Family, Frolics & Foundry

Memaw and Tyson spending some quality time together. 

A couple of weeks ago Mom and Memaw took the Amtrak up to DC to spend a weekend with Abdoulaye and me.  Well, mostly me since Abdoulaye was hard at work fixing up our basement (hence the limited amount of photos, ahem, none, with my handsome husband).  We visited a nearby lake, tidied house (Mom re-alphabatized our spice rack, among other handy putzing contributions), had dinner with friends and visited the church where Memaw grew up, was married and where my Mom was baptized.  Whew.

Buddy Attick Lake Park (Greenbelt, Maryland)

My little babies (Marija, I think this is my new favorite picture of us, thank you!!)

One of my favorite parts about Memaw coming to visit is seeing Washington, DC through her eyes.  When she inevitably shares with a friend, new or old, that she grew up in DC, they always ask thoughtful questions about her time here and tease out stories I've heard over and over again but that truly never get old.

Having Mom and Memaw around is like having home come visit you.  I don't have to work to entertain them and they are perfectly happy sitting on the loveseat in the sunroom reading their books with a glass of wine.  They're also lovely mini-adventure companions - with Memaw interjecting stories of her time as a little girl, and then student at George Washington University, on the streets of our nation's capital.  It's lovely, too, to be with two ladies who are as enamored with our little bungalow as I am and who gush just as much about Abdoulaye as I do :)

Three generations of matching little nubby noses

Visiting Foundry United Methodist Church where Memaw was raised (and where she was married)

Visiting Foundry UMC was a real treat -and not just because of the 200 years of history (this year!) that fill the sanctuary.  Robtel Pailey, a PhD candidate at the University of London, delivered the sermon, which you can listen to here.  Ms. Pailey attended Foundry with her family while growing up after she and her family came to the US from Liberia.  After graduating from college in DC, she went on to "serve as special assistant for communications to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf." (see more of her writing here and here).  How neat!  I loved learning about her path in life and her roots at Foundry and imagining her growing up as a little girl in the same church as my grandmother and how their lives, though incredibly different, had a similar base in a church that welcomes so many people from so many backgrounds. 

Abdoulaye is disappointed I asked them to take the bus.  DC public transport adventure!

I did get a little teary-eyed putting these two little nuggets on the train on Monday - it gets harder and harder to say goodbye!  We had a lovely lunch together at Union Station and then I left them at the waiting area in the Amtrak station, paper-back novels in one hand and the other waving goodbye to me, cupped and flapping up and down.