Disaster Movie

Summer vacation continues for Lix and the kids. After spending 10 days lounging by the pool at the Winn house in Delaware they drove back to Richmond, picked up a top-five nicest person in the world, and turned around to head north to Ohio. The car had two adults and 3 kiddos 2 or younger, so the drive was filled with stops for all sorts of reasons. All things considered, the kids did pretty well and the parents were spared the hassle of strangling them. Once in Ohio the standard Hegewaldian vacation activities ensued. Lix went golfing a couple of times with her dad, played very well, and informed Jarom that she would now like to play golf “all the time, like every day.” Sadly, there is not always a pair of willing free babysitters like PJ and Mikah to allow her to do that. There was also a trip to the tea house for some crumpets with the ladies, a required event for visitors. The highlight of the trip, aside from getting to see the family, had to be the trip to Sandusky to drive through the wild animal safari. In the interest of full disclosure and as you will see from the video below, there was not a wild hair left in any of these animals. They have been well trained by the hundreds of cars that pass through daily, and are perfectly happy to stick their giant heads into your car and drool all over your clothes and blow snot on the side of your car while you fearfully fling the last of your elk food at them in a desperate attempt to get them away from you. Jenna loved seeing all the big, big, big, big animals, and I believe that a good day was had by all. After a week Lix picked Brooke back up and moseyed on back to Virginia, where Jarom and I were anxiously awaiting their arrival. Being single again after having a family is cool for a day or two, when you get to enjoy the peace and quiet and not worry about diapers or naps or feedings, but it gets pretty lame pretty quick.








Back at home, Lix has unleashed her full attention span on house hunting, and is having the time of her life. She will be sad when the search is over. Bo continues to smile most all of the time, which is great. He is getting better at rolling over, though he still can’t figure out how to get his arm out from underneath his body, which is rather amusing. He has also begun his first lessons in standing up on dad’s hand. Sometimes he likes it and smiles, other times he gets scared and cries a little. But Jarom keeps working on it. Jenna is still running everywhere she goes, and has incorporated broad jumping into her locomotion. This is categorized as hopping like a kangaroo, which she will tell you over and over while she does it. She is usually found singing a song as well. She knows the words to a half dozen or so tunes, but she rarely sings those ones. Usually it is just an unintelligible string of sounds that sometimes seems Asian and other times seems extraterrestrial. And of course, she sings LOUD, just like her mom. She has also begun a negotiating phase where she will say “okay daddy, this is my deal,” and then proceed to explain about how she is going to watch a show and then go to the mall to see the fishies and throw money in the water, without the slightest mention of what she is going to put in to get all of her things. Oh well, she’s cute.

Who wears the Bumbo best?

Also, this may be my last post because the world is ending. On Tuesday afternoon a 5.8 magnitude earthquake hit two score miles up the road. For people in Virginia, earthquakes are pretty far down the list of expected disasters, somewhere after Mothra attacks but before the possibility that the south didn’t actually win the Civil War. So even though the quake lasted for about 30 seconds and shook hard enough to knock stuff of the walls and generally scare the bejeepers out of many people (Lix included), many weren’t even sure what had happened. In fact, Nate was driving through a construction zone when it happened, and just thought that those tractors were really rumbling today until he later spoke with his wife. Jarom thought it was pretty cool, especially when he was told to take the rest of the day off to make sure his house and family were okay. There was an aftershock the next night at 1 am that was in the 4’s, but Jarom was the only one who felt it because everyone else was in bed. And now there is a hurricane bearing down on the east coast to wash away all the rubble and debris that the quake left behind. Somewhere in Georgia, Laurie Slaugh is freaking out right now.
In other earth shaking news, Jarom is turning the big 3-0 in less than 24 hours. This embarrasses Alixa greatly. Jarom isn’t sure the math has been done correctly because he doesn’t feel like he should be thirty. When he thinks of thirty year olds he thinks of the guys that taught his church classes when he was in grade school, and there is no way he is as old as they were. He can still do all the things he could do when he was twenty, or at least he thinks he can. It’s a sad day, for sure.


This is Alixa's submission to the mother of the year award