A couple of weeks ago, I took the children to the Domain here in our village. It’s a piece of public land, and it’s fairly heavily wooded, with trails through the trees. There is a large open area, which is now a cricket playing field. The cricket clubhouse is at the edge of the field, and was built on part of the foundation of William “Ready Money” Robinson’s mansion. Robinson made a fortune on the Australian gold fields in, I believe, the 1870s, and came here with the money. He bought an immense tract of land, about half the size of a county in Michigan, and then built this mansion. If I remember right, all 3 stories and 40 rooms of it were finished in about 1881, and Robinson died the following year.
Anyway, we went there a couple of weeks ago to do some filming for a movie the children were making. (Watch for it to post here sometime in December, after Esther posts it on her blog, http://estherfilbrun.com.) The day was a perfect spring day, so after the filming was finished, we just spent some time enjoying the beautiful setting. While the boys played, and rode a bike very fast down a very steep hill, Esther and I read for awhile and played with Little Miss. The little boys (and some slightly bigger ones) enjoyed jumping in a big pile of leaves that Esther raked up for them. Esther put this short video together for me.
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