Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Tomorrow we head out for a big trip.  We’ll be visiting Sydney’s family in Nova Scotia–and we’ll be driving.  So we’ll do a long day of driving tomorrow, stop in Ithaca for a few days to see friends and show the kids our old home, and then drive over to Portland, ME, where we’ll pick up a ferry to Nova Scotia.  Yes, we’re catching a few breaks on this trip when we can, given that Google has the Kentucky-Nova Scotia drive at 26 hours and we will have a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old in the back seat of a Prius.  So, today will be a flurry of packing, but I promise not to forget the camera.  Sydney already had to remind me not to forget the passports, so we hope we don’t forget anything else that’s important.  We’re excited to see friends and family, if a bit sad to leave behind the “stay home and enjoy routine family time” part of our summer.  We have a few activities up our sleeves for when we get back, which should usher the start of school very quickly to our door.

Erin

The daytime highs this week have been flirting with 90, and it’s only going down to about 70 at night, so we’re shifting to new routines.  This morning, since the kids were up early, I took them to the park and playground by 8am and did my best to wear them out by 9.  It was already pretty warm and humid at that hour (Katherine informed me of this about every five feet of our scooter ride), but I tried to help her understand just how much warmer it was going to get, and we got in a mile-and-a-half of scootering and some playground time before heading home.  So, our strategies for conducting life in this weather:

Strategy #1: Heat out early for physical exercise.

Strategy #2: Motivate your family to get out by instilling in them fear of the heat that is yet to come.

Strategy #3: Hand them water bottles when they wake up, just before they step out of the car, and when they return from their play.

Strategy #4: Fail to fill the gas tank on the car when it gets a bit low, and convince the kids that we just “have” to walk to school after we finish lunch.  Follow walk with more water.

Strategy #5: Later in the day, when they’re tired and hot and short-tempered, have homemade popsicles at the ready, for both kids and adults.  One of Sydney’s best ideas was to get a sturdy blender when we arrived in Kentucky, and we’ve kept it busy making smoothies and blended fruit that I freeze in popsicle molds.

Strategy #6: Remove all heavy blankets from the kids’ room.  Otherwise they will insist on sleeping under them, despite the warm weather.  The kids don’t know where the blankets go when Mommy does spring cleaning, but I did promise that the blankets will return when the weather cools in the fall.

Strategy #6: After the kids are in bed, make both Sydney and Erin a quart-sized canning jar full of iced tea.  Since even he likes some sugar in the tea, the tight lid comes in handy.  You’ll find us shaking tea in one hand while we hold a book with the other on a lot of evenings in June and July.

Erin

For a mini-Father’s Day trip, we headed to Cincinnati on Saturday.  We combined kid and adult interests, visiting the Cincinnati Zoo and also Jungle Jim’s, a huge and quirky grocery store that has four aisles of hot sauce, lots of exotic fruit, and some of our favorite English-import tea.  Although the store was definitely worth a few photos, we only got the camera out for the zoo, where Nathaniel fed the giraffe.

Erin

While we were in Iowa, Sydney and I had the chance to take an overnight trip by ourselves, so we headed north.  It was great on many fronts: we revisited Stillwater, MN, a town full of used book stores and foodie shops that’s also gorgeous and right on the water, picked up a set of Suarez volumes for Sydney at a fraction of the usual price, ate out (Jamaican, and delicious!), hiked each day we were gone (a huge part of my satisfaction), birdwatched (Sydney’s, of course), visited the Seed Savers Exchange to pick up heirloom pepper and tomato plants, and stayed at an incredibly beautiful inn where we were given our choice of rooms and had the house to ourselves.

It was very relaxing, and reminded us how much we loved trips when we could take them at a more leisurely pace than 1) is common for academic functions or 2) happens with short-legged, short-tempered creatures in tow.

Erin

By this point, finding new bird species for me to see this side of the Rockies is quite difficult. But I had some great birding excursions on our recent trip to Iowa and, among the 149 species I spotted, I found four that were new for me:

• Sedge Wren
• Lark Sparrow
• White-faced Ibis
• Dickcissel

Oddly enough, my first Dickcissel came at a tiny roadside park — it basically consisted of two outhouses and a trash can — while I was on my way decidedly elsewhere.

Sydney

While we were visiting my parents in Iowa, we got to take Sydney and the kids to some of my favorite parks and nature preserves in the area.  One of them, Hickory Hills, I remember as the place where some friends and I dunked a canoe full of guys who had tipped our canoe during a high-school field trip, and I also remember it from a much earlier time, when Adam and found a snake and salamander for our elementary school’s show-and-tell.  Now Nathaniel and Katherine are forming their own opinions.  Thus far: they like the many flowers along the path, and they wondered why Dada disappeared into the woods for so long (he was following birds).

Erin

Yesterday I got a bit excited for Katherine to start school in the fall and decided to go ahead and order the kids backpacks.  Yes, I know that the current school year is not actually out in many school districts, but I have a very eager five-year-old, I found some sales, and we’ll be going on more long car trips this summer for which cute toddler backpacks are entirely unsatisfactory: they’re not big enough for picture books!

So, once I’d gathered a mom-approved handful of options, I called Katherine over so that she could start off the selection.  One thing I’ve learned: never to let my kids pick things out in a store if there’s much money involved.  Inevitably, the store will have horrible and expensive options that my kids will seize, and then I’ll have to spend ten minutes prying their fingers off said objects.  Everyone will cry or feel like crying.  So, online shopping it is.

Katherine knew that Nathaniel would head straight for the red backpack (which he did), so she began to rethink her initial selection of pink.  I was fine with pink, though I liked the purple better (she shot it down and never looked back), but saw immediately that she wanted the two backpacks to match, even if the kids aren’t in school together.  Fine.  Kinda sweet, actually.

Over the course of two more hours, she shifted from pink to neon green to green-flowered to light-blue to cobalt blue.  At each choice, I just nodded and waited and watched her re-think.  In the end, Katherine, much to my surprise, settled on a solid blue backpack, and it’s one that will, I hope, last her several years.  I hope that she’s still happy with her choice once she hits the pink world of girls at school, but she has several preschool friends now who go in for sparkly princess wear, and Katherine is still fine with mixing up sparkles with simpler fare.  So, we’ll hope that it lasts.  And, of course, Mommy’s happy.  Both her father and I will be happier if we find ourselves lugging around (or borrowing) a blue backpack rather than a pink one, even though Sydney looks great in pink.

Erin

We left Kentucky a week ago for a visit to my parents in Iowa.  This was our first attempt at a long-distance car trip with the kids, so we decided to break it up into two days, with a number of detours along the way.  We first drove up to Columbus to meet the friends that Sydney was living with for much of this spring, and the kids were thrilled to realize that Sydney had been staying in a house with four kids.  After lunch, we packed all of the kids into the car and headed up to the Columbus Zoo, where we balanced walks among the exhibits with some playground time.

Erin

Since I’m new to academic robes and I knew I’d only have a few minutes to don mine before the honors ceremony the other day, I tried them on at home.  Katherine and Nathaniel were pretty intrigued when they saw that Mommy, too, liked to play dress-up.

Katherine said, looking at me thoughtfully, “You look beautiful, Mommy.”  Glad to know that voluminous material in airport-ground-crew-appropriate stripes is what flatters . . .

My department chair teased me by indicating that I should have opted for the runway version of academic regalia, which he sketched for me:

Erin

It hit 80 degrees today, so I think summer is officially here.  We’ve also had several big thunderstorms in recent weeks–just enough to remind us that we’re no longer in England, where it rains frequently but almost never breaks out into a real passion.  Last weekend we joined friends for a beautiful walk down into the riverbeds of a stream that would make for a cool retreat in the summer.  I know that the real heat is coming, so I’m collecting popsicle molds and swimming locations . . .

Erin