Coming together

Last week, my brother Andrew and his partner William came down from PA for a visit to Asheville! Yay! We always have so much fun. The kids couldn't wait for them to arrive, Max thought they'd love to play with his 'pet' caterpillars (he finds them and puts them in a big planter on the porch).

My boy is so sweet. I'm going to shirk my duties and cuddle him. 

Here's Max attempting to pull up Andrew onto a rocky path at the botanical garden.  We found some really beautifully shaped flowers for reference.

We found an amazing path up to a succession of waterfalls and had trying time wrangling the kids. They kept leaping and jumping in such a way that frayed my nerves. Like in this picture, the rocks are slick and that ruin looked like it was filled with creatures.

Someone made this installation of origami butterflies, so of course we had to have the kids pose. I made Andrew hold still.

I love how the picture came out!

There were waterfalls all along the path and this one was near the end. It's hard to capture just how high this is! It might've been 50ft? I wasn't about to scramble to the top, I'm nowhere near as nimble as I once was! I couldn't bear the idea of bustin my hind end and carrying a doughnut cushion.

Don't the kids look super cute dressed up for the Fairy Festival? Max is wearing my painting cap. Yes, I have painting outfits, doesn't everyone?

We had such a great time, I kept annoying Andrew and William with pleas to live in Asheville, or at least pinky promise that we would all move to Hawaii to be together. We got a lot of work done, namely packing our classes for Bead and Button and making some really fun little collaboration paintings. Of course, we didn't touch all the things planned! It was only like 40 items or so.