HARSES HARSES HARSES HARSES

Not the right church. Actually a schoolhouse.

Last weekend we went to a wedding, and spent four hours in the process utterly lost on various country roads. It was a beautiful place to be lost! And such a fiasco. I have a beef with you, east coast. We could never tell what town we were in at any given moment, or even what state we were in, the whole thing was a mess. At one point we thought we'd found it, but then it turned out we were in.... Connecticut. So we circled and back-tracked, we passed the same gas station six times, we stopped in at every church we passed along the way, and then, we found it! We snuck in quietly and sat down in the way way back, just in time for the You May Now Kiss The Bride! And then we were like, well, back to the car? And then we got lost again trying to find the reception location. Disaster. At one point I was reminded of a story I'd read about a family trapped in a car on a snowy mountain road who managed to survive thanks to breastfeeding. Yes, all of them. Luckily, I'd packed dried mangos. 

And now comes the part where I tell you about the wedding lunch, which took place on a totally different day, in handy list format: 

1. There were about 200 people or so invited to this lunch, and we were all encouraged to spread out over their 50 or so acres of land and explore to our hearts content. Even with that many people, it felt like we were the only ones there. At one point an ice cream truck drove through the property handing out free popsicles. I KNOW!

2. The family rents out the stables on their land to nearby horse owners, so there were, like, ten million horses. They'd pop up here and there as you wandered around.

3. I decided this was what it would feel like to spend the day at Downton Abbey. Or Pemberly! Or some other romantic place like that.

4. In between moments of jaw-dropping scenic beauty and loving up on all the animals, I managed to take a merciless amount of photos.

5. It was pretty much the most blissful afternoon EVER. 

And now, a few photos of our day at Green Gables. (The place did have a name and it wasn't Green Gables but, you know.)

These hairy men were my dates for the afternoon. (Stick-on mustaches as wedding favors. :) (But the beard is real! And I know that hashtags are true, amen.)

We got to meet some harses. Including babies! There was a huge bag of rather enormous carrots, easily the size of my forearms, and we were told we could use them as bribes to make any animal love us that we pleased, except for the colts and the llamas, because the colts were on a special diet and the llamas were super mean and did not suffer fools kindly. 

We spent a lot of the day at that fence, talking with other guests. Occasionally Huck would run back and forth between the chickens and the pot bellied pig. A few times I'd be mid-sentence and get a horsey nudge. 

"Just a minute, sweetie. Mommy's talking."

(Natalie Holbrook, proud owner of sticky outy elf ears and weird cowlicks since 1982!)

After a bit a kickball game got organized and the sporty two-thirds of our family went to scope it out. Natalie and kick ball equals a dramatic emergency room visit, every single time, so instead I took my inner introvert out on a date. 

SELF-INVOLVED SIDE NOTE: So Brandon's been to a few training seminars through work this year, and he always comes back with these personality tests as part of their management training. I found one on the dinner table the other day and decided to take it and nearly fell over dead when the results told me I was an introvert. Outgoing, maybe, but in-tro-VERT. Suddenly my whole life made sense! Well. Maybe not my whole life. But I have stopped feeling guilty when I drift out of conversations in large groups and go into what Brandon calls "Natalie Land," because look, a quiz told me it was okay.

So I sat with some chickens, I cooed at some pot-bellied pigs, I discovered a hidden bocce ball court in the middle of nowhere, and I did a lot of thinking about the Mr. Darcy/Elizabeth Bennet relationship dynamics.

CAN YOU GET OVER HIM.

!!  Come on. 

The end.