Riley and Avery

We went to Two Lights last weekend, and Crescent Beach today.  It's nice going to them in the off-season, because we don't have to pay :)  I think come warmer weather we will buy the annual state park pass since we will be spending a good amount of time at these beaches!  I wonder what Crescent Beach will be like in the winter, since they're parking lot is insanely huge.  I think they have a vendor there too during the peak season.  We'll see.  Right now, we enjoy having the shore nearly all to ourselves.  Just a few joggers and dog-walkers there right now.  And us.

Yeah, I make my own.  I was sick of Riley having a reaction to every single detergent I bought.  Then, sometimes she would be fine with one for a while and then suddenly start getting rashes again.  Ugh.  Anyway, I've been making and using my own for a while now, and am just now sharing this.  Why?  Because I am finally 100% convinced that it is better than store-bought detergent.  Yesterday, Riley was cutting herself some strawberries and managed to get the juice ALL OVER her shirt.  I mean, I can't see how that much strawberry juice could have gotten on her shirt without her really trying LOL. Anyway, I told her to take it off and put it in the hamper, and I intended to wash it right away.  I forgot to.  Then I told myself that I'd pretreat the stains.  I forgot to do that too.  No matter, it came right out in the regular wash.  Nice.  Additionally, I washed Rudi's winter coat and the grime came out with a regular washing.

Riley has taken to creating blueprints.  Yeah.  She made a blueprint of a castle, complete with Master Bed Chamber, bed chamber, stairs, stable, towers, a moat, drawbridge, and a "home captuure."  I'm not sure where she got the name "home capture," since she seems to be talking about what I know as a murder hole where invaders get boiling water and rocks dumped down on them LOL.

Since Blogger has been the place I record everything, and refer to whenever I want to know if something happened, how many times it happened, or when it first happened, I am going to record this here.  Most already know it, but well...

Since yesterday was a warm day, we chose to go take a hike somewhere we hadn't been before.  Unfortunately, I let Rudi chose the location.  He chose Gilsland Farm, which still had a couple feet of snow, and it was freezing rain.  He took up up a hill that had the girls sinking in to mid-thigh, and when we got up the hill, we just decided to go back.  The trail was icy.  It was foggy.  A true New England March day.  Next time I pick where we're going!

Rudi had to go there.  Which shouldn't be surprising.  It was an interesting collection.  Basically, it was the head dude's personal collection that outgrew his house.  Very small, but very interesting.  Yes.  This dude, Loren Coleman, is apparently a cryptozoology expert, having written several books, worked as a consultant on the Mothman Prophesy movie, and is a regular on several television series, such as Monster Quest.  Strange the kind of people you can find in the little town or Portland, Maine.  It was in the back of a used bookstore.  After seeing the museum, we wandered around the bookstore and Riley shouted "Aw, yeah, bitches!" when she found the Harry Potter books.  Delightful.  I also found it strange, as we were leaving, to find an older couple who dressed their equally elderly-looking dog up for St. Patrick's Day, and decorated the Sasquatch to match, in order to take the dog's annual St. Patrick's Day picture.  Strange.

I never really got excellent pictures of Avery's new haircut (which isn't all that new now LOL) but here are the ones that I could find that show it, to some extent:

Nothing all that exciting has been going on.  It's rained a bit and thus melted some of the snow, so that's exciting for me.  Also, it seems to be climbing up into the mid-40s now, so perhaps spring really is on its way.  The neighbor has taken the snow blade off of his truck, so I am looking at that as a good sign.  You can actually see grass in some places!  The mud has started already, though, and it's not even "mud season" yet, so I am wondering what that will be like.

The speech therapy fight has resumed.  I don't know how many ways to say that I really can't stand the school speech therapist.  Really.  I rarely see her with a child, and when I do, the child is playing on the dry-erase board while the therapist sits on her computer.  She is saying, again, that Riley's speech is not sufficiently impacting her academics, so they want to wait and see.  So, as far as I can tell here are my options: