Good-bye Virginia

Randomness from our last couple days...

"Washing" the truck

This was one of Hallie's favorite things to do, push her bike to the top of the walkway and then ride down with feet in the air.

"Freeze or I'll shoot!"

Our babysitter!

This picture cracks me up, its a totally typical Friday afternoon, Lis crashed out somewhere in the middle of chaos! On weekends or evenings it would be Lis and Tyson crashed out on the couches- must be a Moses thing! :)

And last but not least, these pictures make me sad, I'm missing 3 things something fierce right now- Target popcorn, chocolate chip cookies and Lis!  But Micah cracks me up- check out his "cheese" grin! Lis was totally trying to get him to make a peace sign but he just kept on with his cheese grin!

Newman's Own

Excuse the technical difficulties (really meaning complete and total operator error) over here! I know I posted the last post at least 3 times, I kept finding mistakes! I think it's better now.

Love this girl and she loves messes...

Don't love it when she greets me at the bathroom door after I've just showered, with a FULL cup of grape juice, which I didn't pour.  I scrambled to get my clothes on as quickly as possible, but in the meantime was able to get the info from her that she "cleaned it up." I was terrified, I didn't know what to expect! I came out to find that it was just as bad as I imagined. 

If you look beyond the large packing mess of a house you can see that there was a large trail from the kitchen to the couch.  Not what you want to see when you are in the middle of packing up your house, as if I didn't have enough going on without having to spend an entire hour+ scrubbing the carpets.  I am so thankful for modern products such as resolve! Thankfully everything came out with a lot of elbow grease!

And bless her sweet little heart, she really did try to clean it up!

Headin' West

Enjoy all the randomness that driving 3,000+ miles provided us...

You see all kinds of things, like giant cows driving down the interstate...

and eat WAY too many M&M's...

and see all kinds of random things at random gas stations in the middle of nowhere...

(the painting was obviously way more exciting than me trying to get their attention!)

Waving good-bye to the "cows" otherwise known as bison...

Nebraska, at least it was pretty for a few miles :)

Great entertainment- every sticker off onto the floor... :)

Great visits with family along the way, way too short though, we got to meet 2 new nephews along the way both whom were adorable!

Daddy and Micah "ready to roll"

My Aunt Deb was kind enough to pamper Hallie while we slept :)

Blowing her pretty blue nails, like the outfit!? We got in LATE and we went with the easiest change!

Buffalo Wild Wings- they were being hilarious, can't remember what they were talking and laughing about, but it was pretty cute...

Hallie and her besty Gina, she was SO excited to go to Gina's house and had a blast while there, we so need to plan a trip to St. Louis and stay for a couple days.

Here's a rundown...

Day 1... DC to St. Louis with a pit stop in Columbus, IN to see baby Jace (and Crandall and Jen)

Day 2... St. Louis to Omaha

Day 3... Omaha to Little America outside of Green River, WY

Day 4... Little America to SLC

Day 5... SLC to Prosser

Day 6... Recovery day, prep for finding a house, left the kids with Shelly and Mike at Gpa and Gma's house and left for Lacey

Day 7... Searched for a house, found one at the end of the day

Day 8... Waited for word on the house, tried to enjoy our day with no kids :)

Day 9... Completed paperwork, moved on in, returned moving truck, and headed back to Prosser just in time for a great friend from high school's wedding the next day.

Now we are spoiled with great views of Mt. Rainier and love it. :)

Flesher Home Site

We were so excited to be able to go exploring and find the old Flesher Home Site.  This post is full of pictures (what else is new right!?) and I have included the emails from Tyson's Grandpa Dann for the background about the house. 

There are actually 2 houses, but being in the middle-of-nowhere West Virginia, we didn't have cell phone service and after talking to a gentleman at a nearby house, whom was a distant relative, we thought we had found the second house/property so we decided to put our hot, hungry, and tired children out of their misery and left.  As soon as we had service again, we called his grandpa and actually discovered we had not found the second house/property, it was further down the road then what we had thought.  By then the kids were done, so we decided to keep heading home.  Later on, after rereading the emails from Dann, we were both kicking ourselves, we should have gone back and found the second house.  Even though we didn't find the second house, we were so glad to have seen the 1st house, which was where Grandpa Dann spent a majority of time at and where his father grew up and grandfather built(?- someone please correct me if I am wrong). 

So without further ado here's the emails and pictures...

This was your great and great-great grandfather's home, and my vacation wonderland when I was a kid. I called my cousin Leroy Towner (Joseph Leroy) Sunday. He is 2-3 years younger than me and a childhood summer vacation playmate. Leroy, like me, was named after your great-great grandfather _Joseph_ Lot Flesher who lived at that farm and worked the land. The property was actually owned/inherited by several members of the family, he and his cousins. Granddad worked it but then moved to the big city, Clarksburg, after a stroke.

Leroy says the old homestead is abandoned but still standing, and with a few clues from him I was able to locate it on Google (see map coordinates). It is on Wilhelm Run (County Road 50/3): turn South 19.7 miles west of Smithburg, just before the new prison facility. It used to be a dirt-mud/slate-rock road and a long drive from the old US 50 route, but now it is actually the first house off of the Newer US 50 and should be relatively easy access. If you look at Google there is a hairpin turn (concave to the east) on road 50/3 just south of the new US 50. There used to be a log-cabin barn at the hairpin: a dirt road/drive drops into the little valley and the old house is a few yards south of the end of the road.

Leroy now lives in Smithburg, WVa, and still owns and keeps a few beef cattle on his parent's old farm. That was my uncle Glen and aunt Valley (nee Flesher) Towner's home. That 'farm' is further south on Wilhelm Run (2). It is a place where the road, a stream and the railroad (now gone) were the only flat area between two green mountains. The Towner house is up the side of the hill, 40-50 feet, which was a long (for a little kid) climb from the only parking spots at the side of the road. (Now there seems to be a road cutting into the house from further upstream).


We used to sit on Uncle Glen's porch on a summer evening looking across the railroad at the coal black wooded hillside . It looked like a giant Christmas display, with a firefly every five feet or so flitting through the trees.

Puleeeze send me some photos of these two homes before they go away. Include the barn at the top of the drive if anything remains, the little stream that cuts across the road, the house in the valley, the porches (front and back) and especially the entry to the fruit cellar. The house sits on a spring, that bubbled up out of the basement's dirt floor and ran out through a narrow trench. The temperature there under the house was a cool 50 +/- 5 degrees in the hottest summer and coldest winter, and the walls were lined with jars of my Grandmother's home canned fruit, vegetables, and meat (they butchered their own hogs and beef).

A churn sat on the small kitchen porch, that I sometimes cranked to make butter. And a twig-built doll house sat on a table on the front porch. In spring it was full of baby chicks, in part to keep the kids entertained, but mostly to help the broody hens repopulate the yard.


They had a beautiful old organ in the living room which my aunts played, and a hand crank-party-line phone. But the house was lit at night only by kerosene lanterns or candles.
 The long table in the kitchen had bench seats against the window wall and chairs on the other side. Grandma Ida started fixing Breakfast about 4:30 AM and had an 8-10 course meal ready before I even got up (That was on a wood burning stove.). Your mom reminds me of her when we eat at her house: lots of food and lots of people. Of course your mom does a better job of getting various slaves to help cook.



For some of those summers my own great-Grandma and great-Grandpa Lasure were there. What I mostly remember was that great-grandpa had a white stringy beard that went to his belt line. And he wasn't at the house a lot; he would get up early and climb up the driveway to a corn and vegetable field even higher up the hillside somewhere across the road. I was only up there once or twice, it was quite a hike. Up there he would work the fields and provide a chunk of the food needed each year for both the people and their animals.


Dann

 See the attached photo. This was probably taken about 1937-8 when I was less than 2 years old. I am relatively certain this is the Kitchen door which is on the North side of the house, the side you drive in to and where there is a level area to park to the left or behind the cameraman (who may have been my Dad). There was no drive way, only a path around to the 'front' door. I used to help churn butter in a hand cranked oak churn on the little porch when I was 5-6-7-8----.

The people in the photo are my great-grandmother Lasure on the left (who I don't really remember), and great-grand father Lasure on the far right. Standing is my aunt Alma Flesher Elder. Then seated is THE cook, my grandma Ida Lasure Flesher. Standing is one of the twins, either my aunt Elsie or aunt Chelsea? (probably Chelsea, she smiled more). Seated is aunt Valley Flesher Towner and in her lap is her oldest child Isabell Towner Hogland (Isabell is my cousin and sister to Joseph Leroy Towner who you hopefully will meet). The other Twin (Elsie?). And finally (again) the old man who used to leave the house every morning carrying garden tools and climb the road and on up to the top of the hill to hand till about 10 acres of crops.

I first remember the twins and Isabell in their teens. They would play with us younger kids, and help us take care of the live baby chicks in a doll-house-log-cabin on the front porch. They were attractive girls and I had a crush on all of them.

We didn't dare go inside, it looked as though there was quite a bit of water damage to the house and didn't want to risk falling through any floor boards. According to the relative Tyson talked to, the mother of the current resident in a newer house on the property was living in the house until 2004, it looks like it was used as a "party house" evidenced by beer bottles scattered around the house and a beer pong table set up. 

In an eerie contrast to the poor condition of the house there was a vase of silk flowers which looked relatively new, dishes in the sink, and a jar of peanut butter on the counter. Makes you wonder!

All American Weekend- Thomson Style Part #2

Again what better way to spend a long weekend with a trip to the beach.  Complete with a sting from a jellyfish, crabs, shark teeth, and sunburns!

If you look closely at her leg you can see the sting from the Jellyfish.  It got her pretty good, it was pretty red from her knee down, but thankfully she's tough and with the advice from the beach patrol of rubbing sand on it, she was fine for the rest of the day.  She periodically would rub sand on it, but no other complaints and she continued playing in the water for another few hours.

Love this face and the good old belly rub!

Shark teeth...

Good Times

After a year of complete craziness together, we realized we had no (meaning absolutely no) pictures of our craziness together! What bad bloggers/friends/people we are! So here's our first and hopefully not last pictures together in all their dorkiness!

All American Weekend- Thomson Style Part #1

What better way to celebrate our freedom by hitting the road?! We enjoyed our last long weekend in DC, by getting out of DC! Haha! We braved the backwoods of West Virginia and hunted down the house where Tyson's Great Grandpa and G-Great Grandpa built(?) and lived.  I'll get my facts straight on the house post! :) West Virginia is gorgeous, wish we could visit during the fall, I'm sure it would be stunning.   

Sums up the trip for Micah and Hallie...

We did make a weekend of it though so they were able to enjoy staying at a hotel and swimming their little hearts out.  They absolutely love to swim and eat at hotels.  They were quite concerned when we had to leave the hotel in the evening to get dinner- they were expecting it to be downstairs! We also improvised when the hotel didn't have another portable crib.  (Yes, I know they could both totally be in big kid beds like 5 times over already, but I'm keeping them corralled for as long as possible!) So Hallie slept on the floor in the closet and Micah enjoyed a portable crib in the bathroom. 

 

The road the house was off of... gorgeous!

They were so done before we even got there.  They were in desperate need of a nap! Love this picture- I can totally hear Micah receiving a stern warning! :)

There this is better...