Moran Family Fun

Earlier this month Abigail turned thirteen! For the second year in a row her birthday feel on a very busy day for our family so we had to spread out her celebration over an entire weekend. Abigail is a gracious girl and she didn't complain at all about the focus being split on her birthday. On the actual anniversary of her birth she spent a large part of the day at a Girls Camp Clinic getting things passed off for camp and going on a five mile hike. Late in the afternoon we sat down to open presents. Abigail always writes out a detailed birthday wish list and typically the items on her list are not things she's going to get - like that time she requested a pet monkey. She's gained wisdom with her old age and most of the items on her list this year were much more attainable. This wasn't a requested gift, but I think she liked it anyway. A shadowbox filled with memories of the half-marathon she and Jared ran in April Item #3 on her list? Rich girl paper. At the ...

We have lived on a peninsula since the end of August. There are rivers on two sides of us and the Chesapeake Bay to our south. Despite being surrounded by all that water, we have yet to actually really see any of it. Okay, occasionally we'll drive over a bridge connecting our little corner of the world to Virginia or another part of Maryland, but just last week was the first time we went and physically touched the water.  I had been told that there was a beach at the Navy base so after a quick trip to the commissary we did a little exploring on the base to see if we could find it. Off topic, Navy bases look and feel very different from the Air Force bases I'm used to visiting.  Okay, back to the story... we found the beach! I'm pretty sure this was the first time we had been to the beach since May of 2009 when we went to the beach in Italy . Well, Emily walked on a beach last spring in Ireland but it was cold and windy and there were cows roaming around, so that doesn...

Every spring our local school district holds a middle school volleyball tournament for all the middle schools in the county. Abigail was excited to hear about it because she's really missed playing volleyball this year and because she really wants to be like Emily and play volleyball in high school.  Tryouts for the team started up right after her play was over so we gave her the go ahead and she was excited to be included on the roster!  They practiced a couple of times a week for about a month leading up to the tournament and the last Saturday in May was the big day.   We weren't sure what the tournament was going to be like; I guess I was envisioning a couple of matches and then we'd go home. Apparently events like this last all. day. long. We got there at 0900 and Abigail wasn't finished until after three in the afternoon. Every team had to play every other team at least twice and then a complicated points system determined which four teams would advance to the f...

During our time in Germany we spent many three-day weekends traveling an hour or two away from our home to explore the amazing area in which we were blessed to live. Recently Jared and I were talking about the fact that we are again lucky enough to live near some pretty darn amazing places and that we needed to get out of the house and start taking advantage of our proximity to them. We've  lived just 45 miles from of our nation's capital for the last eleven months and in that time we've only taken the girls there once, for a baseball game! Plus, in the areas surrounding DC there are tons of Civil War and War of 1812 sites to visit. St. Mary's County , where we live, is home to lighthouses, beaches, farmland, and historic places that we haven't even started to explore. For Memorial Day this year Jared planned a perfect family day out. We started by heading northwest to Sharpsburg, MD for the Memorial Day ceremony at Antietam National Cemetery. We were met there...

Until last weekend, we had no idea that professional ultimate frisbee was an actual thing.  Jared won tickets to a DC Current Ultimate game so we rounded up another couple and headed to the Catholic University of American in Washington DC.  Major League Ultimate is the professional league for ultimate frisbee with eight teams in two divisions.  The DC team won the championship in 2014 so if we had to pick a team to watch for our introduction to the sport, this was it. We found the parking lot (free! a first for us in professional sports) for Cardinal Stadium and followed the crowds, if you could call the small trickle of people a crowd, to find the Will Call window and pick up our tickets.  It turned out that Will Call was not so much a ticket office and more a couple of guys sitting at a folding table under a tree. We grabbed our tickets, program, and fridge magnet and headed in to find some seats. Cardinal Stadium is actually smaller than the football stadium...

This spring has been a season of running for Emily, Samantha, and Abigail. Emily has known all school year that she wanted to play a sport in the spring, but she kept going back and forth between tennis and track. Eventually she decided on track and we're quite glad she did. She had a bit of an injury plagued season with IT band troubles early on and then a hip injury to finish out the season. But, as she said, "Those three injury free weeks were glorious!" Even when she was injured she still pushed herself and improved her time at every meet. Emily, in red, running the mile During tryouts Emily was put into the distance group and she continued running distance during the season. Her race was the mile and she sometimes ran the 800 meter as well. And here she is at the same meet early in the season Like anything else, running track has some unintended consequences. First was her tan. She loved that being outside for two or more hours every afternoon was get...