Arboretum

These are a few of the pictures we took on our outing today, in no particular order.

Here they are, climbing the stone stairs.


Some pretty orchids:


Mr Handsome, with toddler in hand, at least for the moment!


Into the woods:


Peeking out from a mini-cabin:


Taking a rest in the shade, after their walk up the stone stairs.


Here the kids are, smiling in front of some tulips:

Long Past Due

I've been long absent from my blog and I know it.

It started out as a somewhat planned break as my attentions turned to other things, namely my dear father-in-law's struggle with cancer and posting health updates to a website for friends and relatives. My father in law is finally home for a short respite in his treatment. We are praying that he will be well again soon. But, then the planned month slid into two and now I find myself sliding into a third. I'm ready to come back now. I'm putting on my big girl pants and getting back to it.

I spent a month wading through homeschooling curriculum. I spent hours reading through blogs, articles, books, and websites on different products and methods each promising in turn to make my life easy and my child a genius. Awesome. I love it when money can buy easy solutions. At least when there's money to be had.

In any case, I bought books (lots and lots and LOTS of books) and now I'm settling in to go over my list and I'm making plans to get an outline ready for next year. I'll need to browse through our history/geography books and get an idea of the areas we'll be covering.

I have also been planning how we'll be spending our summer. We frequently go for walks through a local park. There are paved paths which wind around a shallow pond and there are many things to see. Last week Anna spotted a baby turtle swimming through the water. Its shell was slightly larger than a quarter so it must have been newly hatched. I have guide books on trees and animal tracks and wildflowers. Thomas and Anna will enjoy looking through them, even if they don't become expert naturalists. I think that this book will be fun for the kids, too.

It might seem like a lot of books, but honestly, Thomas really loves books. He gets most of his ideas and plans and information from books. Most of the time, if I just have the books available he will find them and read them in an afternoon. It makes my job very easy. Except when he gets this Really Great Idea about how he can build a real train and give Henry, Anna, and me rides and how he will be able to use his train to move packages! And he doesn't understand that this is just not something we can help him to do. The time he got into Calvin and Hobbes wasn't so great, either. Hm, or those Peanuts/Charlie Brown comics. Hearing him call Anna a 'Blockhead' was funny the first time, but it got old quickly.

Peter is taking a vacation from the Madhouse this week. We are staying close to home and putting a heavy emphasis on relaxation. Wish us luck. Today we went on a trip to the Arboretum. We had a wonderful time. I packed a lunch and the kids spent most of the day running down the paths shouting, "Really, I'm quite overwhelmed!" and "Mommy, isn't it a GLORIOUS day outside?" and "We could explore and explore every day for a YEAR and never see it all!" I need to stop letting them watch British BBC movies. And I'm definitely nixing the Masterpiece Theatre productions as well. And lest you think that I'm raising Little Lord Fauntleroy and PollyAnna Whittier, you might enjoy knowing they fought with vigor and passion over an empty Almond Extract bottle this afternoon. Ah well. It wasn't as bad as Henry's persistent screams in the van on the drive home.

I'll see if I can find some nice pictures to post of our outing today.

Edge of the Wilderness

We are back.

We went on vacation last week with my parents. They rent two little lake cabins every year so that we can all spend a week having a real vacation. I don't know how restful it is for my parents, but it gives the kids a lot of excitement and Peter and I get a chance to actually rest as Grandma and Grandpa cook and keep the kids busy.


The resort is in the middle of nowhere. It's along the edge of the Chippewa National Forest, 40 minutes away from Grand Rapids, Home of Judy Garland. We ran out of diapers towards the end of our vacation. We drove 10 miles to pay $14 for a package of Luvs. As I was checking out, the woman remarked that this was the last pack of diapers on the shelf in a size 4. I told her that she had a remarkable memory. She said that, no, she had been watching the supply of diapers and was waiting for the last package to sell before she ordered more. I wondered what would happen if you lived in the area wanted to buy diapers when she was waiting for a shipment. You'd have to drive miles to find any. Of course, so few people live in the area that I imagine there wasn't too much chance of anyone rushing in with a desperate need for diapers. But still. If Target were to run out of Luvs, well, I could buy the Target brand diapers, Pampers, Huggies (two different kinds), and that crunchy brand they're carrying now. And, failing that, I could buy diapers at one of the two grocery stores. It's almost a shame I use cloth diapers.

It was a five hour drive to the cabins and it put us in the middle of the quietest bit of forest that you can imagine. The Northwoods are dense and dark, filled with birch trees and pine and we spent the week enjoying the quiet. In the Twin Cities, we have airplanes flying overhead all the time. At our house, you can hear the blaring horn of passing trains half a mile away and the highway provides a steady stream of white noise. In the woods, all you can hear is the forest and the lake. I never heard an airplane all week. And at night I would look up and see the stars. In the country one can see the stars most people have forgotten even exist. I would look into the sky and be amazed that these bright points of light had been there all along. Even on the clearest, coldest day of the year, these are never seen in the city. And you forget. It made me wonder what else is out there, obscured by the business of everyday life. And I wonder how one goes about finding it.

Whatever else there is and however one finds it, it almost certainly has to be easier than finding diapers in the middle of the wilderness.

Mini-Vacation

Last week P took a couple of days off of work so that we could have a little break from our daily routine. We went up to Duluth and stayed at a hotel in Canal Park right on the shore of Lake Superior. Both P and I went to college in Duluth and have many happy memories of enjoying the city in our early twenties as young single people and as newlyweds.

The kids love Duluth, of course. There are so many things to see that are unusual and removed from their normal lives. I don't think they are generally overwhelmed with the natural beauty, but they get a huge kick out of the lighthouses and the lift bridge. Thomas is obsessed with signals--traffic signals, train signals--so of course the red and green lights at the top of the lighthouses are of particular interest. Sadly, the port was closed for the season still and wasn't scheduled to reopen until after we left on Saturday. We did, however, take a drive over the lift bridge and Anna and Thomas waved good morning to Lake Superior.

I think that the biggest attraction for the little ones has to be the hotel (pronounced HO-tel, if you are four years old). They love the room, the BIG beds, the long hallways, the huge breakfast, and most of all the POOL. Yea, Pool! They spend as much time as they can splashing in the pool. Thomas is not a big swimmer. With encouragement, he will allow you to carry him out into the water, kick, and then be brought back to the stairs where he will sit and enjoy the pool in his small way. His love for the pool is wholly platonic. Anna's love is whole-hearted and wildly enthusiastic. From the very first time her little body met a pool of water her love has been nothing less than ecstatic. She is thrilled by the very notion of swimming. Her biggest frustration is that she seems to lack the coordination to both kick and tread water. She loves to play games with me and P and delights in "swimming". She always wants us to "let go", but of course we can't. I don't know how long it will take for her to learn to swim on her own, but she's like a 15 year old pining for a license to drive.

We also got to take the kids out to eat at a restaurant a couple of times. We don't go out to eat very often and sometimes the kids will ask to go to a restaurant like someone might ask to go to Grandma's house. "Can we go to a restaurant, sometime, please?" The highlight of our dining experience was for P and me, though. We took them to eat at the India Palace on Superior Street. They have a buffet during the lunch hour that is good, if mildly flavored to suit the Scandinavian diners. We were beyond pleased to see that they didn't charge us for the kids' dinners. I had kind of hoped that they wouldn't charge for Anna, since she's two years old and not prone to eating great amounts of food. I didn't really think we would get away with not being charged for Thomas, though. What a nice surprise to get our check and only have our own meals to pay for! I think I will love this restaurant forever. Aside from it's generous policy towards children, P and I have been visiting this place since it opened years and years ago and we would go together as a young couple. *sniff* Now I'm getting all sentimental.

I wish I had some pictures to share, not only of the children, but of the beautiful scenery we enjoyed of the lake, the lighthouses, and the buildings. I lived there for four years and it never gets old.

Muckity-Muck

We're back, finally, from our long-winded vacation out West. I'm sure I have more stories to tell about our vacation, but right now the biggest thing on my mind is that my computer has decided to revolt, somehow, during our week away. I really have no idea how this happened. How does something break when you're not even using it?

I blame the iPhone.

Friday night before we left P went to the mall to stand in line to buy an iPhone. He brought it home and tried to get it all "formatted" or something like that by connecting it to our big computer--the one with everything on it. I don't know. Everything seemed to work out fine, except that he was having problems importing music onto the thing. The details are fuzzy to me. But P assures me that it has nothing to do with the Glowing Ray of Holy Moonshine that is the iPhone and that it is, in fact, a problem with our big computer. Big Computer is fine, I say. It's never given ME any trouble. But now it is the focus of an intensive search and destroy mission involving my tech-husband, a small handful of Apple Help Guys in California (or India, again, what do I know?), and possibly some rookie CIA agents. And now it doesn't work. Even my blog reader doesn't work and as far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the iPhone. All I know is that it worked before we introduced it to the iPhone.

In any case, it has made blogging difficult since I haven't been able to get P's head out of the hard drive since we've been home. It's even been hard to get instructions on Picture Posting to my blog since the computer tends to muffle his speech.

So, stand by. I'll be back and I hope to bring pictures of knitting and vacationing with me. As long as the iPhone doesn't eat the photos.

Prozac on the Prairie

I've been wondering lately about the availability of prescription strength 'mood lifters' in the Midwest. If this isn't possible, perhaps something nice in a Sedative?

In less than 40 hours, my family and I will begin a voyage across space and time, across the American prairie, leaving our comfy home and traveling in a car for 14 hours to see my husband's family. Yes. With a 3.5 year old and a 1.5 year old. And what little sanity we thought we had. For a family reunion.

Please don't get me wrong--I really do enjoy my husband's extended family. I just prefer to enjoy them a little closer to home. Say, within a 20 minute drive. And I have enjoyed the Rocky Mountains in the past. When we made the drive without children. I simply cannot imagine what this trip is going to be like. My stress level is off the charts.

I have had glimmers of eagerness when anticipating this trip. I optimistically bought a variety of children's books on clearance and stashed away matchbox cars and small toys in preparation for the car ride. P and I even fought briefly over whether or not a portable DVD player would be procured for our trip, but he won and we're driving without. We've tried to structure our driving around the schedule that our children normally follow and I'm packing healthy meals similar to what we would be eating at home so the kids' systems aren't burdened with salty, fatty, processed food they aren't accustomed to. I've done everything in my power to assure as enjoyable a trip as possible, including an overnight stop at a nice hotel with a pool.

Tonight, however, while laying out and organizing the distractions I've arranged for the children I realized one thing.

That it's madness. Absolute madness.

It's insane to think that any amount of books or gadgets is going to distract my kids from realizing that they are not in Happy Vacation Funland but, in fact, strapped into carseats for hours and hours without end. I mean, really? How do you get around that? I know they are going to hate it after an hour, that they are going to want the car ride to stop, and that they are going to want to be at HOME, HOME NOW, riding on their trikes. They are going to develop Restless Legs Syndrome, Tourette's, and possibly a rash and, by the way, I am pretty sure that whining will kill me or at least make my ears bleed.

I will try to be optimistic, and failing that, at least cheerful. A grumpy mama isn't anyone's idea of fun, least of all mine. And I know that once we get to the mountains that the kids will have a lovely time. My children continue to surprise me with the things they are capable of and I'm pretty sure they'll hold out as long as any toddler and preschooler could be expected to. A lot of my anxiety is simply because I have no idea what to expect of them. Can I expect a peaceful ride to Des Moines? To Rochester? To the end of our street? I just know that 14 hours of screaming unhappiness isn't tolerable to anyone unless you're medicated. Heavily.


"Though I say, 'I will forget my complaint,
I will leave off my sad countenance and be cheerful,' Job 9:27