatloaf for Lars, and Sammy had the bright idea of shaping it into a football.  She even added the lacing by using mustard before baking.

Go Bulldogs!

Another Boston Weekend

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When Anja and Duff moved to Boston, they took their ancient “college car” (which had preciously been Samantha’s “college car”) with them, but quickly realized that it would be nearly impossible, or at least not economically feasible, to get it inspected to meet Massachusetts standards.  They also realized that with a brand new baby – and future trips to Pennsylvania and Mississippi – it was finally time to buy a new car.  So they did – but parking regulations in their new home would not allow for more than one car. And Sammy kind of wanted her old car back.  Which meant we had to get it before the temporary parking pass ran out in Boston.

So Tina took the night train, from Harrisburg to Philadelphia and then another train to Boston.  (Which was not so bad – however, the train was surprisingly full and only aisle seats were available.)

We had a great weekend together in Boston and Tina got to babysit Leif for nearly 4 hours on Sunday.  This was a rather easy task, as Leif seemed to think that everything Tina said was just funny.

We went for long walks each day, the weather was absolutely gorgeous and we even got to visit Duff’s new office at MIT.   Leif was just the happiest baby the entire time.

In the evenings we watched Episode 3 of the first season of Sherlock Holmes and Episode 1 of the second season, which gave Tina enough time to knit a happy red winder hat for Leif:
On Monday, Anja tried for the first time to feed Leif some rice cereal and he did surprisingly well!