camping – Page 3 – My Truant Pen

The moment I’d been waiting for

Thane has gone camping every summer of his life. He was born in October, and by the time his first May rolled around I decided that it was time to go camping! (As an aside: why did we NOT go camping for the 5 summers between graduation and having kids? What was I so busy doing? It’s a mystery.) I trundled the kids (and the pack ‘n’ play!) into a car and by gum, we went camping. His first camping trip was at nine months. We went camping when he was 18 months. And 27 months.

Two years ago - at 1.75, 4.75 and 33.75 years of age — Two years ago – at 1.75, 4.75 and 33.75 years of age

Last summer, my dearest husband and I began to wonder if we even liked camping (the answer being – we definitely like it by ourselves!) It was tough camping with such little kids. And as much as I love camping, it did require toughing. At 9 months, Thane wasn’t – you know – sleeping through the night. When he was 1, he would wake up at 5:45 hungry and bored. At 2, he still so desperately needed his naps and had such a miserable time taking them. There were the diapers. The constant vigilance. The sleep deprivation. The whining. By an objective measure, it wasn’t really… you know… fun. The kids were too small to swim unless we were physically holding them. Too small to go boating. Too small to go fishing. Too small to go for more than a mile-long leisurely hike. Too small to make them do the dishes. Sometimes camping was refreshing, or satisfying. There were glorious moments. It broke the tedium of every day the same. But by the time it was pack-up time, we were really ready to go.

But I had faith that if I just toughed it out, camping with my sons would eventually be awesome. I mean, I love camping. I love the tent. I love the smell of woodsmoke. I love the call of the loons on the lake. I love lying in a dewing field watching the stars come out. I love finding sticks for kindling, swimming, hiking, reading and discovering cool spiderwebs. I mean, isn’t this what having boys is supposed to be all about, this ecstasy of outdoorsiness? All I had to do was get to that moment – that trip – where it all clicked.

And folks, I’m here to tell you THIS WAS IT. We went camping this last weekend, and it was awesome. The weather was awesome. By dint of making reservations in January, we had a truly amazing camping spot. And the kids were so fun. We skipped naps. The kids slept until 8 am. They paid attention to our “how to make a fire” lecture. They entertained themselves. Grey rode a bike without training wheels for the first time. He read a chapter book. Thane used his “playing quietly by himself” skills. Grey swam without flotation devices, made friends, and periodically wandered back to the campsite to check in. Thane went the entire weekend without any potty training accidents. My sons summitted their first mountain (Black Cap Peak). It was just great. I sat by the fire, watching the water, listening to the loons on the lake, hanging out contentedly at the beach, and eating all the s’mores myself because for some reason my crazy children don’t like s’mores.

I’m sure not every camping trip will be this awesome, but this one really was. So for those of you wondering when it’s a good age to bring your kids camping… I vote for 3 and 9 months.

Here are some of the pictures from this trip

Tongue-tied

Some of what I've missed telling you about

When you get out of the habit of frequent posting, you get tongue-tied. There’s a pressure behind your speech, of all the things you meant to say that are unsaid. This blog is part friendship, part letter home, part baby-book, part journal and part sanity check. But it also only touches a portion of my life. There are realms of my life that go unsaid and undocumented here. For example, I rarely talk about work in any but the vaguest of ways because, uh, not to put too fine a point on it but it’s really dumb to talk a lot about the details of your work in your personal blog. (See also: Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Why haven’t I written very much lately? There are a few elements. First of all is the sheer time/energy factor. I’m really crazy super annoyingly busy. I just simply don’t get much downtime between a full time job, obnoxious commute, small children, real dinner, housework, church work (another place I’m horrendously behind/lax) and needing 8 good hours of sleep a night.

Second is, truly, that tongue-tied factor. It’s harder to restart than it is to continue.

Third is the stoooopid leg. OK, a bit more story here. We all remember how I brilliantly busted my knee leaping off a 5 foot stone wall. Right. Then we all remember how much BETTER I was getting. Well, about a week and a half ago, doing yoga as prescribed by the orthopedic surgeon to restore my flexibility before I hurt myself, I stretched the opposing tendon to my injured one. It seemed minor. I went to PT the next day and we got some stretches to work on that. Look how GOOD I was being people! Then on Thursday night I went to dinner with people I totally didn’t know. It was fun. I sat with my knee bent, which was sort of novel and fun because I hadn’t really been able to sit that way for two months! When I went to get up, uh, I couldn’t. I really, really, really couldn’t walk. I couldn’t put any pressure on that leg. I needed help to get to my car, which sheesh. Talk about embarrassing! Then my knee blew up to balloon size.

I did the only logical thing I could do. We left the next morning to go camping.

Then my stoooopid lower back which I’ve totally had completely under control since Thane was born decides that one bum joint isn’t enough. I have kept my lower back issues under control with a combination of massage and core strength. With the enforced inactivity, the core strength has been compromised, and the additional pulling off of significant limpage has caused some serious back issues which infuriates me past speech.

So yeah, things have taken longer than they usually do and I’ve been in pain.

And fourth? Well, there are big things afoot in the parts of my life I don’t talk about here. And that’s where I’ll leave that, in incredibly tantalizing and confusing form. Best of all, from an annoying-my-readers point of view, if this thing doesn’t pan out, you’ll never know what it was! Muahahahah! If it does pan out, it’s too big to not be mentioned here. So you should cheer for success with it (which makes it clear, I hope, that the THING is an opportunity not a threat).

So what haven’t I told you? Well, we went to The Gloucester Fiesta with our neighbors the weekend before last, and had a complete blast. Watching our kids play together in the surf (in their diapers, the weather was supposed to be awful but turned amazing!) in the foreground while the walking of the greasy pole went on the in the background totally made my day.

Grey has started summer camp. It seems fun, but extremely tiring and logistically challenging. Each day is different and requires different gear! On the other hand, they get two fantastic field trips a week!

I am on my third batch of jam for the summer. So far there’s two strawberry and one strawberry rhubarb.

We went camping for the 4th weekend (see also: things that are challenging with one leg). I took no pictures. Our Saturday was fantastic. Our Sunday was good. We came home Sunday night, and then had fun watching fireworks with Crazy Unka Matt on the 4th proper. Grey fell asleep in the kitchen chair eating a post-fireworks snack.

The meeting I was at when my knee conked out was a really neat one about setting up a Presbyterian Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program in Boston focused on food justice. The best part was all the locally sourced dishes that were fed to us there. YUM!!!! Or maybe the best part was the fun and interesting ideas tossed around. It’s hard to pick.

We’re getting ready for our summer vacation. My knee has BETTER behave, but I find it oddly prescient of myself that for once I opted NOT to go backpacking this summer. Instead, we’re going to Ashland Oregon. We’ll be seeing 5 plays in a week for our vacation, and I can’t wait.

OK, those are the big things I’m willing to talk about. What’s going on with YOU?

And the thunder rolls

Fierce weather has cut a swath across this continent. Tonight it is touching down in my small Commonwealth – but so far distantly. Tonight, after the children were tucked in, I snuck up to our high attic to watch the lightening. It was truly a remarkable night for lightening. The sky flickered as though some distant celestial campfire threw shadows upon our darkened world – illuminating the spring-heavy trees and church steeples. The thunder was a constant rumble. The lightening I saw never touched down – it threaded across the sky like revealed veins in the encircling arms of the sky. But here, north and east of Boston, it seems not much more than a summer storm, ushering fast, cool winds.

The fifteen minutes I spent there, in a dark room watching lightening flicker ceaselessly, seems like the first quiet fifteen minutes I’ve had in about two weeks. It has been a busy stretch! When I think of all the things I’ve saved up to tell you – important things! – I feel nearly overwhelmed. And tonight I feel too poetic for bullet points. Last night I stayed up until 1:15 in the morning transcribing 18 pages of notes on the risks and mitigations of an ERP transition for a 9 hour meeting I attended. If I never see another brutally factual bullet point, it may be too soon.

So instead we will wander on together, long form.

First: my knee. When last we left our favorite joint, it was in dire discomfort. I checked that wall I so blithely jumped off again yesterday, and I must confess that it might be closer to five feet than the four I defended myself with. A week after the initial injury I met with an orthopedic surgeon, who got me to PT not 5 minutes later. Really. Remarkable. I did a few PT sessions, and now I’m quite certain that it was a bad sprain. Today, I managed to do several flights of stairs leading with BOTH legs. I even ran for a bit before I realized that was probably a bad idea. (But it was pouring!) I kneeled to pick up toys. I am pretty sure in two weeks there will be barely a twinge left. I’m going to try to actually get ahead of my pre-injured state with the PT sessions I have remaining though. This knee has never been quite as strong and capable as we might desire. But at this point, it is only hampering the most enthusiastic of my activities. (No 5K for me this weekend, not that I was planning on one!)

Second: it’s a darn good thing I was 90% mobile, as we went camping this weekend. At the time, I would’ve told you it was buggy, stressful and I was unsure of whether this was all worth it. It has only taken a few days to fade into lovely memories. How wonderful and odd our minds are to make it possible for us to enjoy things in retrospect that we did not enjoy at the time, or to forget pain and remember pleasure. One of those remembered pleasures was swimming. Our preferred campground, White Lake State Park boasts a lovely sandy beach offering access to a lovely mountain lake which is surprisingly warm, even in May. We went swimming three times, which is a pretty good ratio for so early in the season. Grey displayed significantly more water skill. Thane showed significantly more water-wariness (after recreationally attempting to drown himself constantly last year). I got to take some lovely swims out towards the middle of the lake, past the sight of inflatable alligators where all I could see were mountains, trees and water. Grey made a friend in the little boy at the next campsite. Thane did 1000 puzzles, just like he would’ve done at home. We also had a lovely “car walk” across the Kankamangus, down to Lake Winnepesaukee and back. I have concluded that the thing that would make camping super fun was if some of my friends came too, so we could tell tall tales around campfire. Unfortunately, my friends all seem to have either a) lake houses or access thereto or b) sense.

Third. It has come to my attention that my children are growing up too fast. I’d like to complain to the management, please! This morning was, truth be told, Kindergarten orientation. We went up to Grey’s to-be classroom and met his to-be classmates and to-be teacher. It is a lovely classroom, with books and colors and name tags. It is a place where I think he will be happy. The school is super duper. I mean, I went to FOUR elementary schools, and you could combine the enrichment features of all four of them and still end up short of this one. There’s a music room, and art room, a gym, a stage, a science room (seriously?!!?). They have onsite physical and occupational therapists. There is a school nurse and school psychologist. The library was large and friendly. There was a well equipped computer classroom. The children we saw all seemed to be engaged, having fun, learning, doing cool things. They were very friendly, welcoming the little kids to the school. It felt like a very healthy, happy place where the kids learned good things – and where there was room for them to be themselves. I am super-pleased, since this is just our local public school!

Then, when I picked Thane up, I got the word that he will be going to preschool next month. Indeed, he had apparently gone for a visit today, and his teachers had a hard time convincing him to come back to the Toddler 2 classroom. “He’s so ready” they told me. I know he is. I can’t argue. But sometimes I look at him and wonder where my little baby went. I can hardly see any traces of the infant in his determined features and flamboyant curls.

So while the accountant in me looks at these big changes and says “KACHING!” (because lo! Preschool + public Kindergarten < toddler care + preschool!), the woman in me, growing a little older, looks a little wistfully at how quickly her sons are wantonly abandoning their baby-hoods in preference for boyhood. I like babies. I was rather fond of my babies. I'm proud and pleased by the young men my sons are becoming, but I hope they don't feel the need to be too grown, too soon.

There you go – the momentous events of the last week and a half. Perhaps sometime I'll have the leisure and opportunity to post things that are NOT bare-bones updates… but we will all have to wait together for that moment.

The summer’s wise

Although the calendar informs me that there are several precious days of summer left, my updates are more sporadic than I might wish.

This summer was an exceptional one. I’m not quite sure how to articulate it, but it seemed like uber-summer — the kind of summer used to define what summer is. (Reminding me, in fact, of last Halloween). Perhaps it’s looking at the world through the eyes of my sons. For Grey, this summer might well define what summer is. It may be the thing he unconsciously expects for the rest of his life. (Note: my uber-summer was the summer I was nine and living in the fields and forests of Washington state. According to my memory, I spent the entire time wandering the woods, catching newts on the pond and watching clouds wend their way above dancing firs.) But this summer was one of those kinds of summers. It started early, in May. The weather turned exceptional after a soggy spell of spring and a less-brutal-than-usual winter. And it stayed exceptional. The summer made you comfortable and secure in its summerness. I forgot entirely about jackets. My sons wandered in sandals alone. The windows were only closed when it was too hot out. There was warm, hot, and omg.

This summer was also full of joyful adventures. We took three 4-day weekends to go camping with the boys. I watched my sons evolve over the course of those trips. I watched Thane learn how to entertain himself (and I learned what to pack so he would). Grey made friends with the kids next door, and ventured past the protective skirt of his parents to roam with the packs of children. (Well, he was more watched than he realized, but he never caught me tailing him. And he never needed me to be tailing him.) Both boys made a lot of progress swimming. (Thane would push himself along with his hands in the shallow water, saying “‘wim! ‘wim!” the last time I took him to the lake.) Heck, the boys even figured out how to sleep on their shared and bouncy air mattress. At the end of the summer, my husband and I sat in front of a roaring fire, our sons sleeping nearby, reading as the sparks flew to the visible milky way above.

There was my whirlwind trip across country with both boys to California. That had some very *important* moments in it, and some valuable ones. Those will prove precious, now and later. But I think my favorite parts were getting to know my young cousin and the brief hours we spent at Yosemite. There was a primal longing for me that was quenched, scratched, call it what you will. It was both deeply desire-inducing and deeply satisfying. It was captured by this moment, I think:

The golden light, the tall trees, the river, the mountains, the children

Of course, notable among the life-long-memories was the trip to Istanbul. The heat of summer was just one of the flavors of that journey — the clarity of the winds off the swirling straights, the competing calls to prayer from the minarets high on hallowed and historic ground, the delights to be found in aubergine… it was a week never to be forgotten and long to be savored.

Then there were the day to day things that came together to make it just and wholly summer. Every week I had a huge box of produce to find a way to work into my menus. Many a Monday night I stood at the sink peeling peaches, or stirring jam hot on the stove, my hair curling at the nape of my neck. My sons would ask to play in the park on the way home, and I would oblige. In the undimmed sunlight of 6 pm they would run and jump and climb and crawl. On Saturday afternoons, you might find me in conversation with a neighbor on the latest happenings on the street, or watching our children playing together. Most nights we slept with the windows wide to the light and breezes and air of a barely-cool summer.

It has seemed so long and glorious and full. It has been the epitome, the true expression, of what summer can be even in a life fully lived with jobs and kids and church and all those things that keep me on my toes.

Autumn is my favorite season. The crispness and urgency of the beauty catch me up short. The leaves (after a brief, drought-driven flirtation with color) have only now started to consider the possibilities inherent in changing their green gowns for gold and crimson. I traded out Thane’s 2T summer wardrobe for a 3T winter wardrobe this evening. It seems selfish to hope that autumn is as gloriously autumnal as summer was graciously warm. But oh! I do hope.

I rarely cite song lyrics, because I mostly listen to 16th century polyphony and that makes for really obscure allusions, but one of the few pieces of music from the last 50 years that I do know is the King Singers’ cover of “The Summer Knows”. It summarizes well the intentional seduction of such a warm and easy summer:

The summer smiles, the summer knows
And unashamed, she sheds her clothes
The summer smoothes the restless sky
And lovingly she warms the sand on which you lie.

The summer knows, the summer’s wise
She sees the doubts within your eyes
And so she takes her summer time
Tells the moon to wait and the sun to linger
Twists the world ’round her summer finger
Lets you see the wonder of it all.

And if you’ve learned your lessons well
There’s little more for her to tell
One last caress, it’s time to dress for fall.

And if you’ve learned your lesson well
There’s little more for her to dwell.
One last caress, it’s time to dress for fall.

Grab bag

It’s sad. There are two things you need for a blog post: time and topic. But any time you have a topic, it means your life is busy and you don’t have time. Conversely, whenever you have time, it’s often because your life is boring. Granted sometimes you lack both time and topic, but that stings less.

Ah well. This past week has been a paucity of time and a plethora of topic. This leads to a blogging style of bulleted vignettes. So, without further ado….

I just wrote a birthday party invitation to Grey’s girlfriend. She apparently likes Star Wars. I approve of this as girlfriend criteria. Also, he pretends to die whenever he sees her — on the rare occasions he doesn’t run away. He seems extremely satisfied with his relationship.

I’m always surprised when I’m the biggest geek in a room. I mean, in my social life I hang out with video game developers and people who go to Gencon. We had Talk Like a Pirate Day at work today, with costume contest and scavenger hunt. I won “best Piratical attitude” and the scavenger hunt, and some people were shocked by my geekitude. You have no idea, folks. And these were programmers!

Camping with the boys was awesome this past time. Thane’s fixation on cars makes him much easier to manage. Granted, he attempted to drown himself about every 2 minutes while we were swimming, but that’s pretty much standard operating procedure. The boys were fun, the weather was great, we actually could relax and read, and I love Kindles. We got Grey a set of mostly wordless comic books called Owly and I got complete wish-fulfillment as he sat glued to them and reread them multiple times.

What Grey thinks of camping (from school)

I’m reading Herodotus right now. We’re reading it for our humanities book club. It’s like 600 pages long, so I kind of thought a head start would be a good idea. I’m also attempting to read project management books, a book on Kelso vs. New London Development Corporation (it’s weird to read a book about people you know in a place you know at a time you were there), and Owly. (Hey, you have to keep on top of what’s up in your kids’ life!) At least I finished the one on the strategic importance of Field Service.

Ooh! Ooh! I got to do actual code this week at work! Java on struts with Hibernate handling the data connections using ANT for builds with Subversion managing the codebase in the Eclipse IDE. My contractor was explaining all the ins and outs of the system I’ve managed the building of. It was very exciting. It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve lost all confidence that I know what to do around code.

The Red Sox have given us an awesome season, given their constraints, and would be winning the AL West. They’re still making it fun to follow the games. I’ve also decided to become a football fan this year. Um, go Pats?

I made another batch of plum jam. This was spiced plum jam, which is totally different. In many important ways.

Finally, I met a new person last Friday. He wasn’t very talkative, but he was pretty awesome. I see us having a long and fantastic friendship.

Camping, Round II

Last year, summer was replaced by several months of late April. I recall one or two blessed moments of warmth, between rain storms, but the camping last year was heavy on tarps and light on swimming. This year, so far, the weather has been fantastic!

I recall last year, when Thane was a 9 month old patiently accompanying us in his stroller, thinking that this was the hardest camping would be — it would never be so hard again. HA! My youngest child, delight of my heart, is a fantastic sleeper with one caveat: only when he is at home in his own bed an his own circumstances. Given the novelty of a bed where moving around is possible, he took full advantage of his liberty in order to not sleep.

Example Scene:
-Thane is obviously tired: eye-rubbing, cranky and easily upset
-Mom reads Thane several books, lays him gently on the air mattress, gives him Puppy and says “night night”!
-Thane looks angelic, thumb in his mouth with his hand wrapped around Puppy’s ear. (Note: Puppy is a rabbit. Ours is not to question why….)
-Thane lets out a deep sigh of contentment and says, blissed out, “Puppy”
-Mom leaves the tent (nearly tripping) certain that Thane will now go to sleep like he would in his bed
-A voice emerges as she zips up, “Mama?”
-More insistent “Mama? Mama. Mama! MAMA!!!!!”
-A Thane-shape appears outlined in the green nylon of the tent “MAAAAMAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!”
-Mom returns to the tent. Tucks Thane in with puppy. He gives an angelic sigh and sucks his thumb…. rinse and repeat. For several hours.

On the fourth of July, he got up at around 5:45 and caught only about half an hour’s nap. He stayed up until after the fireworks… nearly 11 pm. This from a kid who usually wakes up around 6:15, takes a 2.5 hour nap between 1 – 3:30 and goes to bed at 7:15 sharp (or you pay for it).

But other than the complete and utter lack of sleeping children, we had an awesome time camping. We’ve gone with the boys five times now? At five times, your traditions start to feel like real traditions. You begin to be an old hand. There are ways you “usually do things”.

One of the neatest parts of this particular camping trip is that it marks the first time Grey has been part of a kid-herd. These phenomenon, a relic of simpler times, have more or less disappeared from suburban neighborhoods (at least mine). On either side of our campsite was a gaggle of children, roughly Grey’s age. Both gaggles invited him to tag along. So for hours at a time I could SEE him, but he was over there, playing with the other kids, swapping silly bands and playing those imaginative games I remember so fondly from my youth. It was wonderful to have him safe, making friends, and playing outside (while I attempted to keep Thane from launching head-first into the fire or eating the Cheerios he’d dropped on the ground).

We did a lot of swimming this last time, since the weather was perfect for it. It’s a nerve-wracking time. When *I* was 4 I knew how to swim, or at least well enough. I didn’t have swimming lessons until I was 9 or so, but I recall being perfectly happy in the water, even when my feet didn’t touch. Grey isn’t there – not at all. We did swimming lessons last summer, but we missed half of them because we were camping. (Ah! Irony!) So we figured this year we’d wait until fall. In the interim, though, we keep Grey very close. Thane, in his continuing quest to give us gray hair, loves the following water sports: flinging yourself backwards until your ears are under water, falling down in the water (forward – allows you to see if your arms are long enough to reach the ground AND keep your mouth above water), falling down in the water (backward – babies have no core strength and really can’t do a “situp”), eel-imitation, and sand-eating. Also, taking whatever toys are unguarded on the shore.

There were notably fewer calm and relaxing swims out to the bouys this time than there were last summer.

Our big “car walk” this trip was up to Mt. Washington. I would hereby like to apologize for all my snide Northwest superiority regarding our mountains. I have long felt that any mountain you could drive up was no mountain. Then I drove the road up Mt. Washington. Now, I’m an experienced mountain driver. I grew up on car-commercial roads. But the 16% grades and no guard rails… well. Actually, I’m not so sure that’s a new experience (I remember particularly vividly a trip we took up to some Lion rock or some such thing up a one-lane logging road that had recently had a washout…. and let’s not even discuss the state of the road last time I went up Llad pass), but it was a rather daunting one. And Mt. Washington is pretty extreme. We went on a very, very hot day — temperatures in the mid-80s to low 90s. At the windswept top of the mountain it was about 50. And there was snow. So I’ll admit it. It’s a real mountain.

Adam & the boys at the top of New England

On my way back down, pausing to cool the brakes, I had the momentary thought that maybe, just maybe, on this adventure so like my childhood adventures (see also: Llad Pass) I was the first Johnstone to do this very-Johnstoneish trip. I reveled in the thought that there was a crazy, mountainous adventure that I got to first. Then I called my parents, “Yeah, that’s quite a road isn’t it?”

I should’ve known better.

The boys and me at the same spot - the hat does move around!

It was a wonderful time. I really like camping. I like being out in the woods. I like resetting my view of the world. I like the depth and breadth of time I spend with my family. And I like cooking everything in bacon grease. I would really like to find some “camping buddies” — folks who wanted to share those bacon-grease cooked eggs, or who can handle a s’more with the best of them. Ideally, perhaps, someone with a few kids so we could have a built-in gaggle. (Also because anyone without kids would likely be really annoyed at the stuff it’s hard to do while camping AND be a responsible parent of young children.)

And this is obviously the hardest time of life to go camping. Next year? Will definitely be easier.

I saw a shooting star

http://www.artinnaturephotography.com/photo.php?id=17&gallery=galleries — The stars over Mt. Rainier

Saturday night, I saw a shooting star.

That may not sound significant or momentous to you. Perhaps you live in a place where you can see stars in the night sky — more than the 20 or so that outshine the ambient light of cities. Perhaps you have ample opportunity, on your drives home, to pull over and admire a particularly brilliant night. Perhaps you can’t exactly recall the last time you saw a shooting star — you’re sure you have, sometime — but it doesn’t matter because astronomical events just aren’t that important to you.

These may be some of the ways you and I are different, then.

Ten years, now, I have lived in places where you could not see shooting stars. For ten years, I have lived within a ten mile radius of the City of Boston, with the orange omnipresent glow that ranges, with the humidity, between present and overwhelming. Ten years, the same feeble 20 stars have been my rare nightly companions. For nearly half that time, approaching five years now, I have been tethered to my home at night. It’s not entirely safe to walk alone in the dark, although I do so. And almost always, one of us (my husband or I) must be at home to listen for the late night cries of our children. I could not see the stars even if they were clear, because I cannot look.

Before that ten years, the stars were very much a part of my life. New London, Connecticut has lights. Certainly. But many fewer and weaker and further down the hill. I used to love walking around Harkness Green in the evenings – from the soft first evenings of September through the bitter colds of February and back to the noisy darkness of May. Sometimes alone, often with friends, I would walk: South overlooking the estuary of the Thames, West towards Winged Victory and the party noises emanating from Freeman, North facing Harkness Chapel then East across the new sun dial. My eyes ranged out and up. It was dark there (with one particular light that always seemed to either go on or off as we approached). The stars were present in greater numbers. For one glorious year, the Hale-Bopp comet hung directly over Knowlton, where young girls had danced with Coast Guard cadets in long-gone times.

My love of the skies had not started with college, though. Even before that, I lived high in the mountains. Growing up, I could see the Milky Way spread out across the sky. I didn’t know that for the urban world it was an unthought-of myth. I remember one particular night when I was driving home, late, and the astonishing brilliance of a moonless starry sky was so incredibly distracting that I pulled over and just looked until I was thoroughly chilled. I used to go to the graveyard — a flat, long horizoned space with no lights — to watch the stars in the dark of the night. I recall one rather ominous occasion when a herd of elk traveled across the clearing while I was there. I rarely brought a flashlight, and the large thumping shapes were frightening in the dark of the cemetery.

In all my sky-gazing youth, the most precious moments were the shooting stars. Have you ever seen one? Do you remember it? My passion for them started during a summer camp. We’d gotten rained out from our backpacking trip, and were sleeping under the stars in fields just to the north of Mt. Rainier. It was during the Perseid meteor shower, although I didn’t know that at the time. It was a super clear, high, moonless night and the stars fell nearly every minute. I loved them. I loved the surprise gift – the reward of watching and waiting with alertness. They were thrilling. Since then I’ve considered meteors to be gifts, benedictions, blessings from a loving creator.

I do not know exactly how long it’s been since I last saw a shooting star. More than three years, almost certainly. Perhaps more than five. I do make visits to places where stars can be seen, but often it’s cloudy that particular night, or I cannot leave my sleeping babes, or the moon steals the stars from my sight. But on Saturday, after all my boys had gone to bed, I crept away from the dying embers of my New Hampshire campfire and walked in darkness to a small clearing near the lake where the loons mournfully cried. I laid on my back in the grass on a warm summer’s evening, marveling at how many more star there were than even my memories portrayed, still knowing I was seeing only a portion. And just before I stood to return, there across the sky sped a streak of light, gone before my eyes could turn fully to take it in. A shooting star. A blessing and a benediction. And I returned with joy to my family.

I’m verbing my noun

It’s been quite a week for me and I’m near incoherent tired. SOME silly people wouldn’t blog when they can’t get noun-verb agreement, but I’m far more cavalier than that! We took a four day weekend and went Camping! In New Hampshire! With a 4 year old and 18 month old! Now that most of the scars have faded, it was a lot of fun. Thane has a death-wish, of course, which seemed most evident in the water. He loves it when he has a bath and lays his head back in the water. The same move in a foot of lake water, on the other hand, has predictable effects — at least to the grownup mind. He got pretty bored at the campsite. I realized, as we packed up, that we brought umpteen toys for Grey, but hardly anything for Thane. No wonder he attempted to drink the dishwater.

Anyway, so Thursday was ALL PACKING and Friday through Sunday were ALL CAMPING and Monday was ALL DOING CHORES.

Normally, work would seem vacation-like in comparison, but this week we flew in a bunch of colleagues from several different continents (bonus French accents!) and spent extensive time in windowless conference rooms discussing the relative merits of SAP and Siebel. And a good time as had by all. But it involved like all my time and brainpower. I mean, I didn’t even get to read my blogs! Or my advice columns! THE HORROR! This is probably the longest I’ve gone without updating in, er, a long time.

So instead of a nice and detailed summary of camping with three maniacs and some meeting notes, I’ll simply leave you with a portfolio of pictures:

Parks, backyards & camping

The beginning of the end of summer

We went camping again this weekend — the last of our planned three day weekends in New Hampshire. It just so happened that this long-planned weekend coincided with Hurricane Bill. It was rather, uh, wet. And damp. And muddy. Happily, our tent has the floor plan of the Taj Mahal (although it did seem to shrink as the weekend went on), my husband is a tarp-affixing, rope-tying ninja, and we contrived to have fun despite the thunder and lightening.

Some friends were camping at the same time and they brought us fresh-baked cookies. Such things had not been dreampt of in my philosophy before.

Other notes on camping:

We played “Roll Through the Ages” again which is a great two player game. Sadly, it was likely the last time I’ll get to play it since it was roughly my 6th consecutive win and I won by a huge margin. This doesn’t bode well for talking my husband into it again.

We managed to sneak some lake time in between thunderstorms. On the plus side, nearly no time was wasted applying sunscreen!

Thane developed amazingly during the weekend. When we returned, Unka Matt got a quizzical look on his face and asked, “Has he grown up since Thursday?”. Yes, Unka Matt, he had.

That last one probably deserves more than a bullet point. The last day, after we’d broken camp and gotten everything in the car, we went for a final swim in some of the best weather we’d had to date. As we reluctantly pulled ourselves out of the warm waters, I held Thane’s arms to have him walk out – on a whim. It was too deep to let him crawl, so I kept him on his feet. And we walked. And during that walk, something turned on for him – the realization that there was this new tranportation method available to him and that this was something he could do. He desires it. Thane has not yet taken his first unsupported steps, but he has stood for significant periods of time. He’s cruising. He’s on the verge. It was astonishing to see that moment of transition between a crawler and one who aspires to walk.

Unlike previous camping trips, I didn’t take any pictures this time. I’m not sure why not – I just didn’t. The only pictures taken were on our way home, at the Miss Wakefield Diner. As I took this picture, my loving husband said, “This is why I wanted to be a father. I remember now.”

Pictures!

I spent last night uploading the next set of pictures. There aren’t any artistic masterpieces in this lot:

July2009

There are some videos, cute kids, church outings, camping, etc!