Abby’s Saturday #416 / Irwin, PA Wedding Photographer

Abbys Saturday Back To School in Irwin PA

It’s that time of year again! Time to get back into a school routine – want to know something (a little bit) crazy? I’ve kind of missed it. I love routines and schedules and habits and while having “unstructured” time during the summer was good (to a certain extent), I’ve missed our mornings spent learning together.
So technically, we did not start school this week – we’ve got about 18 days logged already. Starting in July, we did a few “lite” days here and there, went on a few field trips, and simply started “easing” back into things. When I first brought up the notion that it was time for school to start again, Braelynn’s instant response was: “NOOOOOOOO.” But, as we’ve gently lowered ourselves back into the waters of learning, she’s become less reluctant. We are studying some really cool things this year and I secretly thinks she loves it.
If you’d like to take a stroll down memory lane (UGH this one has a bite to it), here is last year’s “first day of 1st Grade” photo, the year before’s “first day of Kindergarten” photo & before that the “first day of Preschool” photo. (How is Leander SO crazy tall?! Wow, he has grown a lot in the last year!)
Have you ever had a bat in your house? Growing up – I never remember my parents dealing with bats in any of the houses we lived in.
For Derrick and I? We had a pretty bad bat problem in our first house (we would wake up in the middle of the night to bats flying around our bedroom several times) and ended up having to hire a pretty hefty exterminator to come in and take care of them (it was a big ordeal). We even woke up to a bat in our room one night last year when we were visiting Derrick’s parents at their new house! Bats just seem to like us, I guess.
We have lived in our current house for 7 years and we’ve never had a bat problem.
Until this week.
On Wednesday night, around 3am, Derrick woke up because he could hear something. Now, this in and of itself is completely crazy. Derrick doesn’t wake up to ANYTHING. He never hears the kids cry in the middle of the night – the dog will even bark and Derrick won’t hear it. I (on the other hand) hear absolutely everything. I think it’s a Mom-thing.
For some reason, on Wednesday night at 3am, I was dead-asleep and I didn’t hear a thing. But Derrick did. He woke up, was straining to see what was making the noise, when he saw it flash by and disappear upstairs into our 3rd floor.
I have no idea how long he waited to get up, how long it took him to go upstairs to see where it went (because, I was sleeping), but all I know is that at 3:30am, he woke me up by poking me in the arm & shining his phone flashlight into my eyes saying: “I need your help.”
There is very little in this world that scares Derrick, but bats are at the top of that small list. (It pretty much goes 1. Bats 2. Windseeker rides and that’s about it.) After all of our troubles with bats in the past, he hates bats.
Thankfully, our little bat “friend” had flown up to our 3rd floor (where Derrick’s office is), and found himself a perch to hang on. So, he was just chilling up there.
Of course, this sends Derrick and I into a tizzy. What do we do? How do we get rid of it? Is it rabid? How did it get in? It took some finagling (and some Googling), but we eventually came up with a plan. The only trick was: Derrick had to execute that plan. And Derrick HATES bats.
It took some time, but eventually Derrick psyched himself up enough to go get that bat – and he did it! He was able to trap it in a clear plastic bin and with that, our bat saga came to a close.
Can I just say: bats are the creepiest little creatures on the planet. The way they move, their fuzzy bodies, their tiny teeth – they just have such a bizarre look. Derrick was able to call the game warden Thursday morning and he came by and picked our “friend” up. They said they’d test him for rabies and since we haven’t heard anything – that means the results were negative.
Needless to say: Derrick went full-crazy-seal-the-house mode on Thursday afternoon/evening. Any tiny little crack or crevice that he could find, he sealed it off. We truly have no idea where he came from or how he got in, but we feel pretty secure that none of his little bat friends will be able to follow.
Poor Leander fell sick again. And here I was thinking that after about 10 days of everyone being healthy, that maybe we had finally weathered the sick-storm and had come through to greener pastures – but NOPE. The poor little dude came down with a nasty cough/cold – and then he proceeded to share it with Braelynn and me. Thanks dude. This of course simply gave us a great reason to binge-watch the ENTIRE new season of Bluey. (Spoiler alert: it’s the best season yet!)
On Wednesday – the kids and I and my Mom went to Kennywood to hunt golden kangaroos! Kennywood did a fun scavenger hunt all week for their season pass-holders where they hid 5 golden kangaroos around the park each day, and for the people who found them – there were prizes! We couldn’t pass up this fun opportunity, so we got to the park at “rope drop” and ran in to hunt for those golden kangaroos!!
I had studied the maps of where they had hidden the kangaroos over the first two days (once all 5 kangaroos were found, they released maps of where they were hidden), so I felt like I had a pretty good idea of where they might be hidden. In fact, I had told my Mom on the way in: I bet they’ll hide one in the pavilions between Kiddieland and Steelers Country. They haven’t hidden one there yet and that is a PRIME hiding spot! So, Braelynn and I had our game-plan – that’s where we were headed first. So, while everyone ran into the park and went either up toward Phantom or down the main mid-way, we ran straight for those pavilions. No one else was looking over there, so we had that entire section of the park to ourselves. My plan was: comb through those pavilions and if we didn’t find one, walk back through Kiddieland the opposite way everyone else would be walking, giving us a different perspective, and then head out into the park from there. (Can you tell I put a lot of thought into this?)
We were coming to the end of our pavilion hunt – we had two left to comb through, when WE FOUND ONE. I still can hardly believe it. He was hiding down kind of underneath, kind of in the corner of the steps leading out of one of the pavilions. The only way you would have seen him is if you had exited the pavilion, and then turned around to walk back in (which is what we did).
Needless to say: we were ECSTATIC! What an amazing moment!
We were the first ones to turn our kangaroo in at the prize pickup that day (all in all, we found him within 10 minutes of being in the park). And for our efforts, we were awarded a BIG Yeti cooler!!
Let’s continue talking about all of the amusement parks we’ve been to over the last week:
Last weekend, we took a quick weekend-trip out east to visit Six Flags Great Adventure for an event our good friend Austin was hosting there. Then, we visited Dutch Wonderland on Sunday (which, when it comes to going to amusement parks, we really have “it” down – we know what to take, how to prepare, what to do – but for some reason, we were super unprepared to visit Dutch Wonderland. I have no idea what we were thinking! It was like, we packed with Six Flags Great Adventure at the top of our minds, but completely forgot about Dutch Wonderland. We made it work, but sheesh, what were we thinking?
Then, on Thursday, Braelynn and my Mom went to Idlewild! Just the two of them! They had a wonderful time together (while Leander and I stayed home and prepped for the Just Between Friends Sale).
SPEAKING OF WHICH – the gigantic kids consignment sale that I participate in twice a year is coming up at the end of the month! It’s a huge highlight – I LOVE selling my stuff and shopping at the sale! It’s such a well-organized, amazing resource, plus it’s consignment shopping (which is my love-language). Prepping stuff to sell is quite a process, but after doing it for almost 7 years, I have my method ironed out really solid. With my wedding season kicking into FULL gear next weekend, I really wanted to have all of my JBF sale prep 100% complete so that I wouldn’t have to even think about it with all of these weddings looming on my calendar. And I’m super proud to announce: I am 100% ready for the sale! They could move the dates up to today and I would be ready to roll. It feels SO good!
So now, I just get to concentrate on one thing: weddings. I photographed a wedding back in the spring, but haven’t shot one since, but that all changes next week! I have back-to-back-to-back weddings and engagement sessions and shoots until the end of October. In other words, I definitely feel like a running, stretching and lining myself up at the starting line – because fall: here we come!

Abby’s Saturday // Four Hundred And Sixteen

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