Another full week of exploration - Jameson Distillery, St. Anne's Park, and more!

With only two weeks left of summer/until school school starts, we've been continuing our expeditions around county Dublin.

An unexciting trip to the notary public turned worthy of report when the solicitor had Sally write what she wanted to be when she grows up, and then he notarized it for her. Her second contender for profession was "own an ice cream truck" but she didn't think that would be as well-received and therefore went with her first choice.

We followed that with a day trip to Clontarf (just on the northern side of Dublin), which is home to the enormous and beautiful Saint Anne's Park and a 5-km long strand (walk along the harbour). The tide changes are huge here as well as in most parts along the Dublin coastline, so when its out the boats are sitting on their keels, which I think is super weird (and is it bad for the boats? I need to ask our sailor neighbor) but common here (photo below).

St. Anne's had a super cool playground and multiple gorgeous gardens. Clontarf over all had numerous nods to, and notes about, the Vikings (our heritage, for better or worse!).

Later in the week, we went on a hike at Ticknock, the high hill ("mountain") above Dublin, with two other mom/daughter pairs. It was crazy foggy (though of course it cleared literally when we got back to the parking lot) but the weather made for misty magic. I can see how that might get one down long term, but it's still new, so I enjoyed the mist and the beautiful purple heather fields as far as the eye can see (which is not far, you know, because of the fog!).

In other news, we have a neighborhood cat that graces us with his presence every few days. He's generally quite sweet (though noisy, appears to be part Siamese) but gets grumpy when we say he's not allowed inside. I call him Sean, but David and Sally each have their own name for him (for example, Sally calls him Jojo). Ha, no wonder he's confused. At first we thought perhaps he had lived in our house before, because he very much acted like he owned the place, but our neighbor Kevin enlightened us that Sean actually belongs to the woman around the corner, but that he used to "hang out" with the cats who lived at our house, so he probably misses them. Kevin also declared Sean as a serial murderer of birds, so he's not a fan.

Saturday, we walked across the street and checked out a busker-style performance of magic, comedy, music, and acrobatics! It was totally fun to be outside and at attending live performances - and, with the small crowd and front row seats, Sally got lots of attention from the performers, which made it feel particularly special. It threatened to rain the whole time but held off, thankfully. Then boy, did it ever rain! The streets flooded up to about 10 inches high, but I guess Dublin is used to it b/c then it drained completely within about 1 hour of the rain stopping.

Sunday we had our first guests (vaccinated) for brunch, about which all of us were very excited. It went swimmingly! Brunch entertaining being something we did a lot of in Cali, it was fun to restart it here.

Then we headed over to the Jameson Distillery for a tour. I've been wanting to get into whiskey since our arrival and this was the perfect introduction. The tour was top notch and I can see my way into enjoying whiskey at this point. David celebrated the moment by getting me a fancy bottle of distillery-only whiskey with my name on the label!

We do also spend plenty of down time at home or at the local oceanfront (and work, but that's not very interesting to blog about!). I almost forgot the biggest news—Sally finally ate her first crusts (without parental pressure) and I might have cried a little. ;)

Life is good!