Cool Yule

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Steph

Christmas Eve

We flew to Oregon on Christmas Eve. It was a long day of travel (three flights in total) and I had a bad head cold that caused me some ear pain that got worse every time we landed. It would have been a trying trip even if on the longest flight I hadn’t been seated next to a woman who was so determined to discuss God’s role in her reproductive life that when I rebuffed her attempts at conversation (as politely as I could), she just had the conversation with the poor couple in the row in front of us. Beth and Noah were seated a few rows ahead and they watched Star Wars and part of The Empire Strikes Back because he’s recently gotten interested in watching these films, what with all the attention the new one is receiving.

We did get to visit with Beth’s brother in Seattle, in between the first and second flights, as we had a long layover. We left the airport, saw his house, and had lunch with him. We don’t see enough of Johnny, so that was nice. His wife Abby was out of town but she thoughtfully left us a tin of pinwheels and soft ginger cookies.

My mother and stepfather picked us up at the last airport and as rain changed over to snow, drove us through downtown Ashland to see the Christmas lights in the business district, which were quite lovely, though I had to strain to keep my eyes open to see them. Then we had a dinner of Mom’s delicious homemade minestrone after which Beth, June, and I all crashed. Noah, who is apparently made of sterner stuff than us, wanted to adjust to West Coast time in one fell swoop and stayed up until his actual bedtime.

Christmas

I told the kids if they woke before five (and I thought it was a pretty sure bet they would) to try to go back to sleep, but that at five they could read or entertain themselves with electronics until six, when they could come out their rooms and open their stockings. I left a couple oranges in June’s room to tide her over until six and hoped for the best.

I was awake for the day at 4:05 but I followed my own rules and didn’t look at my phone until five. At six sharp I heard June leave her room so Beth and I got out of bed. I inadvertently woke Noah by going into his room to see why an alarm was going off in there. He’d set it but slept through it though the door opening woke him. We all opened our stockings and then Beth and June and I went outside to play in the snow, because there was snow, about an inch or so, but that was enough for June to make not one but two little snowmen, one on Mom and Jim’s deck and another in a small park just across the street. We haven’t had any snow at home so she wasn’t going to let it go to waste and it was a good thing she acted quickly because later in the day it melted almost completely.

When Mom and Jim got up we had breakfast—French toast casserole, scrambled eggs, and veggie sausage. Sara and our new niece and cousin, Lily-Mei (also known as Lan-Lan) whom Sara adopted from China just two months ago, arrived around ten. I opened the door when they rang the bell and Lan-Lan was clearly surprised and somewhat dismayed not to see her familiar grandmother. She hid briefly behind Sara’s legs, but she acclimated to us pretty quickly. June in particular was very good with her and by the end of the day they were fast friends. Lan-Lan called her “Goo” and wanted to hold her hand all the time (going down slides, in the car, walking around the house, etc.)

As she warmed up to us, Lan-Lan enjoyed playing a game with our Christmas card. Sara had been using it to help her recognize us before we arrived. Sara would point to someone on the card and say, “Who’s that?” and Lan-Lan would (usually) point to the right person. This never got old. She was fetching the card so we could do this for days.

The rest of the morning was dedicated to opening presents. There was a great quantity of books, soap, tea, socks, and cashmere scarves exchanged. Sara and I got each other peppermint soap and I got Sara the exact same brand of chocolate tea Mom got for me. In addition, Beth got a big stack of books, mostly about women in rock, I got a camera and a teapot and tea cups from China, Noah got a bunch of Amazon gift certificates he’s already used to purchase a new monitor and other computer equipment, and June got ice skates, a gift certificate to get her hair dyed again and some jewelry.

But it was Lan-Lan who really cleaned up (because so many of Sara’s friends gave her gifts). The big hits were a rocking horse and a set of little bean bags. Noah decided to put reindeer antlers on the rocking horse and to make a red nose out of a barely-inflated red balloon and soon it was a rocking reindeer. Lan-Lan rode it and delighted in the neighing noise it makes when you press a button and all three kids played for a long time tossing the bean bags into empty boxes. Every time Lan-Lan got one in everyone would applaud and then she would sit down so she could clap, too. She does it with her one hand and the opposite foot. Lan-Lan also found time to scribble with her new crayons and play with her egg shakers.

Sara and Lan-Lan went home for her rest time and while they were gone I had a nap. I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down and slept deeply for nearly an hour, which helped me stay up until 9:30 that night. When Sara and Lan-Lan came back June and I went to the playground with them. Once we were there the simple scene seemed momentous to me and I said to Sara, “We’re at the playground with our kids.”

“We are,” she said simply.

This was a long time coming. I didn’t have kids until my mid-thirties and Sara not until her mid-forties, both after long waits, but here we were watching our kids tear around the snowy mulch (June yelling “I’m going to get you” and Lan-Lan shrieking happily) like sisters who’d been watching their kids play together for years.

The girls held hands going down the slide and Sara made a video of it. Lan-Lan wanted to watch over and over and over again. Later June helped push Lan-Lan on the swing. Sara stood behind her and June in front and they pushed her back and forth saying, “She’s mine! No, she’s mine!” while Lan-Lan laughed. (This kid has the cutest laugh you can imagine.) Things only got more hilarious when they invented the game “Switch.” Either Sara or June would yell “One, two, three. Switch!” or to make it more suspenseful, “I feel a switch coming on” and then they would run and switch places. This was funny for a long time. I’ve found you’re never as good a comedian as when you have babies or toddlers.

We came back to Mom’s house and changed clothes for Christmas dinner. Lan-Lan wore a black and gold dress that used to belong to June. (The whole time we were there I took a lot of pleasure in seeing her in Noah and June’s old things—pants, socks, barrettes.)

We ate our dinner—chicken, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cranberry sauce, rolls, and a gluten-free chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. (Sara’s gluten-intolerant.) We ate on the early side so Lan-Lan, who has an early bedtime, could get to bed. As a result, after Sara and Lan-Lan left, we had time to watch A Christmas Story, which we’d never seen before. Mom and Jim enjoyed the nostalgia factor, as they were kids in the 1940s, when it’s set, and June appreciated the broad humor.

Boxing Day

The big activity the next day was a trip to Jacksonville, a nineteenth-century mining town that has a lot of its original Old West architecture. This was almost a trip to Crater Lake, which Mom really wanted us to see in the snow. But the snow up in the mountains posed a problem. Most of the roads there were closed. Only one entrance was open. Various routes were considered and debated and when we left the house, we were actually intending to go there but then we saw a sign for a closed road ahead and we gave up and went to Jacksonville instead. There we browsed in the shops and Lan-Lan stopped to pet the many dogs of Jacksonville, and we had coffee and pastries in a nice coffee shop Beth found, where I got a hazelnut mocha breve and Sara and I shared a gluten-free crème de menthe brownie. Sara said it was the best brownie she ever had and I said, except for Mom’s crème de menthe brownies and she solemnly said, yes, of course.

Mom and Beth were both disappointed not to make it further up into the mountains, but there were lovely mountain views along the drive and there was a spectacular sunset as we drove home.

We went our separate ways for the day then. Sara and Lan-Lan went home and the rest of us went back to Mom’s house where we watched a DVD of pictures from Mom, Sara, and Sara’s boyfriend Dave’s trip to China. (We didn’t get to meet Dave on this trip, as he was with family in Arizona.) Then we went out for pizza. June and I were done in by this point. She was resting her head on the table as we waited for our food and I might have done the same if it were socially acceptable adult behavior—I could have used another nap that day. But the pizza came quickly and we got home in time to put June to bed by her (new, West Coast) bedtime.

Sunday

I slept until 6:15 the next morning and as a result it was the first day I wasn’t feeling jet-lagged. We had brunch at Sara’s house—her famous almond pancakes. Noah and June kept Lan-Lan occupied while Sara cooked, mostly by tossing dishtowels to each other in the living room. Did you know this is the best game ever? Now you do.

We devoured a huge stack of pancakes, a quadruple batch. Noah alone had fourteen. (They’re pretty small, but still…) Sara said it was her first time having people over to eat since Lan-Lan came home and she seemed pretty pleased with how it went. Soon it was time for Lan-Lan to rest so we cleared out.

In the afternoon Mom, Beth, Sara, June, Lan-Lan and I went to a different playground and there was more sliding and swinging and games of Switch. When we got cold we went back to Mom’s house. Sara swung by the food co-op while toddler-free and then we had a big late afternoon snack of chips, crudités, dips, cheese, summer sausage, lentil and green bean salads and spiced nuts. This plus an eggroll was dinner for Sara and Lan-Lan, but after they left, we had baked macaroni and cheese and Christmas dinner leftovers. Needless to say, we were all very full after that. That night Beth and Noah finished Return of the Jedi, which they’d been watching little by little.

June lost a tooth that day and she was hoping the Tooth Fairy would find her. We’d been having snow flurries on and off all day and she also was hoping it would stick overnight and there would be snow in the morning.

Monday

The next morning there was a dollar under June’s bed (it fell off in the night and took some finding) and there was snow, a wet, heavy snow that clung to the tree branches and then fell in clumps. But apparently the second snow of the year is not as exciting as the first snow because June didn’t go out and play in it until Sara and Lan-Lan arrived mid-morning. Instead we read a couple of chapters of Harry Potter (the Platform 9 ¾ chapter and the Sorting Hat one). Beth went for a walk to the UPS store to mail home a package of presents that wouldn’t fit in our luggage and then Sara and I walked to Dutch Brothers to get eggnog lattes, while Mom, June, and Lan-Lan went on their own walk and made a third snowman. It was harder to make a snowman with a two year old than June anticipated. “I don’t think she understands the words ‘Don’t kick the snowman,’” she later told us ruefully. But it was still standing when Sara and I got home after a pleasant walk and conversation.

In the afternoon we made gingerbread cookies. Mom couldn’t find her recipe so I was going to look for a similar one online when Beth told me she’d scanned some important recipes onto her phone a while back and sure enough, she had it. We had to tinker with the recipe, using gluten-free flour and butter instead of shortening (because of trans fats). This is what happens when you try to make gingerbread with a nutrition writer, but at least we used real sugar and not stevia or something like that. (I love you, Sara, really I do.)

Mom mixed the ingredients, letting Lan-Lan dump in the pre-measured baking soda and spices. We decided to have separate workstations on the kitchen counter for Sara and Lan-Lan and for Noah, June, and me. Lan-Lan mostly played with the dough while the rest of us rolled out dough, cut it and put raisins on it. When my kids started to bicker over access to the most desired cookie cutters and over who squashed whose cookie, I told them not to act like toddlers, as that job was taken and then they got along a little better. Even cutting the recipe in half we made three trays of cookies and frosted some of them with leftover frosting from the cake.

We finished in time for an early dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then Sara and Lan-Lan went home and Mom and Jim went to a violin and piano concert while Beth, the kids and I settled in to watch Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.

Tuesday

In the morning we had time for a visit at Sara’s house before we left for the airport. Lan-Lan got us to dance by playing one of her musical toys and as that was a hit, she got a great quantity of other toys (mostly dolls and stuffed animals) from her room to see if we’d like those as well. We could only stay about an hour. When we left, Sara and Lan-Lan watched us from the living room window as we got into Mom’s minivan and began our journey away from snowy mountains, my mom’s house, and our first visit with the newest member of our family.

A Fine Thanksgiving

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Steph

Wednesday

“Keep packing! And don’t take out your phone!” It wasn’t Beth or me urging Noah to stay on task. It was June. We’d been planning to watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving that night but not before everyone was packed for our drive to Wheeling the next day. Everyone but Noah was packed.

“But I need to check the weather to pack,” he protested.

“Sure you do,” said June dismissively.

Despite her best efforts to crack the whip, by the time Noah was packed, it was her bedtime so we decided to download the movie to the laptop and take it with us.

Thanksgiving Day

We arrived in Wheeling a little past two, after an uneventful five-hour drive. The day was warm and clear, good driving weather, though Beth might have preferred some white and drifted snow. The closest we got was some big icicles in a road cut at one of the higher elevations.

We went straight to Beth’s mom’s house. Noah wanted to take video of himself walking up to her door and then text it to her and June just wanted to run up to the door in the more traditional way. We said he could do it, but just this once because it seemed like a cumbersome tradition to start.

Inside we socialized with YaYa and Ron. Beth and June gave her a basket they bought for her birthday and Noah gave her a DVD with the last two movies the kids made, including the one in which she played a ghost last summer in Rehoboth. Then Noah showed everyone a video clip of the student-anchored newscast at his school from the morning when they announced the winners of the school-wide Halloween costume contest. Kids submitted photos and they picked three winners—third prize was a witch, second was a pirate lass, and first prize was….a Fiji Water bottle.

“We both won a contest,” June said, in case anyone had forgotten her triumph. “I won the parade contest and Noah won his school contest.”

Next we checked into our hotel to change for dinner. The room had a nice view. You could see the church where Beth’s parents were married and the school she attended from fourth to sixth grade. It made me think how much more rooted a childhood Beth had, compared to mine. I’m honestly not even sure what state my parents were married in, and I went to four different elementary schools to Beth’s two.

June was eager to get into her Thanksgiving outfit, dress with a tight black sequined bodice and a full, gauzy red and black skirt, a white cardigan, white tights, and black shoes with a moderate heel. The rest of us weren’t so fancy, but we cleaned up okay. In the lobby on our way out, Beth had the idea to take some pictures in front of the Christmas tree for our Christmas card, as everyone was already dressed up.

There were sixteen people at Beth’s Aunt Sue’s house—all from Carole’s, Sue’s and YaYa’s branches of the family. (The fourth sister, Jenny, had Thanksgiving at home with her daughter, who’s due with her first child very soon.)

“I am the matriarch,” Carole, the eldest sister, announced. She’s about to become a great grandmother and is pleased as punch about it. Her daughter Meg and twenty-something grandson Kawika were also those who had travelled furthest, all the way from Ireland and Austin, TX, to be in Wheeling for Thanksgiving.

There were two other kids there—Sue’s granddaughters Lily (who’s June’s age) and Tessa, who at six was the youngest person present. The three girls picked up right where they left off when they last saw each other two years ago.

Sue put a lot of care into the cooking and decorations. She’d collected and preserved red maple and Japanese maple leaves in wet paper towels in her fridge to keep them fresh and arranged them on the tables. There were bowls of appetizers out and she had set up a cookie decorating station for the four kids, with sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies, and little pots of frosting, sprinkles, and M&Ms. She asked ahead of time to make sure Noah wasn’t too old for this activity. He most certainly was not, though he used a different technique than the girls, who carefully used the provided paintbrushes to apply a light glaze of frosting. He spackled his on with the spoon.

Though he decorated cookies with the kids, he ate at the adult table, or one of them—there were two. When everyone had their fill of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and two kinds of gravy (the mushroom gravy was our contribution), sweet potatoes, green beans with almonds, rice pilaf, succotash, nut patties, cucumber salad, cranberry sauce and rolls—out came the pies—pumpkin, apple, and pecan. I failed to take any of the advice I’ve been dishing out recently in ghostwritten blog posts about eating moderately at Thanksgiving. I had seconds on mashed potatoes. I sampled all three kinds of pies, and I don’t believe they were low-sugar versions. Everything was delicious.

After the adults had conversed and told stories and laughed a while and the three girls watched part of Swiss Family Robinson, Lily, who’s just started playing violin, gave a little concert in a side room. I knew she was going to play and intended to go watch, but I thought she was just warming up in there and would come out to the living room to play for a bigger audience, so I missed it. Then I heard June playing. I knew it was June because it was Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which she goes around singing every day and has recently figured out how to play by ear. I got there just as she was finishing.

Soon after it was time to go back to the hotel room. It’s nice not having the youngest kid at a family gathering because it’s easier to leave when you can use someone else’s departure to segue into your own. And by the time Lily and Tessa’s family left, June was leaning against me and saying she wanted to go to bed.

In retrospect we should have recognized that as a sign of an incipient migraine and not lingered for another five minutes as we did. June was quiet on the ride back to the hotel but when Beth pulled up into the lot, she started crying and saying she had an upset stomach. She seemed in quite a bad way all of a sudden and I asked if she’d like to go straight to the restrooms off the lobby, but she wanted to go up to our fifth floor room. She almost made it, too, but she was sick in the hallway about halfway between the elevator and our door.

Then we were busy calling the front desk and washing her face and Beth’s jacket June had had draped around herself in the car and her sweater and tights and my shoes (her dress was miraculously spared), and changing her into pajamas and making up the foldout couch for her and looking for children’s painkiller, because the headache had come now. Once she was in bed, she fell asleep almost immediately and slept all night. I made sure the menagerie of stuffed animals she’d brought with her was at a slight distance from her, but it turned out to be an unnecessary precaution.

(Not So Black) Friday

She woke the next morning recovered, early (about 5:30), and hungry, as she effectively hadn’t eaten dinner. I heard her walking around the room, but she eventually went back to bed and stayed there until 6:20, at which point I gave her a Clementine and Beth offered to take her down to breakfast. Noah and I followed once he was dressed.

As the weekend was going to be something of a busman’s holiday for both Beth and Noah, the plan for the morning was for them to work in the room while I took June to the pool. Beth was still working on the project from the previous weekend. There had been some registration glitches on a rather large scale in a union election and she was directing efforts to sort it all out and make sure everyone who was eligible could vote. Noah was working on a paper and PowerPoint about El Greco.

I started off reading Daniel Deronda in a lounge chair by the pool and then swam sixty or sixty-five laps in the tiny pool. It was so small it was hard to keep track. I was mostly pushing off the side and turning around, but it felt good to be moving through the water. Afterward, I sat in the hot tub and went back to the chairs to read some more. YaYa came to watch June swim and the three of us were there for a good chunk of the morning, almost two and half hours.

We had lunch at Panera and then YaYa took the kids to see the Peanuts movie. Noah wanted to go but was undecided because he’d spent the morning researching El Greco, but he only had a half a slide to show for it. We convinced him to take a break and go.

Beth and I repaired to the hotel room. She had to work and I read some more Daniel Deronda and we shared some orange-cranberry dark chocolate I had been saving for after Thanksgiving. It was quite a pleasant day for an introvert the day after a big family gathering, plus I was starting to believe I’d actually finish Daniel Deronda by the last book club meeting on it the following Wednesday. (I did, too, with a day to spare.)

Dinner was pizza at YaYa’s. Afterward June played her entire repertoire of orchestra songs, which took about ten minutes. Then YaYa thought June might like to hear some David Garrett and June thought YaYa might like to see a video by her own favorite pop violinist Linsdey Stirling. I find this video somewhat less disturbing than I did the first time I saw it, now that I know how it ends. We left June at YaYa’s for a sleepover and headed back to the hotel.

Saturday

Saturday morning Beth and Noah continued to work while June and YaYa entertained each other at her house. They made bird’s nest cookies, then went over to Sue’s house where Lily and June played a duet of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which was duly videotaped and sent to us.

We met YaYa for lunch at a crepes place and visited the talking Christmas tree of Beth’s youth, though she wasn’t conversing with passersby until the first week of December. Still, Beth said, it “warmed [her] heart” to see her.

Beth and June went skating after lunch and then over to Carole’s while Noah and I stayed at the hotel. He’d switched to a Citizen Kane paper since it was due sooner. This was slow going, too, and he didn’t want any help, so I was starting to wish I’d gone to Carole’s as I was now feeling a little cooped up and ready to socialize, but I wanted to stay near Noah, just in case. I knew it was going to be challenging day for him as he had a lot of work and not much mental speed. He’s not on his new medication yet as we’re having some insurance trouble with it. I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I hope so.

At breakfast I’d asked Beth for advice about how not to be dragged down by Noah’s situation myself and she suggested, “Pretend to be a different person.” Later she told me this was how she got through the last couple weeks at work, so I think it was sincere advice. That’s a hard thing to do, though and I had mixed success at best.

Just before five when Noah had finished the first section and it was a half page too long, he asked for suggestions for cuts and I gave some. Just around the time he finished editing that section, Beth and June came to pick us up and take us to drive through the light display at Oglebay Park. We do this every year, either during Thanksgiving weekend or around Christmas. The kids enjoy seeing their favorite displays and someone always points out the one that says “JOY” and says, “Look, it says ‘June’” because when she was two she thought every word that started with J was her name and wouldn’t hear otherwise.

We were playing Christmas music for the first time this season, and as I listened to all the songs about peace on earth, the kids were squabbling in the back seat, about various things, but mostly about the light tunnels. When Beth was a kid she and her brother used to try to hold their breath in tunnels and now the kids like to do it, too. But the first two tunnels are long and traffic was slow and I thought they’d pass out if they tried to hold their breath through them, so I advised against it. Noah tried anyway, without success, but June declined. A long argument about whether or not this constituted her “forfeiting” and him “winning” ensued and was repeated at the next tunnel. At this one, Noah tried again and June started breathing loudly to taunt him. I asked her why she was doing it and she said, “Because I like to.”

By the time we got to the third tunnel, the snowflake one, traffic was lighter and this is the shortest one, so they both tried, and succeeded in holding their breath the whole time. I was surprised they did not seem to be exhaling even after we were out of the tunnel. They were playing chicken, as it turns out. June breathed first, Noah was a little too exuberant in saying he won, and June, who was worn out, got teary, but she recovered as soon as she saw the Twelve Days of Christmas display. Or maybe it was Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. She likes that one, too.

After the lights, we returned to YaYa’s house for a dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers that had migrated over from Sue’s house. Then we watched another Peanuts Thanksgiving special—the one in which they are characters on the Mayflower. Have you ever seen it? It was made in the 80s, past my time, but it came bundled with the older one, so now we watch it, too. We left Noah at YaYa’s for his sleepover (which June noted with satisfaction would be shorter than hers) and went back to the hotel, where June crashed.

Sunday

The next morning, Beth worked some more, while I read a couple chapters of The Magician’s Nephew to June and then we went to collect Noah at YaYa’s house, say our goodbyes, and hit the road.

As we drove, fog wreathed around the bare branches of the trees and nestled in the clefts of the hills. At higher elevations we were driving right through it. Sometimes we could only see a car or two ahead of us and the headlights of the oncoming cars. But Beth steered us safely home.

“How was your weekend?” I asked Beth, early in drive.

“It was fine,” she said. “I wish I didn’t have to work on this assignment.”

“I wish you and Noah were both more free,” I said. But it was a good visit nonetheless. We got to see family, swim, skate, and visit familiar holiday sights in the form of a tree with a human face and lights spelling “Joy.” It was a fine Thanksgiving.

Monday

And then on Monday afternoon, as I was settling into a seat at Starbucks with an eggnog latte and a Cranberry Bliss bar, my phone beeped and I saw the following message from Beth: “Contract passed, huge yes vote. My work was worth it. Very happy and very tired.”

The Ocean Life’s For Me

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Steph

The Week Before the Beach

The week before we went to the beach, Noah was in West Virginia visiting with Beth’s mom. June’s last day of school was on Monday and it was a half-day. I parlayed that into a full day of work by sending her home with a friend and then the next morning I sent her to another friend’s house and in that day and half I did most of my work for the week. June and I had a fun day Wednesday—we took a friend of hers to see Annie at the theater than plays second run movies for a dollar a couple mornings a week during the summer. Afterward the girls played in the Silver Spring fountain until Evie’s mom picked her up and June and I had lunch at Austin Grille. At home we read in the twin hammocks in our back yard, I mowed the lawn, and made chocolate chip cookies for homemade chipwiches. I worked a little on Thursday and Friday. June had a friend over—it was her fifth play date in four days—and we packed for the beach.

Getting to the Beach: Friday and Saturday

Late Friday afternoon Beth’s mom and Noah arrived in Silver Spring, where YaYa would stay in a hotel overnight before we drove to Rehoboth. We all had a pizza dinner at zPizza and then we left June to stay the night with her and we took Noah home. They swam in the hotel pool that evening and visited a flea market in the morning while we finished packing. At the market, YaYa bought June a teddy bear made of multicolored yarn there she named Tie-Dye, or Ty for short. We met up with them at the hotel and hit the road around eleven.

We made great time, arriving at the realty around three, even with a long stop for lunch. When we got inside the house, Noah exclaimed, “This is a cool house. This is an awesome house!” It was certainly the biggest house we’ve ever had—it had six bedrooms so no one but Beth and me had to share and it featured a mix of wood-paneled and airier rooms, a retro-looking kitchen painted aqua, plus a screened porch that wrapped part way around the side of the house. And it was only a half block from the beach.

Mom and Sara arrived around 4:30—Mom had another teddy bear for June, this one from her recent trip to Europe—and our party was complete. While Beth went on a grocery run and the kids got to work on the script of a movie they were planning to film, Mom, Sara, and I took a short walk down to the beach and then we came home and collaborated on a quick dinner—scrambled eggs with asparagus they bought at a farm stand on the drive, vegetarian bacon, and toast with orange-pineapple-apricot-peach jam from the same stand.

Sunday: First Day at the Beach, First Day of Summer

I woke around six to the sound of rain on the windowpanes. I stayed in bed dozing until around seven and then I got up and had breakfast with June on the screened porch. I was getting ready for a rainy walk on the beach when the sun came out so I left the raincoat I was borrowing from Beth at home and put on sunblock instead. The kids were working on their movie again and the rest of the adults were all either still getting up or eating breakfast.

I spread a towel on the sand. The sky had cleared considerably—it was bright blue with big puffy white clouds scuttling across it. The sea was silver and sparkly and full of leaping dolphins, some quite close to shore. I stayed about an hour and a half, leaving around eleven to avoid most of the mid-day sun.

At the house I read to the kids for a long time—over an hour each. June and I finished The Letter, The Witch and The Ring and started The Hobbit. Noah and I finished Crystal Keepers, which we’ve been reading slowly—sometimes just a few chapters a week—since his birthday in early May. While I was reading to Noah, Mom took June to Candy Kitchen and to Funland, where over the course of the week June won countless stuffed animals and both kids won tails you can clip to your pants.

About 3:30, I headed back to the beach, leaving Sara and Beth to work at the house. Sara’s whole vacation was a busman’s holiday, but Beth didn’t work much after Sunday. I was glad of that, as she often works through vacation.

The day was now sunny and hot. I got a cherry snow cone at the snack bar on the trail down to the beach. We’ve never stayed on this stretch of beach before, but I’d explored this trail from the beach side during an off-season beach trip and I’d wondered if the little hut sold food in the summer, so I was happy to see it did. I’d tried to bribe Noah into coming to the beach with me by offering frozen treats but he preferred to stay in his room with the blinds shut. YaYa, who had just spent a week with him, had taken to calling him the Prince of Darkness, because of similar behavior at her house.

I thought the idea of a secret little store, not visible from either the beach or the road, would appeal to June but she was so focused on her goals of getting someone to take her to 1) Funland, 2) Candy Kitchen, and 3) Jungle Jim’s water park that my description barely registered with her. Nonetheless, it reminded me of one of the years we stayed in The Pines and we discovered a grassy path that ran between the backyards of houses down the length of two blocks. We’ve been coming to Rehoboth for twenty-five summers now but I still love finding its hidden places.

While June was off accomplishing goals #1 and 2, I got a voicemail from my mom, asking if June could go on the Sea Dragon, one of those swinging Viking ship rides. She loves those but she’d never been tall enough until this year. I said yes but advised my mother to skip it.

The snow cone was bigger than I expected and I ate it in small bites to avoid brain freeze, so it was after four by the time I got in the water. It was early in the season so the water was cold—68 degrees, a 22-degree drop from the air temperature, so it was hard to get in, but once I was acclimated it was perfect—everything was perfect, the warmth of the air, the cool water, the pellucid light, the gulls wheeling overhead. The angle of the sun turned the sea spray from wave after wave into rainbows. I must have seen dozens of them. The waves were promising, big and breaking just where I like them. Then I jumped into the perfect one—it swept me up and into its inward curve and I flew over the top and dropped down to the water behind it, which is my very favorite thing to do with a wave. When it’s just right I swear I hang in the air for a moment before I drop, like Wiley E. Coyote, but without any injury resulting from the fall. Sometimes a whole beach week goes by without a wave like that.

That evening Beth and I took a walk to the beach and watched the sun set on the longest day of the year.

Monday

Monday started early because the alarm on my phone went off at 5:45. Noah had set it to go off Mondays to Wednesdays two weeks earlier when Beth was on a business trip to Detroit and I was getting him off to school. Since I usually leave it in its charger in the study overnight apparently I hadn’t noticed it going off in the interim. Neither Beth nor I really got back to sleep and the kids slept in that day, so we were eating breakfast together at 7:15 before anyone else in the house was awake.

Later in the morning we went on a series of errands together. We got coffee and visited Browse-About books where we picked up Into the Wild, part of Noah’s required summer reading (or so we thought—he’s actually supposed to read Into Thin Air—Beth exchanged the book later in the week). I looked for my book club’s next book—Cloudstreet and Sara wanted some books on toxins for work, but they didn’t have any of them. We also visited the olive oil store, or tried to; it was closed. Lastly, we rented a bike for me and one for Sara (Beth had brought her own bike) and we rode them home. I’d been telling Beth I wanted to get back into the habit of going on dates and while it wasn’t the most romantic outing, we were alone for a couple hours, so I think it qualified.

Back at the house, we ate lunch and then I started dinner because it was my night to cook and I wanted to go back to the beach in the late afternoon. I enlisted Noah’s somewhat reluctant help to trim and chop green beans and June’s enthusiastic help to shuck corn.

I made it down to the beach by 3:30 and around 4:30 Mom, Sara, and the kids joined me. The ocean was very calm so I thought it was a good opportunity to get the kids to venture deeper into the water than they usually go. June agreed to try it when I offered to hold her on my hip. The water made her buoyant enough for this to be a feasible plan. Sara and I passed her back and forth a couple times and then she said, “Let me go” and she was swimming in ocean water over her head for the first time ever. She’d tread water for a while and then she’d hang onto me again and back and forth. When I got out of the water, she stayed in, not as deep, but deeper than she normally would. When it was time to leave the beach, she didn’t want to go and the promise of frozen custard on the boardwalk after dinner lessened but didn’t eliminate her disappointment.

Tuesday

June was eager to go back to the beach the next day but she had to wait until mid-afternoon because she had a full day planned. In the morning she went on an early morning bike ride with Beth. I met them at Café a Go-Go for coffee, juice, and cake and then we all rode our bikes home.

It was a hot day—it had reached 90 degrees by 9:20, according to the thermometer on Rehoboth Avenue and I was trying to be responsible about the sun, so I stayed in the house, reading to both kids, hanging out with Sara and Mom, and doing laundry.

By 2:30, though, June and I were at the beach. We got snacks—potato chips for her and cherry water ice for me—at the snack hut. I settled on the towel to eat my water ice while June splashed in the shallow water. If I’d realized it would be the only rest I’d have for almost two and half hours, I might have savored it more.

The waves were a little rougher than the day before, at least at first, so when I came into the water, June did more clinging to me than swimming. But the water calmed a little and she got a little more daring and soon she was swimming again. I suggested she try diving under the waves because it’s really something you need to do when you swim in deeper water, but she said no and I said okay. Then about an hour later, without warning, she dove under a wave. I applauded and she looked surprised at herself and said, “It’s that simple?” I said it was and that now she had more choices for each wave—dive under it, jump up into it, or ride it toward the shore. She did all three repeatedly.

We were in the water until just before five without a break. I ended up mildly sunburned on my shoulders because we didn’t even get out long enough to re-apply our sunblock. She was so excited and pleased with herself that it was almost—but not quite—anticlimactic when I took the kids to the Haunted Mansion at Funland that evening and June kept her eyes open for the whole ride for the first time.

When we came home, Sara was eager to show us two short videos she’d just received of her soon-to-be adopted two-year-old daughter playing on a playground in China. I can’t wait to see Lily-Mei splash in the ocean and rides the kiddie rides at Funland.

Wednesday

In the morning the whole crew—all seven of us—took at walk on the Gordon’s Pond trail in Cape Henlopen State Park. As you might guess from the name, the trail goes around a marshy pond and you can see all kinds of water birds. We saw gulls, snowy egrets, great egrets and red-winged blackbirds. There’s a wooden platform that gives you a good view of the pond and there was a nice breeze, too, so we stayed there a long time.

The kids had considered filming part of their movie in the park (it’s the same park where they made a movie about a haunted watch tower during Noah’s twelfth birthday weekend) but artistic differences scuttled filming that day and in the heat of their arguing Noah almost didn’t come. But somehow the outing was salvaged and everyone seemed to have a good time once we got there. There had been a thunderstorm the night before so it was cooler than the day before, a beautiful morning really. The only sour note was when a man sped by us on his bike, yelling, “Get out of the way, ladies,” and knocked my mother’s walking sticks out of her hands. I guess there were no orphans or kittens for him to hit that day, so he had to settle for a senior citizen with bad hips.

Beth took the kids to Jungle Jim’s later that morning, where they had fun going down water slides and playing bumper boats. Beth and Noah came back slightly sunburned, though, and June had a really painful burn on her shoulders. We applied copious aloe, but that night she had to sleep in pajama bottoms only because she couldn’t tolerate her top. (We’ve been home several days now and it’s peeling, which is a new experience for her.)

While Beth and the kids were gone, I had some solo time on the beach and then Sara joined me at the end. I went in the water a few times, but mostly I read because I hadn’t had much time for that.

Mom and Sara made a lentil-sweet potato soup for dinner and afterward I read the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit to June while YaYa and Noah went out for frozen custard and to Candy Kitchen. After June went to bed and YaYa and Noah returned, I read Inkheart to Noah until bedtime. Beth and Sara made their own Candy Kitchen run while we read so after Noah went to bed, I sampled the chocolate-peanut butter and the chocolate-cheesecake fudge.

Thursday

In the morning Beth and Sara took a bike ride and when they came home Sara made almond flour pancakes, her specialty. Since we were all gathered together, we watched some movies the kids made—a mystery called Clara Green and the Missing Diamond and some of Noah’s school documentaries, the F-CON project on banking crises of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the one they shot in in New York City last fall about a Grammy and Tony-winning composer.

We split off into different directions for lunch. Beth and YaYa had lunch with a family friend who lives in Rehoboth. Mom and I had lunch at a boardwalk restaurant and the kids took their first-ever sans adults trip to the boardwalk, where they had pizza and ice cream. (Mom and I actually crossed paths with them and they both looked pleased to be out and about on their own.)

After lunch the kids filmed a couple scenes for their movie after I helped them negotiate some of their differences and get back on track. In the late afternoon, June and I went to the beach and Mom and Sara joined us. June delighted in showing them her new ocean swimming prowess and they were suitably impressed. She couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder to make sure they were still watching.

For dinner Beth made her signature beach week meal—gazpacho, salt-crusted potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, and Manchego cheese with bread. Then we all took a walk on the boardwalk and got ice cream. We stopped at the kite shop on the way home and June picked out a ladybug kite.

Friday: Court Ruling

Beth, YaYa, the kids and I went out for breakfast at Noah’s favorite place to get crepes, which has now moved from a prime spot on Rehoboth Ave to an office park in Lewes. This makes it less attractive to me, but I went anyway, to be a good sport and because the crepes are pretty good. Beth checked her phone while we were all getting buckled into the car to go back home and that’s when we discovered the Supreme Court had ruled and gay marriage was now legal in the whole country.

“Yah!” June said.

“Great,” Noah said.

“Do you know the good thing about having two moms?” June asked and when we asked what, she said, “I know more about marriage laws than most kids my age.”

I spent more time on Facebook that day than I probably should have on our last full day at the beach—I didn’t get to the beach until after three, but everyone was so joyful, I couldn’t help it. Beth posted a picture of the guesthouse where I proposed to her in 1991. We’ve had a lot of important family moments in this town—from my proposal, to Noah’s first steps in a rental house just next door that guesthouse in 2002 to buying our wedding rings shortly after Maryland legalized gay marriage in 2012. It seemed fitting we should be in Rehoboth when we learned that couples in the last holdout states across the South and Midwest could now start shopping for their own rings.

In addition to reading Facebook, I also needed to act in Noah and June’s movie, which they ended up managing to film in two days, after having worked out the script earlier in the week. Everyone in the house had a part. YaYa and I were ghosts. We dressed in white clothes (I wore Beth’s bathrobe) and whitened our faces with zinc oxide. The play is about a woman, played by June, who receives a mysterious note from her ancestors and then travels across the sea to free their spirits, only to have them attack her before she wakes and finds it is all a dream. During the sailing song—filmed in a wood-paneled room that resembles a ship’s cabin—the sailor and her crew (Beth and Sara) sing an original song called “The Ocean Life’s For Me” and there’s a dance, too.

After filming was finished, Beth, YaYa, June and I went to the beach. They flew the ladybug kite and then June wanted to show off her ocean swimming for them, but the water was much rougher than it had been earlier in the week and she couldn’t do it, so she settled for doing cartwheels in the shallow water. I’d had a fun, if challenging swim right before they arrived, with wave after perfect wave and more rainbows in the sea spray. Call it the pathetic fallacy if you will, but nature seemed to be celebrating, too.

Beth, YaYa, the kids and I had pizza and gelato for dinner and then we made a final trip to Candy Kitchen. At home Noah finished editing the movie. He’d wanted to challenge himself to finish editing it while still at the beach and he succeeded. All the adults watched it before bed, as soon as Sara got back from a sunset bike ride in Cape Henlopen State Park. Everyone was impressed with June’s song writing and with the technical effects Noah used, especially how he made the ghost semi-transparent.

Saturday

In the morning, we packed up the house and said our goodbyes to Mom, Sara, and YaYa. Beth, the kids and I stayed in Rehoboth for a few hours. It was cold, drizzly, and windy, so I sheltered in a boardwalk gazebo for a while. I didn’t want to go in the water too soon and get chilled in my wet suit. I finally got in the water around 11:15, after checking with a lifeguard to make sure it was allowed because the surf was high and no one else was swimming. I soon found out why. The waves were big—scary big—and really close together. I only lasted five minutes before giving up and getting out. I was getting pulled close to a jetty and I was afraid I might not be able to get out before without drifting too close to it, but I did.

We had more crepes and orangeade for lunch at an outdoor stand in town—the rain had stopped but we would have eaten there even if it hadn’t because Noah insisted, pointing out there are umbrellas on the tables—and then went back to the boardwalk for fries and to say goodbye to the ocean. I was still cheerful from the marriage decision and not too melancholy about leaving. We’ll be back in November or December and our families will be back some time in the next couple years, and when they do, there will be a new cousin to share the ocean life with us.

Southland in the Springtime: Part I, Ashville, NC

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Steph

We just got back from a very fun spring break road trip. We spent the first leg with Beth’s mom in Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives part of the year now.

Five hours into our drive, around three in the afternoon and near Roanoke, Virginia, Beth said, “It’s greener here.” It was. There was light green, gold, and dark pink fuzz on the branches, all of which were bare at home. I thought once we reached Asheville the altitude might cancel out the effect of a day’s drive southwest but it didn’t. Lawns were green, flowering trees were blossoming, and daffodils were in bloom, with some already finished. Over the course of nine and a half hours and four states (Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina), we’d driven into spring.

The drive would have been about twenty minutes shorter but we went to a different street by the same name (Way instead of Court), which as it turns out is a very similar looking cul-de-sac in an entirely different neighborhood. The residents of the house drove up as we were standing on their porch and an elderly man said, “Can I help you?” which I think is Southern for “What the hell are you doing on my porch?” Eventually we found the right house, where Beth’s mom, Ron, and a homemade spinach lasagna awaited us. It was warm enough that evening to eat ice cream on the screened porch.

Saturday we explored the city. We took a trolley tour through its beautiful Victorian neighborhoods, downtown area, and arts district. We learned a lot about Asheville and its famous residents, particularly the Vanderbilts and Thomas Wolfe.

After that we had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, with a lot of plants, a sheet of glass with water coursing down it and skylights. I got barbequed tofu with cole slaw—all the barbeque joints the tour leader pointed out put me in the mood—and a spicy carrot-apple-ginger drink. I was glad to have something zippy because I was stuffy from a cold the four of us had been passing back and forth for weeks. (It was my second time around with it.)

From the restaurant we proceeded to the establishment that most intrigued Beth on the trolley tour—The French Broad Chocolate Lounge. Noah was hoping for couches made of chocolate, but instead there was an extensive selection of chocolate in solid and liquid forms and a line out the door. There was an employee—a chocolate bouncer if you will—monitoring the line and admitting people in groups. There were tiny chocolate-mole truffles to sample in line. Once inside we ordered drinking chocolate (I recommend the dark chocolate liquid truffle) and various other treats.

Next we moved on to a festival in a nearby park. June spent most of her time climbing up and sliding down inflatable structures. There was also a kids’ karaoke booth that inspired Noah to say, “I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do that,” but June studied the songbook and was seriously considering it before losing her nerve and deciding against it. Many kids performed songs from Frozen, but oddly one chose “Piano Man,” and sang it as if she’d never heard it before, which might have been exactly what was happening. June got her picture taken with the Easter Bunny and we went home, where we dyed Easter eggs and I had a short but deep nap.

We’d had such a big and late lunch no one but the kids even wanted dinner so they had leftover lasagna. Noah finished a take-home geometry test and then he and I read a Douglass Adams short story, “Young Zaphod Plays it Safe,” that comes between books four and five in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

Easter morning after the kids found their baskets, we had a cinnamon roll-French toast casserole Ron made and then we went to church. YaYa had asked me to bring some half-opened cut daffodils from our yard for the flower ceremony, which is a Unitarian tradition. Members of the congregation bring flowers to make an eclectic communal bouquet and then at the end everyone takes different flowers home. There was a lot of music at the service and people lit candles to symbolize their joys, concerns, and sorrows. The children had an Easter egg hunt during the sermon. As we left we collected flowers, leaving with more daffodils, a tulip, a sprig of grape hyacinth, and a yellow, spiky flower I couldn’t identify.

After church we went shopping for provisions and then had a picnic and a hike to a waterfall in Pisgah National Forest. It was a pretty walk, but the trees were a bit more bare than in downtown Asheville. The fall wasn’t a steady stream of water, more like a heavy rain falling from a high rock into a creek. The kids and I went behind the water where we climbed rocks, observed the multi-colored cliff wall, and got good and muddy.

On the way out of the forest we stopped to see Sliding Rock, a natural waterslide Beth and I slid down during road trip through the Southeast we took in our mid-twenties. When YaYa and the kids saw it, the older and younger generations had a similar reaction, “You went down that?” We used to be interesting, apparently. June said she wanted to try it some day, until she learned the pool where you land is eight feet deep.

We came home and June had a bath in YaYa’s whirlpool before we went out to dinner at a Jamaican restaurant. I had jerk tofu with grilled pineapple and vegetables. Asheville is known as a foodie town for good reason.

Monday we visited the Biltmore, a mansion belonging to the Vanderbilts and the largest private residence in the U.S. It did make Hillwood, a D.C. mansion June and I toured two weeks previous, look downright modest, though as far as I know, the Vanderbilts had no Fabergé eggs. What they did have was a 250-room Gothic style house with 99 bedrooms, lovely mountain views, a swimming pool, and a bowling alley on 125,000 acres of woods and farmland. There weren’t as many formal gardens as I expected but we did see a very nice area planted with tulips.

We had lunch in a restaurant located in the converted stables and visited a few of the numberless gift shops on the property before going back YaYa’s house. Noah, who had been feeling under the weather, had stayed home. We collected him and Ron and headed out for an early pizza dinner, stopping at Barnes and Noble to look for my book club’s next book (Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones). They didn’t have it, but June found a graphic novel her friends had recommended and spent most of dinner reading it. (By breakfast the next day she’d finished it and she risked carsickness re-reading it much of the next day.)

Beth had a work crisis that evening and had to work a little, but afterwards she and I went back to the chocolate lounge, which I think is her new favorite place. We bought chocolate bars and toffee for later and more liquid truffles (I tried the milk chocolate one this time, also very good). Then we came home and ate the cake Ron had made earlier in the day. It was triple layer Italian cream cake with jelly beans and chocolate shavings on the frosting.

Tuesday morning we packed to leave. June gave a farewell violin concert under the tree in the front yard she’d climbed many times and we said our fond goodbyes and hit the road by 9:15 en route for the beach.

Stay tuned for more spring break adventures.

A Merry Little Christmas

Posted on January 1, 2015 by Steph

Christmas Eve

We spent Christmas at home again for the second year in a row. The kids’ first day off school was Christmas Eve, so after dentist appointments for both of them, we had lunch at Maggiano’s, a cavernous and ornately decorated Italian restaurant in the city. Then we went to see It’s a Wonderful Life at AFI. Though I didn’t have an opinion beforehand, afterward I wished we’d seen Miracle on 34^th Street instead because it would have been easier to for June to follow. Nonetheless, everyone did enjoy the film. Beth and I used to watch It’s a Wonderful Life every year for a stretch from our mid-twenties to our early thirties and possibly not since then. I find it reads differently, more darkly and also more richly, when you’ve reached middle age yourself.

If it had been up to me, we would have just eaten our ample lunch leftovers for dinner and skipped cooking because I had a lot of wrapping and other last minute Christmas chores, but June had specifically requested chili, cornbread, and homemade applesauce for Christmas Eve dinner and she wanted to stick with that plan, so we did. After dinner we watched Christmas is Here Again, put June to bed, and I got to work.

Christmas

The kids were awake and whispering well before six, when they were allowed to get out of bed and open their stockings. When Beth asked June later what she’d been thinking about while she waited, she said she wondered what Santa had written in his thank you note for the gingerbread cookie and carrot we left him, so I was glad I’d remembered to ask Beth to write one while I wrapped presents and stuffed stockings.

Beth and I rolled out of bed at 6:45 and we commenced the present opening, without making the kids wait for us to eat breakfast, though I did make some peppermint tea for myself. June had proposed a new method of opening gifts. In my family everyone opens gifts one at a time, in a youngest-to-oldest rotation, but Beth’s family has everyone opening gifts at the same time. Having only done Christmas as a foursome once before, we have no set protocol. June wanted to take turns but to have everyone open all of his or her gifts in one turn. Beth tested June’s dedication to this idea by asking if she’d be willing to do it oldest to youngest and to everyone’s surprise she said yes, so we did it that way. (She must have really wanted to do this because she also let Noah have his choice of Christmas special on Christmas Eve, as a bargaining chip.) I think it might have taken as long to negotiate how we were going to open the gifts—over the course of a couple days—as to actually open them.

I won’t list all the gifts, but there were many books all around and gift certificates. Fancy teas and sweets were also popular. Noah got a pasta machine, a game, new lined Crocs, and a microphone. June got ice skates, a basketball, a doll dress-making kit, a set of CDs with stories about classical composers, and dog and sled set for her American Girl doll. After opening presents, June and I made cranberry-chocolate chip-walnut pancakes from a new cookbook she ordered from Scholastic.

I’d gotten Beth a mix for cheese dip and she wanted to make it for lunch but we didn’t have any cream cheese so I asked if anyone wanted to go for a walk and when no one did (I was pretty sure of this outcome ahead of time), I walked to the grocery store to get some to surprise her. It was pleasant to be outside on a secret errand, listening to Christmas music on my iPod.

I spent a good bit of the afternoon reading to both kids—The Long Winter to June and The Rogue Knight (a Christmas book) to Noah. Then it was time to make Christmas dinner. We had another tofu roast because June liked the one we had at Thanksgiving so well, plus stuffing, sweet potatoes, creamed kale, cranberry sauce, sparkling cranberry-apple juice, and Dutch apple pie—purchased from a fifth grader at June’s bus stop for their class trip fundraiser. (June will be in fifth grade before you know it and what goes around comes around.)

It was an enjoyable day, but it felt too short. I’d hoped to take a nap, or to have a long soak in the bath, or to read one of my Christmas books. It would be three days after Christmas before I even opened one, but then over the course of three days I read all of Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, and it was worth the wait.

Boxing Day to New Year’s Eve

The day after Christmas we drove to Wheeling for a five-day visit with Beth’s mom and extended family. We stayed at a hotel but June spent the first two nights of our stay at YaYa’s house (she made her breakfast in bed one morning) and Noah spent the next two, so they each got some one-one-one grandmother time.

There were two family gatherings—one night Beth’s cousin Sean made Indian curries for a crowd (June played “Jingle Bells” for everyone that night and we contributed homemade gingerbread cookies) and another night Beth’s mom made spinach lasagna. Beth took June skating and I took her swimming in the hotel pool three times (once for almost two hours). We went to the playground and YaYa took June to church and to see Annie at a theater and watched Maleficent with her at home. Beth and the kids played Noah’s new game and the kids bought books at a local bookstore with gift certificates they got from Beth’s aunt Carole. I spent a lot of time the first couple days we were in Wheeling working on an outside (i.e. not for my sister) editing job, but once that was finished I had more time to read and relax. Noah also worked, doing long packets in preparation for upcoming county exams in geometry and Spanish.

One morning a friend of Beth’s mom took us on a tour of the Victorian mansion-turned-retirement home where she lives so we could see all the Christmas trees and decorations. There were at least a dozen trees, all with different themes. YaYa liked the snowman tree best. It had a snowman head for a topper, mittens coming out of the sides, snowman decorations, and two oversized boots underneath. June liked the angel tree and Noah liked the candy cane tree. (We got samples there.) It’s a really lovely facility, but one odd effect of the tour was that when I read a story in the Atwood collection that takes place in an upscale retirement home, of course I was picturing it taking place there, and as something truly awful happens in the story, that was a bit disturbing.

We also drove through the light display at Oglebay Park. Our old favorites—the candy cane wreath, the twelve days of Christmas, and the jumping horse were there of course, but there were also new displays-one of the tunnels had multi-colored lights that crawled across it and some of the huge evergreens had new lights—blue streaking ones and pretty white and gold ones. When we passed the lights that spell “Joy,” I said, “Look! It says ‘June.’” This is a family joke based on the time June was two and thought every word that started with J was her name, including this very light display.

Noah, who’d had a bad headache in the afternoon and taken a two hour, forty-minute nap, was quiet on the drive, not reading the brochure and playing tour guide as he usually does. Toward the end, he started to feel poorly again. We went back to YaYa’s house and he ate a banana and crawled back to bed. The rest of us ate leftover lasagna and then June and I went up to the bedroom where Noah was resting and I read an Edgar and Ellen book to both of them so he’d have some company.

I’d been reading about a lot of friends and kids of friends who’ve had the flu lately on Facebook, and Beth wasn’t feeling so hot either so I feared the worst, but the next day Noah seemed recovered and Beth, while tired and queasy, at least wasn’t violently ill. This was our last day in Wheeling and it was more low-key than the rest. We mostly hung around YaYa’s house.

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day

We drove home the next day, arriving home around 4:30 on New Year’s Eve. We unpacked, did laundry, ate the Christmas Eve lunch leftovers I’d frozen and had a quiet evening at home, unless you count the noise of bickering kids who’ve been so well behaved at their grandmother’s they had a lot of pent-up arguing to do. Everyone was in bed by 9:45.

On New Year’s Day I had coffee with a friend from my grad school/adjunct days. Joyce lives and teaches in Indiana now but her parents live in the area so I often get to see her at Christmastime. We talked about work, kids, and marriage, and I was surprised to see when we checked the time that we’d been talking for two and a half hours. That’s how it is with good friends. It was a lovely way to ring in the New Year.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog in 2014, and Happy New Year!

Not Every Sunday, Not Every Monday

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Steph

Friday & Saturday

A friend of mine posted on Facebook recently that she was down and wanted to some suggestions for what people do to feel better. A lot of people, including me, suggested getting outside. I thought of this on Sunday, when I spent most of the afternoon outside. I needed it, as I’ve also been down for a while. Part of it was having a mild cold and part of it was missing Noah while he was away in New York for a week on a school trip, although even together neither of those factors really accounted for the depth my funk. I did notice after the fact that while he was away that I used a lot “dis” words in my Facebook status updates—“discombobulated,” “disquieting,” “disrupted.”

But then he came home and we were all very happy to see him. We went out for celebratory pizza at gelato at Mama Lucia’s Friday night, and he and June spent part of Saturday afternoon and evening working on a movie they’ve been making together and digging into the big box of Pop Rocks he bought at FAO Schwartz. The Supreme Court decision that allowed friends of mine to get married in Virginia and Colorado this week was also cheering.

Sunday

Sunday we had a day of family togetherness planned. June’s music school had a booth at a little street fair in the morning and they asked her to come play her violin in front of the booth. She did this once at the farmers’ market last spring (4/12/14) and was happy to do it again. Noah stayed home to finish up some work before our afternoon outings, but Beth and I were there to see her play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Ode to Joy,” and two of her own compositions to a small audience and applause. Afterward we stopped at a crepe truck and had a snack because we were going to have a late lunch.

Next we drove out to Northern Virginia, where we got cider, spaghetti squash, pumpkins and decorative gourds at Potomac Vegetable Farms. The kids and I picked two gourds each. Mine—a little orange and green speckled pumpkin and a white one—are on my desk. The rest are on the porch and the dining room table. Beth said she had “zero decorative gourd needs,” so no gourds for her.

The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park on the Maryland side of Great Falls was our next stop. Last week Beth’s cousin Sean biked from Wheeling to Washington, D.C. and his mother, Beth’s aunt Carole was driving out with Beth’s mom to pick him up and bring him back to Wheeling, so we all agreed to meet up at the park for a picnic. We arrived around the same time as YaYa and Carole, a little before two. Sean was not expected until four, so we had our picnic without him near the canal. As always when members of Beth’s family are together, a lot of food was exchanged. We went home with our leftovers plus a bag of pistachios, some pretzels and three kinds of cookies. YaYa and Carole took with them their leftovers, a jug of cider, and a box of flax seed crackers.

After we ate we took a walk along the towpath and on footbridges and boardwalks over the Potomac River and on an island in the middle of the river. It was good, restorative even, to be walking around outside with family in a beautiful place. The kids had fun, too. They both enjoyed throwing pebbles and acorns into the canal and Noah liked inspecting the locks and June found a sycamore tree that was hollow for at least ten feet up. It reminded me of the hollow tree in one of the Pippi Longstocking books. Unfortunately, Sean got lost on the way to the park and around five we had to leave without having gotten to see him, but it was still a very nice afternoon, and not something we do every Sunday.

Monday

The next day was Columbus Day. I used to love Columbus Day. I always said it was my favorite minor holiday, its celebration of imperialism and genocide notwithstanding. Why? Beth has it off work and the kids don’t have it off school so it gave us a built-in date day every second Monday in October. When June was in preschool, we’d visit Noah’s elementary school because the schools all have Open Houses on this day, which is convenient for so many DC-area parents who work either for the federal government or for non-profits that follow the government’s holiday schedule. But even with June in school only a few hours, we always seemed to have enough time to have lunch out while she was at school and watch a Netflix movie while she napped.

But once June started elementary school, we had two schools to visit and we’d generally go to one in the morning and the other one in the afternoon. It was still pleasant and we still found time to eat lunch out, but it wasn’t quite the luxurious day it had once been.

So all this is to say that it wasn’t as disappointing as it would have been a few years ago when June announced Monday morning that she was sick to her stomach and didn’t want to go to school. I have to admit I did think sadly of the lost opportunity to have lunch alone with Beth before I tried to sort out who would go to which school when.

As a first step, we decided I would go to June’s morning class and Beth would stay home with June. June has math and science in the morning in Spanish and I speak Spanish and Beth doesn’t so that decision was easy enough.

I wanted to see this class, as opposed to June’s afternoon class, for two reasons. One was that since Noah’s been in middle school we always go to visit his Media Production class since it’s consistently his favorite and he has it during sixth period this year. But the more important reason is that June feels intimidated by Señorita Y. Señorita Y has a reputation for being strict, but June usually does fine with strict teachers (and lenient teachers, and all teachers basically). It’s to the point where she won’t turn in forms and she failed to turn in her summer math packet because she was afraid to approach her, and as a result she isn’t eligible to go a party this week for all the kids who finished it and I had to wade through a lot of red tape to order to school pictures on the phone after they’d been taken. I wrote Señorita Y a note and asked her to tell June she can talk to her whenever she needs to, which she did. I’m not sure if this talk will help matters or not, but I wanted to see what her class is like, even without June in it.

The lesson was on multiplication. They were discussing the commutative property when I arrived. Later they used a matrix to figure out 9 x 9 and various kinds of diagrams on the white board and in their notebooks to figure out other problems. They also had plastic tiles to arrange in row and columns. The lesson seemed well thought out and the kids were engaged, but I did see Señorita Y get cross on a few occasions, when a child was too slow to answer or asked a question that had already been asked and answered. She’s not a particularly patient or friendly teacher, but June’s doing well in her class, according to the mid-quarter progress report we received and some teachers (and bosses) are just like that. Learning how to deal with gruff authority might be what June needs to learn from her as much as multiplication strategies. I’m taking a wait-and-see approach before doing anything else about it.

When I came home, June was feeling better and she was ready for lunch. After she ate two bowls of lentil soup, an apple, and a pear, and asked for a cookie, I informed her that if she was well enough for a cookie, she was well enough to go to school for her afternoon class. She went back to her room to listen to a book on tape and to think about this and after the first cassette of Ramona the Pest was over, she decided she would eat the cookie and go to school. I gave it to her, feeling a bit like I was bribing her because it allowed me to go with Beth to Noah’s school, which was what I wanted to do.

We took June to her school and drove to Noah’s. We were going to his sixth and seventh period classes and then taking him home. Driving him, we’d get home a half hour before the school bus and he needed an early start on his homework because he was going to a high school Open House for a math and science magnet that night. I didn’t know whether I was going or not because I didn’t have a babysitter yet and while we leave June alone in the daytime for short periods and both kids alone at night, we don’t yet leave June alone at night.

In Media, the kids discussed how the interviews with their documentary subjects in New York had gone, as it was their first day back in class after the trip. After that, the teacher gave instructions for transcribing the interviews and set them to work writing thank you notes to their chaperones and interview subjects. This was not too exciting to watch and the next period was not much more dynamic.

In science, they are designing green houses, each in a different ecosystem. (Noah’s house is in Antarctica. I imagine heating it will be his biggest challenge.) The project itself sounds interesting but what they actually did in class was go to the computer lab and do research, so there wasn’t much instruction to watch in this class either.

That night Beth and Noah went to the Open House and I stayed home with June, as I had failed to find a last-minute sitter. This is the second time this has happened this month. I really need to find a back up sitter. Anyway, Beth said the session was interesting and informative. Noah didn’t have much to say but I’m hoping after he goes to the humanities magnet session tomorrow he will be able to make some comparisons. We had been leaning against having him apply to any high school magnets because seventh grade was so brutal, but eighth really has been better, at least so far, so we are considering the idea again.

It wasn’t an ideal Columbus Day. I would have liked some alone time with Beth, especially as she’s leaving on a five-day trip Friday morning, and I was sorry to miss the magnet Open House. I’ve missed two of these now and I am feeling out of the loop. But I think I have a better sense of June’s morning class and it’s always nice to see Noah in his school environment, even if the lesson plans were not particularly scintillating. That’s not something I get every Monday either.

So Oregon

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Steph

Sunday-Monday: Westward Ho

About halfway through the third flight of the day June fell asleep. It had been an exhausting day and it was early evening our time so I wasn’t surprised. She woke a few minutes later when the flight attendant came by with the snack cart. She declined the offer of a drink, but again, I thought nothing of it, figuring she was so sleepy that the appeal of snacks and drinks high in the sky had diminished. It wasn’t until she started crying that I put the pieces together. I had just outlined them for a neurologist at Children’s National Medical Center less than a week earlier—falling asleep in the late afternoon, losing her appetite, and unexplained crying. June was getting a migraine.

I took her to the bathroom because she thought she might vomit, but she didn’t and we made our way back to our seats. Another flight attendant offered painkillers, which June didn’t want because they weren’t chewable, and earplugs, which she accepted but did not use, and a bag of ice with a wet paper towel inside. I used it to mop her forehead and I held the airsick bag for her when she did vomit during our descent. It was the first time she’d used one and I have to say she nailed it. It was also the first time June had flown. My mother and stepfather moved to Oregon a year and a half ago and this was our first visit.

For the first two and a half flights June enjoyed flying. “We’re in the clouds! We’re in the clouds!” she exclaimed as we took off, and she enjoyed pointing out the tiny houses, and road and even a miniature football field. She also read and colored in a coloring book provided by the airline. I read The Miserable Mill (book 4 in the Series of Unfortunate Events) to her and she and Beth listened to an audiobook of a Nancy Drew mystery.

My mom and Jim met us at the Medford airport and then Mom had to turn around and go back home because they had forgotten the booster seat. Luckily, Ashland, where they live, is not far from Medford so we relaxed in the lounge, glad to be on the ground, until she returned.

Sara came over for dinner and we got to congratulate her in person on finally being matched with a Chinese toddler girl, after years of trying to adopt first domestically and then from Haiti. Some time next spring or summer she will travel to China and bring home her daughter, who will be two by then.

We ate a lentil-kale stew Mom had made and all fell to bed exhausted, except Noah, who wanted to stay up until his bedtime on West Coast time. We let him because we all had to make the switch sooner or later. The rest of us went to bed about halfway between our bedtimes on EDT and PDT. Sara thoughtfully brought us a bottle of melatonin, which she said might help us sleep longer in the morning.

I’d been fretting for a long time before the trip that June would wake up at three in the morning the first day in Oregon and I would have to keep her quiet for six hours until it was reasonable to expect on-West-Coast-time-and-retired adults to be awake. Well, she slept until almost 4:30, when I had to adjudicate a dispute about bathroom access between both my kids. I thought we’d all be up for the day but I said everyone had to go back to bed and try to sleep and Noah and I actually did sleep. June didn’t and at 5:25, while she was getting herself a bowl of cereal (she’d already had a plate of strawberries), she knocked over a jar in the fridge and Mom and I woke to a loud crash. We both got up to investigate and we had a little pre-dawn chat before Mom went back to bed.

I ate breakfast and read to June on the deck and then took her on a walk around Mom’s neighborhood, looking for a playground Mom had mentioned but we didn’t find it. We did find wild blackberries and Queen Anne’s lace growing by the side of the road and as June had things to pick, she was happy.

Beth and Noah were up by the time we returned so we all headed back out together on a longer walk in search of espresso and Wi-Fi. On the way we enjoyed the mountain view— a lush, green range on one side of the road and an arid one on the other. Apparently, Ashland is at the juncture of two ecosystems. After second breakfast at a café and some computer time for everyone, June and I hit the playground, which Beth had discovered on the way. There were two preschool girls and a mom there. June played with them and within minutes had them all filled in on the plane ride, her migraine and her Kung Fu lessons (the little girls had suggesting playing at martial arts). I simply cannot imagine having June’s social moxie. As we left one of the girls wanted to know if I was the grandmother June was visiting, a detail I include because Noah said I should, and which Beth attributes to the gray hair at my temples, though I want to state for the record she has at least as much gray hair as I do and probably more.

When we got back to the house Mom was up and we spent much of the day walking around Ashland with Sara. We visited Lithia Park and tasted the famed mineral water (salty and with more than a hint of baking soda). You should only try it if you are curious. We saw the duck ponds and walked along a wooded trail. There was a playground with a giant rope climbing structure and it was just what June needed—two playgrounds in one morning after a day cooped up on planes. We had lunch at a restaurant with a nice view of the creek and we visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival gift shop because Mom volunteers there. She said she would buy June “anything [she] wanted.” This turned out to be a deep blue and green princess dress and a white garland-like headdress. Then she had to take June around the store and show her off to all her gift shop friends. Meanwhile, Noah got a rubber duck that looks like Shakespeare with a beak.

In the late afternoon we went to Emigrant Lake, where we split into groups. June wanted to go to the water slide so Beth took her. Noah, Sara, and I swam in the lake and Mom stayed on shore with a book. The lake was only 35% full, due to a drought. Noah noticed the line of buoys that normally mark the swimming area, sitting up on the dried and cracked mud hundreds of yards from the current shoreline. He said we were rebels to cross the line. The lake, even in its reduced state, was pretty, ringed with mountains. Sara swam far out, but I stayed with Noah who enjoyed splashing and plucking small green gelatinous balls (algae perhaps?) from the water and throwing them.

Mom’s sister Peggy, her husband Darryl and their grandson Josiah, who’s just a month and a half younger than June, arrived from Boise in the early evening and our party was complete. We met for dinner at an Italian restaurant. June and Josiah, who are good buddies from the two years he and his mom lived in Brooklyn when we used to see them more frequently, sat together and made plans for later, which included playing Sleeping Queens, a card game Josiah learned from June at a previous family gathering, and he was eager to play again.

The new arrivals were staying at Sara’s house and June wanted to sleep over there, too, which meant Noah and I had some time to read Insurgent before bed. I managed to stay up until my bedtime and even a little past it that night.

Tuesday: Oregon Trail

In the early afternoon the ten of us piled into our vehicles to drive to the Oregon coast where we were spending a few days. June went with Peggy, Darryl, and Josiah and the two kids played Sleeping Queens with the cards spread out on a cooler in between them. We stopped a few times—for forgotten groceries at a health food store, for a late lunch at a picnic table near a river where Sara took a dip and finally at Jedediah Smith State Park in Northern California to see the redwoods and for Sara to try to swim in another river. On exiting the cars, we all scattered. The kids found a big fallen log with alarmingly large slugs on it (not quite as big as a banana slug but bigger than slugs have any right to be). While they were climbing on the log, Mom, Jim, and Sara headed toward the river. The left a helpful sign on the back of the car that said, “River” with an arrow pointing to the right. I went to find them in an attempt to make sure everyone knew where everyone else was. Sara was wading in the river but it was too shallow to swim. As we were all leaving the river, I heard Beth’s and June’s voices coming toward us and I veered in their direction. When I first caught sight of them, Beth was tumbling down a steep incline and then I heard June crying. I ran to them. Apparently they were going down the slope when Berth stopped to put her hand on a signpost to get her balance. But the sign was rotted at the base and it fell right on June. They were both scraped up—Beth worse—but June was more rattled, having taken a wooden post to the head.

After we’d cleaned them both up with Peggy’s first aid kit and checked June for signs of concussion, we drove the rest of the way to the rental house, had a quick dinner of white bean and artichoke sandwiches, and went to bed. Beth and the kids and I were in one room. June slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and Noah had a mat he placed in the closet. He liked being enclosed that way and ended up spending a lot of his free time in the closet, which led to the predictable jokes. (When I explained them to him, he joked that if he was gay, he thought I’d be “pretty understanding” about it, so I took the opportunity to say I would, but it would be fine with me if he was straight, too.)

The house was painted bright colors and was what Noah and I (independently of each other) called “very decorated.” There were a lot of wooden figures—on shelves and hanging from the walls—stars, animals, and mythical creatures. June liked the winged mermaid in our room best. I was taken with the snake in a sombrero.

I didn’t go down to the beach Tuesday evening, surprising those who know me best. It was dark and the trail to the beach was unfamiliar and involved crossing a highway, so I decided to wait.

Wednesday-Thursday: Down By the Turquoise Sea, Oh My, Under the Blue, Blue Sky

But the next morning I left the three kids playing Sleeping Queens and the adults chatting or making almond pancakes and I made my way down a steep, scrubby incline by the side of the highway and down to the beach. It wasn’t easy to get down it and I had to roll up my jeans and ford a marshy area before I was on sand. It wouldn’t have been a good idea after dark.

The beach was lovely—located at the north end of a long, shallow cove with those classic Pacific coast rocks rising from the water at either end. The sand was darker and more pebbly than East coast beaches but still mostly sand. There was a lot of driftwood, including whole logs and a lot of tubular kelp, some hard and dried into curly patterns, and some still flexible. There were eight vultures on the sand, walking around and occasionally stretching their wings. I was there over an hour and never saw another soul, though I could hear traffic not far behind me.

I returned to the house, and ate the leftover pancakes Sara made. Everyone wanted to go to the beach but the path I took proved too steep for some of the senior members of our party so we got into the car looking for a place with easier access, but not before Josiah had scrambled to the marshy pool of water and lost a flip flop.

At the beach the kids enjoyed playing with the dried kelp tubes. Noah immediately discovered a short, thick one that made a satisfying thump when he whacked it on the sand. June decided hers was a scepter and she was Queen June. Noah decided to overthrow Queen June and then she wanted him to tie her ankle to one of the longer, more flexible lengths of kelp that looked like a ball and chain. She had a suitably downcast prisoner look. Josiah built a pyramid of sticks and June, Josiah, and Darryl played in the surf but it was too cold for the rest of us to follow them.

Back at the house, June and Josiah started a treehouse they would work on the rest of the stay. The laid sticks and a flat rock in the crook of a tree branch and secured it all with yarn Peggy had on hand. The treehouse had its own constitution, a set of rules and punishments for breaking the rules. And they charged a dollar for admission.

Our afternoon adventure was a drive south along the coast, stopping at scenic viewpoints and beaches to see particularly impressive rock formations and in some cases to hike around them. We saw an arch, a natural bridge, rocky islands covered in conifers, and sea caves with water rushing in and out of them. And as June cheerfully noted after a particularly high, narrow trail, “we didn’t plunge into the icy water!” The water was turquoise in places and there was fog rolling in and out all day, usually just enough to be scenic without completely obscuring the view.

Mom and Jim showed us a beachside campground where they stayed in their trailer on a previous adventure and the kids enjoyed climbing the rocks that emerged from shallow water on one beach. The rocks were sharp with barnacles and mussels and one had succulent plants growing on one face.

We got home later than intended, which was worrying me because I tend to obsess about the kids’ bedtimes, but we found that in our absence, not only had Peggy chopped the vegetables for shish kabobs (which we knew she was going to do) but she’d made the rice, baked a peach-blackberry crisp with Josiah’s help, and even taken my laundry out of the drier and folded it. She is now my favorite aunt.

After dinner there was a talent show. June sang “Memory” from Cats to much acclaim and Josiah did magic tricks, quite skillfully I must say. (The next day he showed June how to do one of the card tricks.)

I stayed up too late trying to catch up on Facebook and then discovered while trying to undress that I was stuck in my jeans. I’d rolled them up to just under my knees in the morning on the beach, and then left them that way all day. Either my calves swell late in the day like some people’s feet, or I built up some muscle from all that hiking, or my jeans got wet and shrank a little. Whatever the reason, they would not unroll and they would not budge. It took Beth ten minutes of yanking on them and dragging them down millimeter by millimeter until I could get out of them. I should add lest there be any misunderstanding that these are not tight jeans. I don’t wear tight jeans. They are Mom jeans, from L.L. Bean, no less. Anyway, I wore different pants the next day.

I spent Thursday morning mostly at the house, socializing and reading to the kids. Josiah was really enjoying the Series of Unfortunate Events even though he came in at book 5, The Austere Academy. I did enjoy a brief jaunt down to the beach. It was a cool, sunny day and my stretch of beach was deserted though I could see people far to the south.

After lunch, nine of us drove to Arizona beach, so called because it’s sheltered by rock and somewhat warmer than nearby beaches. Beth had read there were good tidal pools there. We arrived an hour and fifteen minutes before low tide and we couldn’t find much interesting tidal pool life at first. But the kids didn’t care because there was a freshwater creek winding down the beach toward the sea and great quantities of sun-bleached driftwood in all sizes. Noah and Josiah swung heavy logs around and June and Josiah built things—they made dams and a castle guarded with a long wall of logs. They also attempted to build a raft—a long-standing goal of June’s. Meanwhile Beth and I were poking around the rocks near shore, looking for sea anemones and starfish. We edged around the corner of our cove, into the next one, picking our way through rocks and waves. At the far end of that cove, we hit pay dirt.

I found the anemones first. They were small and brown and covering a rock that was under shallow water. When I poked them they grasped my finger gently. I wondered the kids would leave their building projects to see them and then Beth spotted a red starfish on a rock a little further out, and I went back to get them. It took a while to get back to the original beach and talk to my mom, Peggy, Darryl, Sara, and the kids so by the time Darryl and the kids and I made it back to where Beth was (Mom and Peggy elected not to come as it meant wading through swirling seawater and across slippery rocks) Beth had found scores of starfish and hundreds more anemones. The starfish were red and orange and black, clinging to the rocks and to each other. In addition to the little brown anemones, there were big green ones. The more you looked, the more you found.

“This is magical,” Sara said.

Later Noah told Beth, “You keep suggesting things to do that sound really boring but turn out to be great!” (Beth asserts the trick is to undersell the activity. She’d described the tidal pool trip to him thusly: “We are going to a beach to look at pools of water on rocks.”)

The kids drifted back to their creek before the adults were finished marveling at the sea life but we eventually followed. I took a brief swim in the ocean, probably ten minutes or less, and the water was so cold my legs were starting to go numb when I walked back onto the sand. After my swim I was standing by the creek, near the ocean, when I saw Noah’s crocs come floating down the creek. I snagged them, returned them to him, and asked if he’d known they were drifting out to sea. June nearly lost her crocs at this beach, too. It was a hard couple of days on kids’ shoes.

Friday: If You Said Jump in the River, I Would

The next day it was time to check out of our beach house and drive back to Ashland. Noah and I went down to the beach to say goodbye to the ocean while people were finishing their packing. As we sat on a log and stared at the ocean and the conifer-covered hills at the north end of the cove, he said, “This is so Oregon.”

On the way home we stopped at the Smith River for a picnic lunch and to swim in a swimming hole. This was Sara’s favorite part of the trip because as much as I am an ocean person, she is a river and lake person. The swimming hole was shallow in some places and deep in others so it was good for everyone who wanted to swim. The water was cool and green and very clear. (“Lucid” according to the park website, so of course we all worked the word “lucid” into conversation as often as possible because we are that kind of family.) There was a rock face on one side with a good ledge for diving, but only Sara dove from it. “I hope Mom’s not watching,” I commented to Beth as we watched her, and luckily, she wasn’t. I understand the maternal point of view on these matters better now then when I was childless.

Once we got to Ashland, we visited Sara’s house and her tile mosaic studio, which we had not had a chance to see yet. It’s a charming house and as Beth noted with an eye toward its future inhabitant, full of breakable objects. The kids liked seeing the studio where Sara breaks colored glass with a hammer and then glues the pieces into pictures. What kid wouldn’t like at least half of that equation?

We had pizza for dinner on the green in front of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival theaters and watched the Green Show, which is a free show put on six nights a week. That night it was the Rogue Artists Ensemble performing HYPERBOLE: Bard, which in their own words “recreates a collection of William Shakespeare’s most famous scenes through clowning, masks, puppets, and original music.” This was fun. Noah has studied some Shakespeare in school, which might have helped him appreciate it. June thought the funniest part was the slapstick bit when Romeo and Juliet kept dying and coming back to life, only to find each other dead and killing themselves over and over.

When the show was over, I turned to find Beth talking to our friend Sue, who lived with us in a group house when we attended grad school at the University of Iowa about twenty five years ago. (Her mother lives in D.C. so we see her every few years.) Soon her husband Scott, who also lived in the house, came over and we were all exclaiming over the coincidence of finding each other. They live in Washington state now and happened to be visiting Ashland. We invited them to come have gelato with us but they had theater tickets so it was a very brief reunion.

After gelato, we said our goodbyes to Sara and returned to Mom and Jim’s house. We had an early flight the next morning but June had napped in the car so I let her stay up past her bedtime so I could read a chapter of The Austere Academy to her and Josiah.

Saturday: Homeward Bound

We were up at 5:30 and out the door by 6:35. Mom drove us to the airport. We parted, after many hugs goodbye, and began our trek home. June got a nosebleed in the Medford airport and I thought our journey east might be as eventful as the one west, but it wasn’t. June was an old hand at flying by now and just wanted to watch movies on the laptop, so I let her go over her media limit by watching all of Harry Potter and part of Frozen, both of which she has seen many times. She didn’t even want to rent the movie players they provide on the plane to watch something new, like her brother who watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I think after a week of adventure, she was ready to return to the familiar. And while it was nice to sleep in my own bed Saturday night, over the past few days I have often found myself thinking of all the relatives we saw and the bodies of water in which we immersed ourselves and the trails we hiked and the beaches we wandered and I imagine us doing it again some time.

A Barrel of Fun

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Steph

Beth, who was sitting in an armchair in her mother’s living room and looking at her phone shortly after lunch on Tuesday, gasped quietly.

I looked up from the couch, where I was reading the newspaper, and asked why. “A room may have opened in the Breakers,” she said. We’d been in Wheeling a couple days and we were headed for Cedar Point the next day. The Hotel Breakers is the oldest hotel associated with the park. The original portion dates back to 1905, with larger modern wings, and it’s where Beth’s family stayed during her childhood trips to the park. When Beth and I visited Cedar Point in college she fantasized about us staying there together, though of course at the time it was out of the question financially. The next time we came to Cedar Point was much later, the summer Noah was five and June was an infant and that time we stayed in a cottage right on the lake.

There had been no vacancies at the Breakers when Beth made our reservations for this year’s trip, but she’d been checking online every day and within minutes of seeing the vacancy, she’d cancelled our original reservation and made a new one. Afterward, she was all smiles. She really wanted to stay in that hotel.

We had a pleasant stay in Wheeling. In various combinations, we attended an outdoor concert at Oglebay Park and rode the paddle boats and played miniature golf there as well. We swam in the pool at Beth’s aunt Carole’s condo and in our hotel pool.

YaYa and two of her three sisters played the customized Monopoly game (Sisters-opoly) that Noah made for them. All the properties and good luck/bad luck cards are based on significant places and memorable experiences in their lives. It was fun listening to them play, arguing anew over whether or not one of them avoided her turn doing the dishes back in the 1950s and hearing about the teasing Jenny (the youngest sister) endured as a child for believing the pimento grew in the olive.

As they played we listened to the CD of Noah’s band camp concert. Noah put it on shuffle and occasionally made people guess which of the three age groups was playing. Not to be outdone by her brother’s performance, June sang songs from Oliver! for YaYa on several occasions during our stay.

Each kid had an individual sleepover with YaYa, June on Monday night and Noah on Tuesday. June was indignant on Monday evening when we didn’t leave right after dinner, but instead stayed during what she thought would be her private time with YaYa (the Sisters-opoly game was still in progress and Noah was playing). When we left, twenty-five minutes after June had her bath and gone to bed, she came down the stairs in her shark pajamas saying, “I just wanted to see you leave.” But we left her with YaYa until lunch the next day and they had a lot of fun so she was appeased.

It so happened that when Beth, June, and I were leaving YaYa’s after dinner the next night (when Noah was staying behind for his sleepover), he was upstairs reading. As we left he came down the stairs to say, “I just wanted to see you leave.” Who knows? It may become a catchphrase in our family.

Oberlin, OH: Wednesday Afternoon

The next morning we set out for Cedar Point with a pit stop in Oberlin, Beth’s and my alma mater.

We arrived around lunchtime, in a heavy downpour. This seemed appropriate as it rains and snows a lot in Oberlin, because of the moist air from nearby Lake Erie. Most of the restaurants from our era have closed in the twenty-four years since I graduated from college so we ate at a very nice organic restaurant with a good selection of vegetarian entrees. There were a lot of professorial-looking people eating there and the wait staff consisted of impossibly young people we were forced to admit were probably students. (Were we ever that young? I don’t think we were.)

After lunch we took the kids to Gisbon’s bakery, which we were glad to see was still in business. I got a whole-wheat doughnut, one of my favorite college day treats, and a buckeye for later. Beth bought a t-shirt at the bookstore and then we took the kids on a walking tour of dorms, co-ops, and one apartment building where we lived in college. We took Noah’s picture in front of Noah Hall, the dorm where Beth I and met my first day of college, and after which we named him. So June wouldn’t feel left out, we took her picture under the Memorial Arch where I think I remember having the discussion (about a year into our relationship) in which we jokingly decided that if we ever had a daughter we’d give her Beth’s and my middle names (traditional names in both our families) for her first and middle names, which is, of course, exactly what we did eighteen years later.

Cedar Point, Sandusky, OH: Wednesday afternoon to Friday morning

It was late afternoon when we got to the hotel. I remembered the lobby with its stained glass windows and chandeliers from walking through it on previous visits and I had a strong association of nursing June on its benches. In the first floor corridors there are old-time black and white photos of people on the beach, riding long-gone rides, and quite of few of different people posing in a barrel with the words “Barrel of Fun” painted on it.

We unpacked and relaxed for a while in one of the several swimming pools and hot tubs. Noah and I wanted to go swim in the lake and June didn’t, so we left her with Beth and he and I waded into the calm and pleasantly cool waters of the lake.

There are a number of restaurants in the Breakers and if Beth and I had our way, we’d have eaten in the Japanese one, but it seemed more likely we’d find something everyone would eat at Perkins, so we ate there. The service was quite slow, so it was past June’s bedtime when we finished and we headed up to our room.

The next morning we were lined up to enter the park by 8:45 a.m. People staying at the any of the hotels associated with park can enter at 9:00; everyone else is admitted at 10:00. We split up until lunchtime. Beth took June to the kiddie rides and carnival games at which they won a blue stuffed dog. Noah and I headed straight for the Iron Dragon, a moderately big hanging coaster that travels over a lagoon. Part of the reason we came to Cedar Point this year was that on a band field trip to Hershey Park this spring, Noah discovered he liked roller coasters and we thought he might be at a good age to appreciate some of the big-kid rides for the first time.

Noah liked the Iron Dragon and it’s about my speed, too, so we rode it twice, and then went in search of a wooden coaster. After a longish walk to all three and a well-considered visual inspection, we decided to start with the smallest one, the Blue Streak. I was glad we did because at 75 feet and 40 mph it ended up being a little much for Noah, who declined (rather forcibly) to ride it a second time.

After that it was hard for him to choose a ride. He wanted to go on the mine ride but he was apprehensive so we rode the antique cars and the swings while he mulled it over. Finally, after texting Beth to get its statistics for height and speed (she had an app for that on her phone), and finding out it was only half as tall as the Blue Streak and approximately as fast, we rode it. It was pretty tame and he seemed happy to have done it. There was a man sitting in the front seat, who screamed, “Oh my God!” at every little dip, presumably in jest; it was actaully really funny and helped break the tension. Noah would have liked to do the mine ride again, but by then it was time to meet Beth and June and have lunch.

We rode a few rides everyone wanted to do (the sky tram, the Ferris wheel, and the train that travels through various tableaux of skeletons engaged in activities such as playing in bands, making moonshine, sawing lumber, and shooting one another—it’s a sentimental favorite from Beth’s childhood and June loved it). Next June rode the bumper cars and she and I rode the Woodstock Express, which is quite a respectable starter coaster with cars that look like a train. In line she asked me, “Do you think I can handle this?”

I’d been wondering just that, hesitated just a moment, and said yes. “What do you think?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said with confidence and I decided I didn’t need to say anything about how it was okay to get out of line. Earlier at the Iron Dragon I’d witnessed a mother trying to force her weeping nine- or ten-year-old daughter onto the ride so I wanted to be careful about not pushing the kids past their limits, but June was grinning and ready and she was smiling all through the ride.

Next we visited Soak City, the water park just next to the main amusement park. We went down waterslides, clambered on a path of lily pads, and floated down a river on inner tubes. We only stayed an hour because it was time for dinner by that point.

The Magnum goes right over part of the water park. I rode this coaster the week after I graduated from college, at which time it was the biggest coaster in the world. It’s still one of the bigger ones in the park, though it doesn’t go upside down or have the cars hanging off the sides of the track or anything crazy like that. It’s just a very big coaster, with graceful, clean lines. To my regret, I could never ride it now. But every now and then I would point it out to the kids and say something like, “Let’s all take a moment to admire the Magnum,” and remind them I’d ridden it in my glory days.

We ate in the park, and after June had a chance to jump on the Spoopy moon bounce we split up again. It was past June’s bedtime, so I was taking her back to the hotel, while Beth and Noah were planning to stay until the park closed at ten. June didn’t know I’d been considering letting her stay up and watch the nightly 9:30 firework show but around seven when the kids and I were sitting at a picnic table waiting for Beth to come back with burritos she put her new stuffed dog on the table and used it as a pillow and I couldn’t see keeping her up another three hours. She did perk up a little after eating so on the way back to the hotel, we detoured briefly to the beach where she collected seagull feathers and we relaxed in the chaise lounges. She couldn’t believe I wasn’t hurrying her off to bed, but it was a lovely evening and we could see the bigger rides all lit up in different colors from the beach, and I wasn’t quit ready to end my day either.

Meanwhile, back at the park, Noah surprised Beth (and later me when I found out) by riding the Windseeker, a swing ride that goes up 300 feet in the air. It is far from the most terrifying ride in the park, which has plenty of enormous coasters, including one that sends you hurtling to the ground at a 90-degree angle at 120 mph. (Our family name for this one is the Paperclip, because that’s what it looks like, a giant paperclip standing up on end.) But it was intimidating enough. Beth says she checked his seat belt three times and was quite anxious until he returned to Earth. He says it’s not scary at all. Apparently he is more scared by fast drops and I am more scared by the idea of being that high up with no structure underneath me, but as he rode the Blue Streak and I did not ride the Windseeker, I think Noah qualified as the bravest one in the family on this trip, though his sister is close on his heels.

Around ten, I looked out the hotel window and stared at the cars sweeping up and down the big coasters in the dark, feeling a little sad both that my youth was behind me and that our trip was almost over as well.

Friday morning we visited the hotel gift shop where I bought a t-shirt that says “Cedar Point, America’s Roller Coast” and we strolled on the beach before hitting the road. But after an intervening day of tennis practice, housework and errands, Sunday found us at the Montgomery County Fair where we spent all afternoon riding a Ferris wheel, a little coaster, swings and other rides all over again, because even though we did have a barrel of fun on our trip, we weren’t quite ready for the fun to end.

One Wave at a Time: Twenty-One Trips to the Beach

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

1. Saturday, 8:53 p.m.

It was almost dark when I reached the trail from the parking lot to the beach, but the sand was still warm under my feet. It had been hot and humid and muggy for the past two weeks at home and it was hot and humid and muggy at the beach, too, but there’s an ocean there, and the water swirling around my ankles was cool.

2. Sunday, 11:46 a.m.

Sara and I didn’t really mean to arrive at the beach quite so close to high noon, but my family and my mom and sister had all been socializing and menu planning and now June and I were too eager to wait until late afternoon, so the three of us headed out late Sunday morning.

June was toting her new body board for most of the fifteen-minute walk. Beth bought it for her at home after much pleading and June was so excited to have it she slept with it the first night after she got it. She also drew a picture of smiling people riding the waves the first morning we were at the beach.

Once we got our towels arranged, the first thing June wanted to do was stand at the water’s edge and let the motion of the waves bury our feet in the sand. This was a good way to get acclimated to the cold water as it splashed our legs and torsos. Something about prevailing southwesterly winds was churning up water from the deep and making ocean temperatures colder than usual from the Outer Banks to New Jersey, Beth had informed us.

Soon June decided it was time to use the board. We were starting very close to shore and the first two waves were perfect, gently pushing her to the sand. But then a big one cane up behind the third one she tried to ride and merged with it, crashing over us, knocking June off the board and me off my feet. (I lost my sunglasses, though I didn’t notice at the time.)

Sara said she saw it all unfolding inevitably, the wave too big, June and I too far apart, no way for either Sara or me to get to June in time. It was a very long five seconds or so before I could drag June to her feet. Her hair was swept over her face, full of sand and shell fragments, and she was sobbing. All three of us went up to the towels and sat until she’d calmed somewhat. I offered to take the board and demonstrate its use while she watched from the safety of the sand. She agreed, but not long after I got into the water, I saw a big jellyfish and made a hurried exit. Then Sara mentioned she did feel a stinging sensation, the way you do sometimes when you swim near jellyfish.

I talked carefully to June about how it was fine if she didn’t want to try to ride the board again today but that sometimes if you don’t try again right away after something scary happens, the scary gets bigger in your head. She said nothing, so I left it at that.

June did want to go back in the water without the board, so eventually we did, but then she got sand in the crotch of her suit and she started to feel stingy, too. Between the hot sun and the treacherous water, Sara decided it was time to go home, but June wanted to make sand castles so she did. I thought she’d forgotten all about the board when she quietly announced she was going to ride one more wave–just one–and then we were going home for lunch.

We picked a small one and she glided to shore. She scraped her knee a little but she didn’t seem to care, she was just happy and relieved to have done it and not to have to do it again, at least not right then. As we packed up our things, she held the board aloft. A sudden breeze buffeted it for a moment. “June versus the wind!” she cried. “June wins! June is stronger than the wind!”

3. Sunday, 6:04 p.m.

Beth and I biked to the cheese shop to buy some Spanish cheese for dinner the next night. Sara was at home making lentil-sweet potato stew while Mom watched the kids.

“Do you want to go to the boardwalk?” Beth asked as we left the store.

“You know me so well,” I answered. She remarked that over the course of twenty-six years you notice a few things.

So we found a bench in the shade and sat and watched the ocean for ten minutes until it was time to bike home for dinner.

4. Monday, 10:10 a.m.

Rain threatened, so I managed to get the kids down to the beach earlier than the day before. When I asked June if she wanted to come, she said, “Yes! And I want to bring my body board!” I’d been on the verge of telling her we’d bike (or scoot in Noah’s case), but the board presented a logistical challenge. Beth offered to drive us to the parking lot, so we took her up on it. It wasn’t as hot as the day before. Every now and then it clouded over and looked like it would rain, but it never did. The water felt a little warmer, too, but still plenty cool.

We splashed in the water for a long time. Noah came up with new names for different kind of waves and wave actions. The backward tug of a wave is a “ghost wave.” When two waves merge, one “eats” the other. Eventually, June declared she wanted to ride a wave, again, just one. The first wave she wanted went by before she could get on the board, but she caught the next one, and then she was done. This seemed to be her system for conquering this fear, one wave at a time.

Once she’d dispensed with this, she befriended a girl whose family was sitting nearby. I’d been watching this girl because she was about June’s age and she had a body board, too. I wanted to see what she’d do with it. Not ride it was the answer. Instead she put it on the sand and stood on it, pretending to surf, while the very edges of waves rushed over it. They did this together for a while. They also lay on the boards facing the waves, deep in conversation, while the occasional wave splashed their faces. June ran to fetch her goggles for this activity. Later they dug in the sand– stopping when the girl’s toddler sister kept destroying their creations—and played with a boomerang.

The girl’s name was Augusta, which her mom thought was funny, two girls with month names. I’d recently heard an almost identical comment from the mother of a girl named April who was attending tinkering camp with June the previous week. The mothers always find it more amusing than the girls do.

Noah and I were on the towels. He was burying his legs in the sand when June came by to ask if she could go in the water with Augusta and her mom. I said I’d come with her. June can swim, but she’s not a confident ocean swimmer. On reflection, I realized we had the cart before the horse with the body board. She won’t really be able to ride it until she isn’t afraid to go in over her head and catch the waves while they’re forming rather than in the more chaotic areas of crashing waves near the shore. As it turned out, Monday was the last day she even tried to ride it, but I was proud of her for getting back on the board after wiping out, even if it was only twice. Maybe next year her memory of it will be of those last two successful rides and it will be easier to try again.

Soon it was clear that Augusta and her mom were going out well past June’s comfort zone. I asked if she wanted to try swimming in the deep water, thinking peer pressure might help her seize the moment, but she said, no. I think she’d used up all her courage on the board. Noah joined us where we were and we splashed together and watched a lone pelican fly over our heads until the kids were hungry for lunch.

5. Monday, 6:37 p.m.

After an afternoon at Funland with Mom for the kids, and Beth’s delicious dinner of gazpacho, bread, Spanish cheeses, and salt-crusted potatoes, we drove to the north end of the boardwalk and walked down to the middle, stopping for various desserts along the way. As we read the water ice flavors, “watermelon, cherry…” June stopped me at tie-dye. She wanted it without seeing it or even asking what it tasted like. It was blue, green, and white, and it stained not only her tongue and lips, but even her teeth blue.

Noah and I got frozen custard and everyone else got ice cream. The benches were full so we initially sat on the low concrete wall that separates the boardwalk from the little strip of dune grass. It was a beautiful evening, warm but not hot, less humid, golden-hued.

Our rental house was north of the boardwalk, near a less populated stretch of beach so there were fewer junk-food seeking gulls whenever we went to the beach, but here their cries filled the air as they circled lazily over the crowds.

6. Tuesday, 9:17 a.m.

The kids felt like watching television so my first beach trip of the day was solo. I swam and read and swam again and watched two ospreys fly over my head with fish in their talons. I also saw a big, purplish-red jellyfish. I began to wonder if the cold water brought them. I saw them washed up on the shore every day that week.

My towel was right behind the lifeguard chair so I heard when another guard jogged by and advised them, “Watch the waterline. There’s a seal!”

I looked up and saw a crowd gathering around a jetty just to the south. Everyone stopped what they were doing, even the lifeguards (at least those with a partner to stay behind) abandoned their posts. And sure enough there was a black head rising from the water. The seal was swimming near the end of the jetty. When it turned and swam toward shore I could see its face, even the whiskers, and a good bit of its torso.

On shore everyone was exclaiming. How did it get here? Escaped from an aquarium? Seriously lost? A boy Noah’s age guessed it “took a wrong turn.” Later I googled seal habitat and found that on the East coast they’re native from the Arctic Circle down to New York, and that they are “occasionally” seen off North Carolina. Had the cold water brought it south, along with the jellyfish? The seal seemed intent on getting (back?) to New York. It left the jetty and swam steadily north, occasionally stopping to pop its head out of the water and look toward shore or behind its shoulder.

People were taking pictures and movies. I went back to my towel and got my phone, hoping to snap a picture. Along with a couple other people, I followed it north for around forty minutes. I never got a picture, though, because it popped up too briefly and at unpredictable intervals. At one point, we passed a big pod of dolphins, but I hardly paid them any mind.

Eventually I turned back because I had gotten pretty far from my towel. It was a long walk back. I read and swam again and then went home.

7. Tuesday, 4:37 p.m.

After Beth took June to Funland again (where June won two stuffed animals at this game she loves where you move a cup to catch a ball falling out of a vertical maze), everyone but Beth made it down to the beach at the same time that afternoon. The weather was nice, not too hot, with a breeze coming off the water. Mostly the kids splashed and Sara napped while I chatted with Mom, who prefers to stay on shore. Mom had made dinner, a black bean-quinoa salad ahead of time, and the afternoon was so lovely we decided to eat in shifts so that Mom and Sara could stay at the beach longer.

8. Tuesday, 9:05 p.m.

Beth and Noah hatched a plan to go on a dessert run after June was in bed. This was later than anticipated because June had a lengthy and mysterious meltdown at bedtime, triggered buy a minor conflict with Noah. (This has been happening a lot recently.)

Once she was finally asleep, Beth, Noah, Sara, and I got cake and cheesecake from Gallery Espresso and brought it home to Mom, who stayed with June. (She was also the one who got June to calm down enough to sleep. Thanks, Mom!)

On the way back to the car, we walked a block along the boardwalk. We’re rarely there after dark any more and it was hopping. There was also a delightfully cool breeze from the ocean. Heat is one of the reasons Beth rarely comes down to the beach, so I told her once the kids stop habitually waking at dawn we can come down to the boardwalk at night more often. Sara asked Noah if he liked being old enough to be out late—I know, it was barely past nine, but that’s late for us. He didn’t answer, just laughed.

9. Wednesday, 9:39 a.m.

Beth took the kids to Jungle Jim’s water park in the morning so I had another solo beach jaunt. I told Sara after the seal the day before I was half-expecting to see a unicorn, but I didn’t, just a few dolphins. The sky was overcast; the sea calm. I swam and read and swam again.

10. Wednesday, 12:55 p.m.

Mom and I had lunch at O’Bie’s, a boardwalk restaurant with a nice view and a nice breeze, both from the ocean and big overhead fans. It’s becoming our traditional lunch spot. The food’s not bad, but not exceptional either. Sometimes it’s all about location.

11. Wednesday, 2:58 p.m.

Sara parked near the north end of the boardwalk and walked down it to the bike shop. We were embarking on a long series of errands that included: a bike rental place to get more comfortable bikes than the one supplied by the house; the bookstore, to buy Sara’s belated birthday present and Beth’s anniversary present; the wellness center, to buy a gift certificate for a massage as an early birthday present for my mom, who’s turning seventy this week; a bakery, for birthday cupcakes for my mom; a coffee shop to slake our thirst with iced drinks after biking all over town; the sunglass store, to replace the ones I lost in the ocean; a gift shop, for a card for Mom; and finally, Candy Kitchen, because I thought the house needed salted caramels. Sara and I split up between the coffee shop and the sunglass store, so she could move the car.

12. Wednesday 5:30 p.m.

Rehoboth’s a small town, but between all these stops and doubling back to feed the meter, it was two and a half hours later by the time I was walking my bike along the boardwalk again for quick view of the ocean before heading home.

13. Thursday, 9:03 a.m.

Beth and the kids and I had breakfast at Gallery Espresso—crepes, yogurt, a bagel, and a chocolate chip muffin fresh from the oven with the chips still melted. I offered to walk the kids back home because Beth had her daily conference call at 9:00 a.m. It had been overcast the past few mornings with no rain, but as we walked along the boardwalk I thought the banked clouds looked darker, more serious. June, who’d been oddly moody for the past week or so, was put out because I wouldn’t buy her potato chips at breakfast. I tried to interest her in several people who seemed to be standing on surfboards and rowing along the nearly flat sea with oars, but she said she’d seen that before. Soon she fell to bickering with Noah and forgot to be mad at me. Then she perked up and asked if we could take the secret path home.

Beth had discovered a grassy alley between the back yards of the house on our block and yards of the next block over. It goes almost all the way to the beach. It’s not a short cut, but it’s shaded and interesting to see the more private sides of all the houses on the way to the beach—the decks and pools and gardens and sheds. I’d transversed it alone and with Mom when we’d gone to lunch, but not with the kids. I said yes and by the time we left the boardwalk, June was happy. (It did start to rain while we were on the path and we got soaked, but the kids seemed to regard it as an adventure and not an inconvenience.)

14. Thursday, 2:09 p.m.

The rain that started in the morning continued steadily until mid-afternoon. We spent the morning inside, working (it was a working vacation for both Sara and Beth), reading and watching 101 Dalmatians (The house was well stocked with kids’ movies. June had already watched Anastasia.) In the afternoon Mom went for her massage and Beth took the kids to see Monsters University in 3D. I stayed inside as long as I could stand it and then took a walk in the rain.

Before I reached the boardwalk, however, the rain stopped, and I wondered if I’d packed for the wrong outing, but I settled into the first wooden pavilion on the boardwalk and read two chapters of my book, waiting to see if the rain was really over. Mom called me to say she and Sara were going to the beach, so I headed home to change and meet them there.

15. Thursday, 3:54 p.m.

The rain had cooled the air considerably so I didn’t want to go in the water right away, for fear I’d be chilled if got out and wanted to stay at the beach. I sat on my towel, talked with Mom, and watched the dolphins. She said she wanted to see one jump out of the water, but all we saw was fins skimming the surface.

I asked Sara if she wanted a swim and she said, “No. Are you crazy?”

“No, she’s Steph,” Mom replied.

When I got out of the water, Mom and Sara had left. I spotted about six dolphins, close to shore and one jumped almost all the way out of the water. I saw everything but the nose.

16. Thursday, 7:33 p.m.

Beth and I had just finished an almost-anniversary dinner at Planet X, while Mom and Sara took the kids out for Italian. We were taking a stroll along the boardwalk in the pleasantly cool air, and watching the dolphins, unaware that Noah, who’d complained of a headache before we left, had taken a turn for the worse at the restaurant and had been sick at the table. Mom and Sara took him home at put him to bed. When we got home shortly after eight both kids were asleep.

17. Friday, 2:33 p.m.

We woke to rain and it rained ceaselessly until mid-afternoon. Noah and I read for a long time and the kids watched Bambi and seemed content to stay inside. I was feeling stir-crazy enough to agree when Sara suggested we bike to Candy Kitchen in the rain, though after stepping out into the downpour, we decided to walk instead, so we could use umbrellas. It was coming down so hard I was wet up to the waist (though mostly dry from there up) when we stepped onto the boardwalk.

I wanted to see if the benches in the first pavilion were dry, but they weren’t. Then I noticed a dead mouse on the ground inside.

“It’s not dead,” Sara said. I asked if was just the wind moving its limbs but she said no, and the waterlogged little thing began to struggle, its torso half rising off the ground. Sara scooped it into her hand. I asked what she was going to do with it. “Nurse it back to health?” she suggested. I reminded her she had a plane to catch the next day and two cats at home. I also warned about bites and rabies. She continued to hold the mouse and carried it all the way to Candy Kitchen and inside, hidden in her hand. We made our purchases and parted ways. (She went home with the mouse and made it a little nest of shredded paper inside a basket and tried to feed it on milk and shredded apple. It didn’t eat much, if at all, but it did seem to perk up and explore a bit before it laid down and died a few hours later. It’s buried in the yard of the beach house now. Sara was sad, but satisfied to have given it a more comfortable death.)

While she headed home, I walked out to the beach. Here the wind was blowing the rain in all directions and my top half was soon as wet as my bottom half. There were a few other people on the beach, some huddled under beach umbrellas, but as soon as I got north of the boardwalk, I was alone. The sky was medium gray—it looked almost like dusk—and the sea was dark gray and choppy. It looked inviting and I was already almost as wet as I’d be if I’d swum in my clothes, but the roughness of the water and the isolation of the beach gave me pause, so I didn’t swim, just waded up to my calves and breathed in the intoxicating smell of sea and rain.

18. Friday, 5:01 p.m.

Of course the rain started to let up shortly after I got home and changed into dry clothes. By 4:30 Funland was posting on Facebook that the outdoor rides would be open by 5:00, so Noah and I headed over there. (June was feeling under the weather.) He rode the Freefall and then we rode the Paratrooper together. This ride looks like a Ferris wheel and when we were in our twenties, Beth and I rode it, not realizing it tilts and goes fast, and at the very end of the ride, backwards. Beth didn’t care for it, and I never went on it again either, even after Noah started to ride it a couple years ago. This time I enjoyed the ride, especially the ocean view, and hearing Noah laugh as the soles of his bare feet brushed the top of a small tree, but I once it started going backwards, I was ready for the ride to be over. My queasiness did settle the question of whether I should try the Sea Dragon, which is one of those swinging Viking ship rides I used to love when I was a teen. The answer is no, you are not sixteen any more, lady. Good to know, for when Noah moves up to that ride.

19. Saturday, 10:19 a.m.

I wheeled my bike onto the boardwalk and walked toward the bike rental store. Beth and the kids were driving to the realty to return the house keys. We’d said our goodbyes to Mom and Sara, who were finishing up their packing and were about to drive to Philadelphia to catch a plane back to Oregon.

20. Saturday, 11:01 a.m.

Once the bike was returned I met up with Beth and the kids and we headed to Café a-Go-Go for iced coffee drinks, pastry, and juice. Then we split up, as Beth had some anniversary shopping to do. I took the kids to the boardwalk Candy Kitchen, where we stocked up on candy and June bought a stuffed harbor seal with her own money. (I thought she’d go for one of the mermaids or a seahorse, but she surprised me.) I couldn’t help but think about being with the mouse the last time I was in Candy Kitchen and I think it’s possible I will think of it whenever I go into that Candy Kitchen for a long time.

21. Saturday, 11:57 a.m.

After trip to the T-shirt Factory where the kids picked out blank t-shirts and designs to have pressed onto them–Noah chose the words Rehoboth Beach, DE with an Aloha flower on white and June selected a mother wolf with a cub on yellow–we picked up some fries and hit the boardwalk. Beth happened on us while I was buying the fries. We spent about an hour on the beach. It being a Saturday and right in front of the boardwalk, it was much more crowded on the sand and in water than any other time I’d been to the beach all week. Beth got her feet wet, then rested on a towel while the kids and I played in the water. I had a swim and the waves were better than they’d been all week. There were two that were big enough to sweep me up into their swell and drop me a couple feet through the air down the water below. This is my absolute favorite thing to do with a wave.

We had crepes on the boardwalk (strawberry-nutella for Noah and tomato-cheese for everyone else). June wanted to go to Funland one last time. I was hesitant because we didn’t have a lot of time left on the meter and I thought if she didn’t win the medium stuffed animal she had her heart set on, she’d be disappointed and we’d leave the beach on a low note. But we talked about what would happen if she didn’t win it and she said it would be fine, she’d just try again next year, so we said she could go on one ride and have five dollars to try her luck at the ball and cup game. Well, she walked out of there with a mini beach ball and a medium panda to add to the small panda and owl she’d one earlier in the week. (Noah, taking fewer turns, won a mini beach ball and a small panda.) Next year June wants to win a large. And to go in the Haunted Mansion. And maybe next year I’ll convince her (and Noah) to venture out into the deep water with me. Whatever June sets her mind to, I think she’ll do, one wave at time.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Extended Family

Cool Yule

A Fine Thanksgiving

The Ocean Life’s For Me

Southland in the Springtime: Part I, Ashville, NC

A Merry Little Christmas

Not Every Sunday, Not Every Monday

So Oregon

To Grandmother’s House We Go

A Barrel of Fun

One Wave at a Time: Twenty-One Trips to the Beach