I am overjoyed to have two whole weeks to spend with my niece and nephew!  They’ll stay with my folks some days and at my house some days…  we have SO MANY PLANS!  We want to go swimming and pick blueberries and go to the Eno Festival and play and make stuff and cook out and play board games and tell stories and watch movies and maybe just hang around and be together.

I went to Virginia Beach to pick the kids up, and got there in time to help out with the Amazing Sky Fort.

   

Christi and Mike decided it was time for a tree house, and lacking the right kind of tree, they constructed the whole thing to stand on its own.

The kids are old enough to help out with the actual building!  When I got there, we painted the inside walls (they’d decided on a fun 1980’s style splatter-paint).

For the drive back to NC, happily, Jaden had “her” music on her phone, so we had something good to listen to in the long radio wasteland along I-58.

Here’s some of our car playlist.  It’s good to always have pre-teens in your life so you know what music is cool.

R-5

We like the cup song.

And the happy song.

And evidently, we also like 5th Harmony, Zendaya, and some fairly old-school disco.  I’m pretty sure I caught Michael Jackson and Prince on her playlist.