My Truant Pen

Red sky at morning

I awoke briefly this morning at dawn and looked out the window. It was astonishingly red and rosy – like the most florid of Pacific sunsets.

Sailors take warning.

We’re battening down the hatches here. Of course so many New England storms are overhyped, and so few live up to even a portion of their media coverage. Whether Irene will fall in that category remains to be seen. But we’re ready. Our house is in the middle of a hill – protected from wind but far above standing water damage. Most of the trees around us have been taken down – I think there’s only one tall enough to hit us. I have 10 gallons of water in the basement. I have our camping lanterns. I have enough batteries to get us through the long winter. I have enough food to last a month (assuming that the gas doesn’t get cut). I have cash and two cars with full tanks of gas.

I also lost my wallet last night. So far I’m not seeing any activity on the cards, but talk about the worst possible time to misplace your wallet. I really believe that it’s lost somewhere in the house or at work. I had it Thursday night at 10:30 pm when I went grocery shopping. The only thing I did between that and when I missed it was go to work. But seriously, I’ve looked everywhere. I really hope it miraculously appears and I don’t have to call everyone I’ve ever met to cancel my cards.

ETA: I’m DELIGHTED to let you know that after about 12 hours of worrying, I found my wallet wedged under the driver’s seat of the car. Huzzah! Now I’m ready for a hurricane.

Today is a kind of weird day. There’s no storm or rain yet – it’s perfectly fine outside. The storm isn’t really supposed to start until late tonight or early tomorrow. But the state of emergency starts at noon. And what do we do today?

I reckon it’s a good day to get my shaggy dudes a haircut!

Critical Breaking News!

My five year old son, a week and a half away from his first day of Kindergarten, has lost his first tooth.

How time flies.

Thucydides, naval warfare and sandwiches

I have now finished reading Thucydides’ abbreviated account of the Peloponnesian War. Which could perhaps be more aptly named “The war the Athenians would’ve won if they’d actually kept focusing on the Spartans instead of getting distracted every other year”. The history, written in the 5th century BC, goes on for 554 modern, tightly written pages. OK, with lots of maps, but it is still a tremendously extensive history. You find yourself wondering how there were enough papyrus reeds, or sheep, or whatever they were using to write on in those days for all of it. More astonishingly, the text ends abruptly, mid-paragraph, in the 21st year of the war. Given that there are some passages that show signs of later editing, it is entirely possible that the book went on for another couple hundred pages – but the remainder got lost. (You can just imagine the banal or tragic circumstance. Used to mop up spilled milk? Dropped from the desperately clutching hand of a man hanging with his other hand to the rigging of a boat? Forgotten when a family packed up and moved?)

Reading Herodotus and Thucydides back to back has led to a pretty darn decent grounding in ancient Greek history (and an EXCELLENT understanding of ancient Greek geography). The two authors are very different. Herodotus was very interested in sociology, social custom and anecdote (especially any of those that have to do with having sex in weird ways). I don’t remember any particular speeches in his story. Thucydides only gives you sociology when it is required for the storyline, and switches between event narratives and speeches. The speeches are really excellent.

Towards the beginning of the recounting, when Pericles fires the blood of the Athenians, you find yourself SO GLAD that you’re from Athens. As time goes on, your pride turns to ashes in your mouth as the Athenian public opinion squanders opportunities and reaches for unattainable and stupid goals. It’s possible, just possible, that I might have seen some corrolaries between those Athenenians and my own people, in character, confidence and (um) lack of focus.

Anyway, the seventh book is dedicated to the events of the siege of Syracuse. The Athenians, having left the Spartans and their allies strong and regrouping on their near border, decide it’s an awesome time to go and invade Sicily – mostly at the importunings of Alcibiades. Alcibiades is the most important and intriguing historical figure you’ve never heard of. If his decisions had gone another way, the whole history of the Mediterranean would have been different. Perhaps Alexander would have been a vassal, not a King. And had that happened, the world would have been different.

Anyway, long distance naval warfare was a relatively new concept. And Athens and Sicily were separated by a not insignificant expanse of water. Triremes were not ships – they were boats. They were not intended to be slept in. There were no facilities for preparation of food. So if you were in a trireme, you needed to stop on land in order to eat or sleep. This has an obvious restraining quality on who you can attack by sea in trireme warfare.

In one of the peculiarities of this form of warfare, the Greeks expected their soldiers to feed themselves from their wages (or booty). So they would pull ashore, find a market, have everyone eat dinner, go to bed, and then do battle the next day. At one point, to the end of the Syracusan campaign, the Syracusans arrange with a market to be held right on the shore. They pull off to get dinner, and the Athenians go and do likewise. But the Syracusans arranged to buy all the prepared food in the market, so the Athenians have to go further inland to try to find dinner. Meanwhile, the Syracusans have a quick dinner from the arranged market and then go back to attack while their opponents are still haggling over mutton. This was a decisive move. The Syracusans won that naval battle against the greatest naval power the world had ever seen. It was all downhill from there for the Athenians. A scant handful of the flower of their military forces survived to return from Italy.

While I was reading this, all I could think of was sandwiches. Seriously, if they just had sandwiches on those triremes, what an advantage it would have been! What a tremendous tactical flexibility this would’ve offered!

This war was brutal and bloody. Men died horribly. Women were enslaved and raped. (Seriously, the only time women appear in this narrative is to either be enslaved or, obnoxiously, widows told by Pericles that their greatest honor will be in being completely invisible to the real people.) But especially in the beginning, it was civilized enough to have some assumed graces. In the beginning of the war, you started in the morning and fought until dinner time. Then the living stopped, had dinner and gathered their dead under truce – to begin again on the morrow. Anyone violating these rules could generate an advantage – but it made warfare that much more awful. No dinner, just sandwiches, was what I would’ve suggested if I was an Athenian general. The next battle in Syracuse ended up being fought at night – with no lights, torches, uniforms. Men were killed by their compatriots, who in daylight knew them because they _knew them_ not by some other marker. This let the Syracusans defeat a superior number of Athenians, speeding the boulder of their defeat downhill with increasing momentum.

We are not done optimizing our lives and our battles. An innovation like sandwiches can be easily copied by the enemy. It brings a decisive but fleeting advantage, after which war is permanently even more miserable for all participants.

I think we still do this. Would you have invented sandwiches on triremes, or would you have left well enough alone? What are the modern equivalents, in warfare or in life? What do you think?

Back to life, back to reality

The vacation is over. The children have returned. The schedule is resumed. The fall planning has begun. The rules have been reapplied.

We’re back to our life. But with some changes. (NOTE: One being that I’ve been picking at this post on and off in 5 minute increments for about 4 days now…)

Last night, after Thane’s bed time, my husband, eldest and I laid on a blanket in the backyard, vainly fighting the full moon and suburban light pollution for a shooting glimpse of majestic fire. We laughed, joked, poked each other, and listened to the symphony of insects performing every summer evening. This was a moment that probably would have been an option in our pre-vacation world, but that we would have been to stressed, blind or busy to see. In the lassitude of people whose emotional needs have been met, though, we had a really joyous hour together.

In other urgently important news, Grey does not have a loose tooth. No he does not. He has TWO loose teeth. His bottom two center teeth are extremely wiggly. One has an imminent departure date. I was sniffling a little at dinner about him losing his teeth. He got very sad and tried to assure me that he’d done his very best to take good care of his teeth – brushing and flossing them! Factual analysis of his actual oral hygiene practices aside, I had to rush to reassure him that losing teeth was perfectly normal and expected – but that I like him the way he is and it’s hard to watch him growing up so fast. He gave me some big hugs, that made me feel better about it. (At least until I consider that I should be banking them against the inevitable teenage hug-drought, but that’s just borrowing trouble.)

And then there’s my knee thing. I believe I’ve agonized at length over here about my KNEE and how I’ll have to actually have surgery. I feel like a total wimp. I’ve always seen myself as a strong stoic person (hey! Stop laughing!) In fact if you’d asked me why I chose to give birth – TWICE – without drugs I’d say something about how it wasn’t actually that hard after you got over the screaming bit, and the toughest part was that your jokes just weren’t that funny between pushes. (Ah, hormones! How easy you make it seem in retrospect.) I begin to suspect, however, that I’m actually a wimp about medical procedures. You see, I have no problem with needles. I’ve given about five gallons of blood. No problem! And I’ve never caviled at the procedures I’ve needed. But, uh, I haven’t needed any. Or at least many. This will be my first time unconscious. Not asleep, but knocked out. I’ve never fainted, blanked out, passed out, gone unconscious or had general anesthesia before. This will also be the first time anyone has ever cut me open in any way. And it will definitely be the first time someone has inserted a cadaver tendon threaded through my knee, after trimming off ragged bits of meniscus.

And the more people I talk to, the more this surgery sounds like a big deal. I mean, weeks and weeks of badness. Probably two weeks of incapacitation, followed by a long period of limping. I don’t do well with incapacitation. I prefer to tough my way through the pain and do stuff anyway. In this case, doing so will be stupid and irresponsible. I have no coping skills for when I’m not allowed to tough it out.

It probably means I will have to (gulp) ask for help. So my husband will be with me the day of the surgery. My MIL (who is a saint) is flying down for that week. But that second week? I’m hoping I will be able to limp to the bathroom and get lunch for myself by that second week. But no way can I take care of my children, do the laundry or dishes or make dinner. And our household generates enough work to keep TWO people busy full time doing it. I’m terrible at asking people for help. I’ve had so many kind friends volunteer, and I don’t know how to graciously and gratefully accept.

I guess this whole surgery thing will teach me many things.

But first! We have a first day of kindergarten approaching. I’m hoping to sneak in a camping trip over Labor Day. I have two neat kids who are a ton of fun. My husband brought home about 20 boardgames from Gencon. We’ve had fun playing them together, and with friends. (And hey! We’ve been married for eleven years now!) And all my counters are completely covered in the bounty of my CSA. (Seriously, two watermelons and two cantaloupes!)

And of course, my usual sporadic once-a-week-a-third-of-what-I-want-to-tell-you postings will now resume. At least that should improve with surgery!

Minor miraculous detours

You’ve had the bones of our summer vacation – the bright lights on warm summer nights revealing the shadows of majesty in the theater. But there were other moments too.

The journey from Mt. Rainier (more or less) to Ashland usually takes about 7 and a half hours – if you stick on I5, go 70 and don’t stop. But it’s not what you would call a lovely drive (at least not until about Roseville). It had been years since I’d been to the Oregon Coast, and none of my memories of it are strong. So I decided this was an ideal time to rectify that.

It took us quite some time to get from Kelso/Longview to the water views on 101 in Oregon. Once we did, winding slowly behind lumbering RVs, the fog rolled in and there were few and dangerous views of the roiling waves below. Then, at one, we just stopped. Parked. Got out of the car and walked.

I had warned Adam not to expect sandy beaches. My (dim) memories were of rocky shorelines and dancing from dry-foot-fall to dry-foot-fall among the tidepools. But much of the Oregon coast line was sandy and lovely. This beach had large pebbles, then small pebbles then sand. There were uncompromising rocks erupting from smooth beds, like bullet holes through stop signs. We walked around a cape, carefully and quickly, to avoid the waves. We wanted to linger longer, but the pounding surf would soon make our retreat impossible. We stood, looked, listened, enchanted. I have long thought that the West was underlauded in stories and song. These coasts and mountains and forests deserve a rich, deep mythology. Those fogs should hide legends and rumors of legends. Those peaks should be shrouded in many names, mysteries and prophecies. And on this day, the waters of the Pacific, throwing themselves upon the unrelented shores of New Albion, were truly mystical.

But all stories come to an end, so we climbed back up to the car, rolled down the windows, and kept on. 101 jogged inland for a bit – more dairy farms than mystical rocky outcroppings – before lurching back out to the coast. We found a good radio station playing classic rock and roll, ignore the hours and miles in front of us, and sped onward.

An hour or so before dark, we stopped again. The northern fogs had lifted, and only the salt spray obscured the coast line. The beach where we stopped was a long one, with summer cottages redolent in childhood coming-of-age stories perched along the bluff, ending with a lighthouse that looked like the painted background on a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. We climbed down through scrub to the deserted beach. The water snuck up, like the serpent in Eden, to entice us in. Quickly shoes were discarded and jeans rolled up past the knee, and we stood touching the majesty of the unfettered ocean.

That half hour spent there, feet sinking into sand, waves crashing into us, eyes towards the sunset, was one of the most magical I have know. There we were, in love, together. We held hands before the eroding power of the Earth, strong together. We laughed, watched and exhaled our shallow breaths. It was with great reluctance that we finally put our shoes back on and climbed back up the bluff.

All was well with my detour (carefully negotiated with the help of Google maps with my husband who-does-not-love-road-trips) and I regretted not a minute of it. But it was 7 pm and we had between five and six hours of driving left in front of us. I was well rested, experienced and not too worried. With the last light of the long Western twilights, we turned onto Rt. 38 to Rt. 138 for the last haul to our rest.

It should be mentioned, at this point, that I am an extremely experiences mountain-road-night-driver. I learned to drive on mountain roads in the dark – usually while it was raining and I was super tired. I regularly came home from the theater in Seattle at 1 am when I was in high school. The roads I drove on were car-commercial-curvy with no lights. I remember some nights where the only point to the headlights were to be seen, not to see, since the lamp of the full moon offered more illumination than the paltry output of the forward lights.

I have never, in my life, seen a blacker road than I drove that night. There were no towns or outposts. There were no lights at the tops of hills. The moon was a memory, perhaps never to return. The stars were up there, but hidden and dimmed behind a high mist. The world was shrunken and swallowed to whatever dim advice came from my headlights, and my reflexes entirely guided by staying between the yellow reflectors and the white reflectors. We were far from rest or guidance and tiring fast – and in elk country. We were the only souls fool-hardy enough to be braving that stretch of highway in the dark. The road followed etching of the Umpqua River through the mountains, gleaming in starlight to my right, but beholden to the urgings of water (which are not the straight lines of men). Translation: it was curvy and windy and unpredictable, as well as dark. I do not believe two hours driving has ever left me as worn and weary as that two hours did. By the time we ceased our digression and made it back to I5, I gratefully passed the keys over to my husband.

But really, look at this road and note how green and unamended are the mountains through which it passes! (101 to 38 to 138 to I5)

We did make it safely, of course. And then we commenced our time in Ashland, returned home by way of Crater Lake (oh most patient of husbands!), went pontoon boating with the family and then returned, in stages, to the flat coast.

This is, sadly, the last report of my vacation that you will get. There’s one more story to tell, but I think it shall come from memory instead of journalism. But as a parting sweetener, I offer you these pictures!

Vacation 2011 Pictures

Camp Gramp — Fini

Note: I’ve been publishing my mother’s updates regarding my children’s escapades at Camp Gramp in Washington State

This is the last morning of Camp Gramp. We were awakened by Grey with wondrous news, his first tooth is loose. During Camp Gramp Baz lost a tooth, which he has placed in an envelope to take home to the tooth fairy. (This is not a full service operation). And Grey has his first tooth loose. What events! I e-mailed the parent units of the excited one, and Mom called to hear the news all by herself. I hope she had the phone a long ways from the ear!

We have started to collect the sundry things. The disaster so far is DS stuff. There is a sack missing. — the one with Baz’s case and various games. I am very sorry. The laundry is almost finished. Then I can have Grey and Baz sort stuff (Editor’s note: This assumes Grey knows which clothes are his – an assumption I would challenge!). I have allowed Grey to wear Baz’s plaid pants twice now. Clearly I am not capable of sorting the clothes. Kay and Thane’s stuff is easier.

The boo-boo report: The water park was hard on the campers. Thane has small abasions on his bottom. I was hoping they would be gone so I wouldn’t have to report them, but they are still there. The bottom of Kay’s bathing suit took the brunt of the wear. I haven’t checked to see if anyone else has bottom damage. No complaints = I don’t ask for the older ones. Otherwise, I think we are all OK.

It has been a wonderful Camp Gramp. You girls should be very proud of your children. (All right, the sons-in-law can also share in the pride) They are polite, intelligent, and adventurous. It is a pleasure to get to know the children. The Mineral church was particularly enchanted with the children. They specifically thanked us for sharing.

Today they go to Kent for a day and a half. Matthew (my son, you have a mother who loves you) will be taking care of them this afternoon. Matthew (loved by all, but primarily by his wife, Heidi) will take care of them tomorrow. Don and I will be packing for the Maritimes and sleeping later than 6:30 a.m. Then tomorrow night we take the Flynn children on the flight back to Boston.

We will take one last picture when we get all packed which I will post to prove they are still alive.

Thank you for sharing!

Gramama

Camp Gramp — Saturday

These updates are sent by my mom, telling us about the latest hijinks the kids are up to. My folks and kids will all arrive back in New England on Wednesday morning.

Lively day. We were invited to a play date at Sue and Dave’s. Their granddaughter, Melissa, was there. She is 7. She had prepared well for our visit — tea cups and punch, cookies, mac and cheese which was nothing like the stuff that comes out of the box. I need that recipe! They have an outdoor room kind of thing with a fire place and a fire was not amiss today. I think the high temperature was under 70 today. We even roasted marshmellows! Fun.

Then we came home and Unca Matt was here. So we had a computer afternoon. He downloaded Castle of Dr. Brain for the boys. A little difficult yet, but fun. I did a really cool book with Thane. It is a dinosaur book. When you find a page with the correct logo, you hold it up to your web cam and it gives a 3-D graphic. I sense a coming trend. It is pretty simple, but could become more complex. One graphic is eggs. You press the space bar and the eggs hatch. Just thought I would say that Thane didn’t really understand it and prefered reading the book, but hey!

Kay started painting her peacock.

Then Unka Matt took me to Kent to pick up the Saturn. Ironically, we both forgot our phones, which was a mistake. Dad did a fabulous job taking care of the kids. He is a hero!

10 p.m. — I think I will go relieve him!

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

When I returned to the office after a week’s vacation, in the standard office small talk lots of people asked me where I went. “I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.” For some people I had to explain that the festival is not a weekend-long amateur production. Others needed to be told that Ashland was in the south of the State – near the California border. Still others (in their defense, mostly my non-US colleagues) had to be told where Oregon was. But not a single person had heard of the festival.

This is tragic. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) should be internationally known and lauded. As their “About us” states:

Founded in 1935, the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is among the oldest and largest professional non-profit theatres in the nation. Each year OSF presents an eight-and-a-half-month season of eleven plays in three theatres plus numerous ancillary activities, and undertakes an extensive theatre education program. Operating on a budget exceeding $26 million, OSF presents more than 780 performances annually with attendance of approximately 400,000.

In other words, this is not a rinky-dink theater in the middle of nowhere. This is a theatrical powerhouse nestled between sea and ocean in one of the loveliest small towns I’ve ever seen. In my youth, I went to Ashland most summer’s with my Godfather. I learned an abiding love of Stoppard with Arcadia in 1996. I fell in love with Ted Deasy in “As You Like It” in 1997. I met Bobby McFerrin, barefoot and whistling, on the street the night after watching him rehearse an orchestra at the nearby Britt Festival. I have warm and lovely memories tied up there.

So this summer, when I heard they were doing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance on the open-air Elizabethan stage, I decided that this is where we were going to spend our summer’s leisure. And it was a very, very good choice!

We had tickets originally for four plays, but “rushed” a matinee play on our middle day. This is an excellent plan, if I may opine. Also, that rush play was the very best of our viewing there, leading me to be relieved and delighted we picked it up!

Tuesday – King Henry IV Part II
This was the last of the Henry’s I had not seen. I’m quite fond of Shakespeare’s histories. I liked Henry IV part I and I loved Henry V, so I was glad to see this bridge play between the boy and the man who stood on that French battlefield. But Henry IV Part II is really Full of Falstaff. It must be a difficult play to stage because, in truth, it is not one of Shakespeare’s best. The two concurrent plots seem very far from each other – suppressing the rebellion and Falstaff’s foolings. It seems as though one or the other could easily be edited out without affecting the counterpart. The production was an excellent one. My favorite interpretation element was having one of the characters deaf/mute, who communicated with Hal through this expressive and easily understood sign language. The flicker of hands and the unexpected element of interpretation was a delight to me. Still, the theater was half full and the play faded fast from memory. If you can see only one play at Ashland… not this one. (Although if you are seeing several, it should be on your list!)

Wednesday afternoon – Ghost Light
This was our accidental play. The promo text did not sound promising. Few experience the death of a parent against the backdrop of history. In Taccone’s evocative new play, Jon is a theatre director haunted for years by the assassination of his father, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. When asked to stage a production of Hamlet, the ghost of the king stalks the battlement of Jon’s mind and heart, and he is summoned to confront his long buried feelings. Smartly laced with poetry and wit, this world premiere is rooted in a crime that shocked a nation and changed a city—and a young boy—forever.

In fact, it didn’t sound promising at all. But I really really didn’t want to see Measure for Measure and it was half priced so….

People. It was fantastic. The dialogue sparkled. The fourth wall was breached in a most fascinating manner. The boundaries between reality, perception and dream were powerfully crossed and braided. The acting was superb. The characters were people you wanted to know and to sit with. There was one of the best awkward scenes I’ve ever seen acted. (Of course, that it included my long-time heartthrob Ted Deasy was just a bonus.) From first scene to closing, it was superb. I would strongly recommend that should you find yourself passing by Ashland, you stop and see this play.

Wednesday night – Pirates of Penzance
My family has a long, long history with Gilbert and Sullivan, and with Pirates in particular. At about Thane’s age, my brother watched a video version of Pirates (with Kevin Kline, Linda Ronsadt and Angela Lansbury … truly worth seeing some sad night when you need cheering up). But this blessed video was played every single day in my household for over two years. Sometimes twice a day. We can, collectively, sing the whole thing together. I know every line of this operetta.

Ashland was one of the few places I could count upon to improve, not disappoint. And I was not disappointed! The staging was a delight. There was a live orchestra (of course) and the conductor played a visible role in the play. There were periodic lapses into other musical idioms – all amusing – before snapping back to Sullivan’s original-as-written text. Through it all, the cast moved and flew and lunged and trotted (often with the assistance of tuxedo’d, white gloved assistants) across the Elizabethan. The production was full of fun and energy and enthusiasm – as it should be. There were just enough departures to keep me on my toes, but enough time spent on the original that I didn’t feel cheated. Perfect. I would recommend you see it – but good luck getting tickets!

Thursday afternoon – The African Company presents Richard III
I had originally thought this was actually Richard III. But no, it was about a freed black troupe attempting to put on a production of Richard III at the same time as a white company nearby. There were a few promising moments – a few speeches, a few exchanges, a few plot threads… but on the whole it disappointed. The drama of the black/white conflict was diluted. The love-plot seemed abandoned halfway. Instead of a tight interweaving of multiple plot threads, it seemed just disjointed. This was the first week the play was open, so there’s hope that it will somehow tighten. It was also produced in the temporary tent necessitated by the cracking of a structural beam in the Bowmer, so that couldn’t have helped.

Thursday night – Love’s Labours Lost
We closed our theatrical week with a bit of cotton candy. Love’s Labours Lost is one of Shakespeare’s lighter plays, with a group of boys and a group of girls playing with each other’s expectations, well mixed with a troupe of fools wandering through. This production was fun, light and did an excellent job of making the almost entirely verse play easy to follow for modern audiences. It was lovely to look upon and very funny when the text permitted it. It was a wonderful play to disprove the idea that Shakespeare is boring to a young person. It was a lovely way to end our stay.

There were two plays that, having talked with our fellow theater-goers, I really WISH I had been able to see. I was told by a fellow patron that August: Osage County might well be one of the best plays written in the last 100 years. Even putting aside such hyperbole, it came so highly recommended that I was sad I couldn’t fit it into our schedule. We also really wanted to see The Imaginary Invalid, mostly because Moliere is fun.

It was a superb way to spend a week of vacation.

Camp Gramp Thursday and Friday — Great Wolf Lodge

Note: these are updates from my mom about Camp Gramp. I just serve as the editor and publisher!

Yes indeed, Great Wolf Lodge was a fun place to be! Great wet fun was had by all. There aren’t many pictures because cameras and water don’t make a good match, but we had a great time. Thane played in the tot area. He loved the slides and sitting on the banana. Kay was with him most of the time. Baz was an intrepid swimmer. He did all the slides in the park, including the biggest. He did that with Papapa. We were supposed to go together but just didn’t find the right time. Grey did a wonderful job. He really learned how to handle the waves in the wave pool. Poor kid, he was too short for the big slide, but the was plenty of excitment in the ones he did.

Unfortunately, the grandparents weren’t with it and failed to get magic wands with the game. It is like a scavenger hunt all over the hotel. Next time we will be smarter.

The minute I get the three younger ones to sleep, I am going to bed. It was great fun, but I am really tired!

Hey, who took my toddler and replaced him with this boy?

Camp Gramp Tuesday/Wednesday

Can you hear the exhaustion in my post. My oh my, we are all tired. Poor Thane, his tooth brushing was certain the sad way. He is one tired little boy.

Tuesday we went to Pioneer Farms. That is an amazing place. Baz got to use the blacksmith’s forge. Thane petted a pig and chased chickens. They all tried to milk the cow and got a ride on the horse. Doing the laundry was fun, and so was grinding coffee for their Aunt. Unfortunately, the trip to Sheila was cancelled. Good thing. We all took baths and played in the back yard. We all needed sleep.

Wednesday was a three adventure day.

First, Wilcox Farms, which is now an egg farm. They have 1,000,000 chickens on the place. As you can imagine — there were a lot of eggs. Unfortunately, the guide was not kid oriented and although he talked to the kids, he was really long winded. But the school house was cool, and so was the heavy equipment to climb on. Grey’s favorite part was lunch. I do wish that boy would eat breakfast.

Adventure two, Nisqually wildlife refuge. It is a beautiful place to walk. We watched a frog eat an insect and heard lots of birds. Baz read all the informational signs, but all three of the older kids could handle all the headings. They just didn’t have the interest that comes with a little age. While the wildlife refuge is a place that we all want to go, the primary purpose of this stop was to let Thane finish his nap before the final adventure of the day, Chuch E. Cheese. The pizza was better than the last time we were there. It is still a parent trap, but it does entertain the kids nicely. It was facinating to see the kids use their tokens.

Baz. He used his tokens very slowly. He took Thane around for some time. He is so patient with him. Then he chose challenging driving games and things like that to do. They all took longer. He didn’t get too many tickets, but he got good play value for his time.

Kay. She was extremely thoughtful about her use of tokens. She like rides with video on them. She came back to the table to check with us the most often. She was a little panicked that she was not with us all the time. Her pictures is very cute.

Grey. Grey used his tokens first by half the time. He would come dashing back with pickets and put them in his cup, then fly off to do more. Grey got a very creative collection of pictures in which he had different emotions, mad, scared, happy, etc.

Thane. We could give Thane no tokens and he would be happy. He puts tokens in the slots of the most colorful game, then runs away without playing it. He is perfectly happy with the demo screens on most of them. We almost made it out of CEC with him happy, but there was an epic meltdown at the prize redemption area.

Great days!