We’re all at home for the week between Christmas and New Year’s—this wasn’t originally the plan, but the reason we’re all here is a story for another day—so it seemed like as good a time as any to post another batch of pictures, this one from the second half of the summer of 2014.

A lot was happening that summer. As he approached his first birthday, William was becoming a very interactive member of the family, and though he wasn’t talking yet, he was quite happy to listen to himself squawk and squeal. You can hear examples of his delighted exclamations in some of the video clips contained in the gallery. A number of these arose from Joe’s experimentation in the world of documentary filmmaking; his work is featured prominently here.

Julia had a busy couple months, as well. She and some other girls from school did a week-long “friends camp”, in which they spent one day at each of the girls’ homes. This let the girls’ parents exchange four days of relative freedom for one day of utter madness. Later, she spent a week at Camp Campbell, as was her custom until she increased the length of her stay to two weeks in later years.

After we dropped Julia off at camp, we stopped at the park surrounding the Felton Covered Bridge on our way home to break up the long drive. The bridge itself was once the main entry point to Felton and is the tallest covered bridge in the United States. A few years later, in 2020, the entire community of Felton was evacuated due to the CZU Lightning Complex fires. The bridge and park were not damaged, but nearly 1,500 buildings were destroyed, and both Camp Campbell and Roaring Camp Railroads, which we’ve visited a number of times, were in real danger.

Gallery: Summer 2014