Contrived Scenes - Labor Day

 The Husband and I drove with our progeny down the highway to Orange County, where we visited our dear friends Erika, Phil and Izzy. Phil is the genius who put together the slides for the Extreme Parenting Video Project (that has now had over 4,000 hits thanks to all of you wonderful bloggers who posted it on your blogs!). Erika is the incomparable mother, holding on to her flippin' hat in the video, who can also cook some delicious Hungarian delicacies. Izzy is the hummingbird, their delightful daughter who smiles charmingly at my sons as she kicks her legs and giggles, completely belying the fact that a couple of months ago, she lay in an induced coma fighting for an intact brain and her life.

Here's a shot of what it looks like in Phil, Erika and Izzy's parts:

Here's another one:

Here's the contrived scene from the title. Something about my sons in this little hideaway makes me want to mock them. But I won't:

The children at the top of this grassy hill are sitting on cubes of ice and sliding down the hill. They are contriving to sled (is that grammatically correct?). Only in Southern Cal would you contrive to go sledding when the glorious Pacific crashes onto the sandy beach below, tanned and muscled surfers everywhere you look and bikinied damsels frolicking in end-of-summer waves.

Here's another contrived scene - disregard the blurry photo and Sophie's glittery eyes. I really only made them sit there, together, to get a shot of the fantastic chartreuse couch that Phil picked out. I'm still marveling over that. I mean, The Husband can cook, but pick out a gorgeous, completely hip, chartreuse couch? I had a contrived vision in my head of my beautiful children arrayed on that couch. The colors would pop and it would be worthy of a design blog. Never mind that I only had my Android phone.

We had the most wonderful, relaxing day with our friends and reluctantly left in the late afternoon to drive back to Los Angeles.  It's the last day of summer as school starts for my boys Tuesday morning. Oliver just went to bed in what I think are contrived tears as he earlier stated that he was excited to go back to school.

I could never contrive that light and that sky, the road to our little house just there, on the left, nor my gratitude for all of it.