Name Change

"Sam Lewis? Nice to meet you." So said a professor in my undergraduate German department in 1996 to me, after I had introduced myself to him. 

"This is Kim." So said my would-be director at a small liberal arts college in Virginia in the summer of 2008, as he introduced me to one of his co-workers. Truthfully, this was not an error on my part; instead, he just called me by the wrong name, but it is another evidence of people mis-hearing or mis-communicating my given name.

"Jim?" "Time," as too many people write my name in e-mails and on Facebook. 

I've debated this with my wife before, often returning to this conversation when another name slip-up occurs. It's a simple thing, but you wouldn't believe how many times my first name gets muddled, both by me and others. I'm very guilty of this poor pronunciation behavior, especially when I say my full name. The last letter of my first name (M) merges too seamlessly into the first letter of my last name (W). When those successive sounds emerge from my mouth, too often the M and the W blend together, creating a new, merged letter (like the L in Lewis above).   

I'm kind of tired of it, so I'm now going to introduce myself to new people this way: "My name is

...but I go by Tim." 

And who knows? Maybe after trying this approach with new people, I'll start using my full first name with everyone. 

Moose and his cousin D.

Much as Our Little Mouse bonded with her Wilson cousin C. on our recent Pennsylvania vacation, Our Mighty Moose got along just great with his cousin D. I should use cousin with quotes to indicate that we're not technically related, but after spending almost 4 days together, we decided to christen our families cousins in word.

Like Mouse, Moose does not have a ton of friends his age who live in a quick drive to/from our home. That may change as he starts elementary school and we get to know more families in the area. Two of his good friends are in 2nd and 4th grade, and they live kitty-corner to us, but Moose has to play-up to them and their antics. And he's not yet involved in sports, though he's starting soccer next month. 

So when he met the D-Man, who is a smidge older, it was like Moose was reuniting with a long-time friend. It was very interesting to us four adults (Kim and Boris, Becky and her lesser half) to watch the differences in how girls and boys play and interact. Our girls and theirs held hands, were content to play with toys for tons of time without our help or supervision, and were quick to respond to our calls. 

The boys? Rough-housing with each other, though not in a hurtful way. Running all over creation. Being loud. Pretending to be soldiers. Some less-than-soft words cast in the other kids' directions. Being territorial. I guess that is par for the behavioral course with young boys. That is how I acted when my three cousins from Alaska visited most every summer, and my cousins from a neighboring town and from Cape Cod came to visit concurrently. In this case, the behavior was amplified when there were 8 other kids running around! 

Seeing this pair of boys bond over these days was a highlight of our time with our Wilson cousins. I was very glad that Moose had a boy his age to play around with during this part of our trip! 

E-Bow the Letter

Twenty years ago, E-Bow the Letter, one of my favorite R.E.M. songs, came out. It almost instantly became one of a few songs to the soundtrack of my life at the time. It still feels that way, two decades later. 

I hear the song's melancholy chords and the mournful pleas from guest vocalist Patti Smith, and suddenly I'm back in my tiny university dorm room in Freiburg im Breisgau, feeling alone and pining for the routines I had known just days, weeks, and months before in the States, while also feeling a strong sense of "Make this year what you want it to be," in whatever ways that would unfold.

The swooning and the melodrama of this song's lyrics and melody, they perfectly captured my own feelings at the time. I was 21 years old, new to living in Germany, embarking on a year abroad in Europe, only knowing two people on the entire continent (Ola in Poland, Kathrin in northern Germany), and alternately homesick for the familiar people and places while also enthralled by all of the newness and opportunities to be myself. Aside from my two female friends (Ola and Kathrin), no one on the entire continent of Europe knew me. That was both exhilarating and tense. I could dye my hair, insist on going by a different name, be the extrovert I secretly wanted to be, be this or that, totally different in any way, or I could just be who I thought I was. 

No had any expectations or preconceived notions about me.

  As I write this, like the hypnotic E-Bow the Letter and the memories and emotions I felt at the time flooding back now, I feel nostalgic and melancholy, for a time of life that hit like a tidal wave and zipped past me in record time.

The Mouse and Her Cousin

Almost instantly after arriving at our friends Kim and Boris's house in Pennsylvania (now almost two weeks ago), Our Little Mouse bonded with Kim and Boris's daughter C., below. The girls are the same age. In Mouse's short lifetime, most of her friends are either older or younger; aside from her cousin and outside of school, there isn't a friend who is right at the same age as she is. I think she feels that, too. 

So when Mouse and C. met for the first time, it was like watching kindred spirits come together. Both girls have fun, quirky senses of humor. C. took a liking to me as well, and kept asking me to bring her "barbeque chicken," her favorite meal. From morning until bedtime, these two girls were constant sidekicks. It made me wish that Mouse had C. in our neighborhood, or someone like her; but preferably her!  

It was really sweet seeing these girls spend so much time together. These girls would hold hands as they skipped or meandered along the sidewalk, the shaded paths at Valley Forge National Historical Park, at church, and elsewhere. 

After spending Saturday evening until Tuesday morning together, unfortunately this fantastic duo had to say their goodbyes. I fully anticipated that Mouse would cry, but she didn't. Instead, yours truly was the one holding back tears, as I pulled our Blue Bomber mini-van away from the curb to drive on to Philly, and saw C. running up her sidewalk to wave goodbye to us. It was sad thinking that these quickly formed best buddies would go their separate ways until our next visit. 

C. gave us her family's Skype contact info, and wants to keep in touch despite the distance. We hope to visit our Wilson cousins again soon, too! It was just so much fun. 

August 1996: Kathrin's Visit to Freiburg im Breisgau

Twenty years ago this month, I was a newly arrived Ami (American) in the stunning Black Forest city of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. I make no excuse for my wardrobe, aside from naivety! I was trying my best to not dress like an American, not so much for concerns for my safety as I traveled but much more in an attempt to blend in better, in order to have a more immersive junior year abroad.

My friend to the right is Kathrin Nägelen. We had met four summers earlier, in 1992, when she and other members of her youth singing group Die Hamburger Alterspatzen, the youth choir of the Germany metropolis of Hamburg's city choir, toured several cities in the U.S. The choir's logistics person had contacted my parents' church to see if congregants could house choir members for their few days in the Boston area, and my parents agreed to house one, who turned out to be 16-year-old Kathrin. She had much longer hair in 1992 than in 1996. I was very curious to talk with her about life in Germany and to see what, if any, interests we shared. Through her very good English, Kathrin told me that she loved oldies music, from the 1960s, as did I. I can still remember Kathrin clapping her hands with glee when we realized we had this interest in common. 

We both especially liked Scott McKenzie's ode to the counter-culture movement, San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), from 1967. The song was written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who I blogged about two days ago. 

Kathrin and I wrote letters to each other about six times a year between 1992 and 1996.

Then here we were, four summers after first meeting, and half a world away from our meeting- point. Kathrin visited me within the first three weeks of my time in Freiburg. She sent me a postcard to my junior year abroad office days before I even landed in Germany; it was there to greet me, which was a nice touch. I called her at the phone number listed on her postcard, and we talked for a few minutes. My German skills embarrassed me. We didn't talk long. We didn't even discuss where Kathrin would stay. As I nervously got off the phone, I instantly felt badly that we hadn't talked more; turns out, her boyfriend had a friend in Freiburg, and this friend would be out of town for August, so Kathrin stayed there.

Kathrin's visit was terrific, arriving at a time when my homesickness was peaking. It rained a lot in Freiburg during her visit. The photo above was taken on her last day in town, when of course it was beautiful outside. We were standing about 500 yards from Freiburg's main train station (Hauptbahnhof, Hbf), where I had dis-embarked after flying in to Zurich and then taking a train to Freiburg on August 1st.  

I remember being nervous around Kathrin a lot on her visit. I was very self-conscious about trying to not speak English, yet was also self-conscious that my German was not strong enough; I was certainly conversant, but wanted to be better. The people I hung out with at the time were nice, but they were not my type of friends; we were all caught in the same wave of being newly arrived and not knowing many people, so we stumbled around together until real connections could be made with people that each of us jelled better with. 

Kathrin and I really didn't know each other much, either. Though very fun, it was a little weird to spend so much time with someone I had only known for a few short days four years earlier and then had spent the last four years connecting with only through hand-written letters (this was before e-mail!). Plus she had a boyfriend. Plus she knew that I thought she was pretty. Oh yeah, there's that. 

I was very grateful to Kathrin for making the trip from her parents' home outside Hamburg to spend a few days with me. It went by in a flash. I won a mini-golf game against her. We went out for pizza, beers, and ice cream, exploring this ancient city on foot, even in the rain. 

She laughed when I showed her my newly purchased umbrella. "Ach, du hast eine Damen-schirm gekauft," she chuckled. ["Oh, you just bought a woman's umbrella"]. It had a neat, tight rope attached from the handle, over the covering, and to the umbrella's metal tip, to keep the cover from inverting in the wind. It was a novel idea, one I'd never seen before. My light-brown umbrella didn't look feminine, not that I would have minded; I'm comfortable with my feminine side and it's totally cool to embrace it! Yet, I never could find a non-Damenschirm in the city!

All too soon, Kathrin returned to her life in Hamburg. I visited her and her family in January 1997 for a long, cold weekend. It was a really nice time. Even that year, I remember wishing that we had seen each other more than just twice. But she was busy with her life, and I was, too. We haven't seen each other since 1997, five years after we first met; it's now been almost 25 years since our first introduction. Kathrin got married around 2002 and still lives in Germany. I'd love to visit with her again someday; I'd love to bring my family to meet hers, and to show my family around Freiburg.  

FOMO: Family Movie Edition

For the un-initiated: FOMO means fear of missing out, a personal angst exacerbated by the myriad forms of social media that a] not only notify you with words that you missed a fantastic moment with friends but b] bombard you with photographic and other evidence of the revelry that you missed out on.

Yours truly has FOMO. For a lot of things. But in the interest of focus, I'm only going to post about my family movie FOMO. You see, for years I've wanted to watch countless family movies with our kids as they get older. Below is a list of the ones that they have seen without me, which I post as a way to chronicle the films that I'd still like to see with our kids, even though it won't be their first times:

The Wizard of Oz
Brave
The whole Ice Age catalog
All of the Madagascar films
Annie (the 1982 version)
The Sandlot
Charlotte's Web
The Fox and the Hound
The Secret Garden (I love this film's soundtrack).
The Black Stallion  

I'm sure there are other gotta-see-it-with-our-family films that our kids have seen without me. Years ago, I made just such a list, but my addiction to Excel spreadsheets at the time was countered by an addiction to rid my life of list-making. Here's to a re-start!

50 Years Ago: Walk Away Renee

Yesterday's post about this year being the 50th anniversary of the oldies classic Monday, Monday sent yours truly scouring through my database of favorite music to find another favorite song of mine, also from 1966. There was a time of my life when melancholy moods in songs instantly pulled me in. See: the Beatles songs Eleanor Rigby, In My Life; the Rolling Stones' stupendous Ruby Tuesday. The Left Banke's top hit Walk Away Renee, from 1966, was another classic that I listened to a lot in my young teenage years. 

I wanted to date a girl named Renee, but to not end up apart, as the couple do in the song. One thing about this song that intrigued is that the opening verse sounds a little like you, the listener, are just entering a conversation that the singer's been having with someone else -- that you're picking up loose strands, having missed the back story. 

Unlike other hits of its time, Walk Away Renee only features two lines in each verse before getting to the chorus. Ticket to Ride, for example: I think I'm gonna be sad, I think it's today yeah. The girl that's drivin' me mad is goin' away yeah. She's got a ticket to ride...  

Listening to it again now, after not having heard for it a few years, I've got to disappointedly say that Walk Away Renee is too melodramatic for my liking. It's schmaltzy. But I've always liked the singer's voice in the song, the way he conveyed his strong emotions [in real life] for a girl named Renee, who his friend in the band The Left Banke was seeing at the time.

Here is a YouTube video for this song.

Maybe I'm naive: Were romantic relationships truly simpler a generation before mine? It sounds like they were, from this song and others of its era. But, I'm not so sure. People have always been complex. But maybe Walk Away Renee came about at a time in the writer's life when his infatuation was simple, before the intricacies of adulthood got in the way.

Monday, Monday

Incredibly, Monday Monday is fifty years old this year. I've only known about this beautiful song for about half of its shelf-life. My Dad has given me countless gifts throughout my life. One of them was the gift of his taste in music, which I sucked up like a sponge as he drove me around on his work errands when I was in elementary school. We listened to an oldies music station out of Boston, and that's where I first heard the Mamas and the Papas' classic Monday, Monday, sometime around fifth grade.

I prefer this signature Mamas and Papas song to their other top-billing classic, California Dreamin'. It's a more upbeat tune, whereas California Dreamin' is moodier. Lead singer and head writer John Phillips (the late John Phillips) once remarked that he had no idea what Monday, Monday was about, lyrics-wise. Was it about his girlfriend Michelle (the blonde on Phillips' left in the photo above) -- the one I had a crush on when I first started reading about this group? 

The proclaimed mystery of the song's meaning only adds to the song's charm for me. As with any Mamas and Papas ditty, the group's vocal harmony is on full display in Monday, Monday, as the men sing "Every other day and, a fraction of a second later, Michelle and Mama Cass chime in with the exact same words. It's infectious, easy to sing along to (the lyrics aren't complicated), and makes me wish I had lived in the 1960s, to have heard this song live. 

Did the average radio listener know that this song was so unbelievably good? Was it recognized as a classic even in the moment? It's a timeless classic now, and I hope to sing along to it with my kids soon.

50 Years Ago: Solitary Man

Fifty years ago, Neil Diamond released his debut single, Solitary Man. Starting with a simple yet intoxicating jangle and soft lyrics about a girl named Belinda who cheated on Diamond, the tempo increases as the singer recounts how a rebound girl, Sue, also did him wrong. From there, Diamond just sounds more pissed-off and resolved. 

I kind of wish he had written more of these smart, introspectively strong, and kind-of angry ditties, instead of later offering Kentucky Woman, Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show, and heaven help us, I am...I Said. But obviously an artist can't churn out simple variations on the same general theme over and over again. Solitary Man is a rough-edged shot across the bow from a singer-songwriter who would mellow in time before veering into pop pablum with hits in the late 1970s and 1980s [Forever in Blue Jeans, anyone?]. 

Yet it all started with this brilliant, quick, and haunting first offering from Diamond.

Intercourse

Did that get your attention?!

During our recent Pennsylvania vacation, we spent one day in Amish Country. Of course, like every other tourist, we had to visit Intercourse. We passed the town's sign below while riding in a horse-drawn carriage on Monday, August 7th. 

Our four kids were with us, but none of them would wonder about the town's name or snicker at its double meaning. We did wonder why anyone would name a town after what my Freiburg friend Matthew liked to call the horizontal love trade.

Visiting Our Wilson Cousins!

Moving on from our Santa's Village chronicling, next up is our recent family vacation to Pennsylvania. This trip was awesome, and a big part of that was how well our four kids did. They had nearly two full days of driving, book-ending almost a week of meeting new kids and running like mad from early in the morning until way past their usual bedtime. But they were having a very fun time, and how could we not when a lot of that time was spent with our Wilson cousins in the greater Philadelphia area? 

As far as we know, we're not directly related within a recent realm of ancestors to our Wilson cousins, but we just decided on this vacation to proclaim ourselves relatives. We've known our friends Kim and Boris for about 10 years, from when they lived in the Boston area and went to our church. About 2 years ago, they relocated to Pennsylvania, and they live in a really beautiful stretch of the country.

This was our first time visiting them, but it won't be our last!  

After church at their ward on Sunday, August 7th. Trying to corral 10 kids ranging in age from 12 to 2 to pose for pictures:

Our Mighty Moose (in the white shirt and blue sandals) loved playing with his cousin D., who is about one year older. They also got along well with C., who is just one year younger. Meanwhile, Mouse (in the white dress and black shoes) and C. were best buddies from the get-go. They are the same age, and they were inseparable during our 3-day visit. 

10 Kids and 4 Adults!

Sunday afternoon dinner at the Wilsons! They have a house big enough for a dozen-plus people (and more). We're thrilled for them to have these new digs. After dinner, we bundled up all 10 kids and drove to Valley Forge National Park for a beautiful late-afternoon walk around the massive grounds. It was an incredibly eventful and fun day. More to come!

1 Crazy Day in Amsterdam: 1996

Twenty years ago today, I arrived in Amsterdam with 4 Americans and one Spanish woman, all of us college students, for a brief visit. And by brief, I mean 12 hours. 

On August 17th, 1996, I had been in Europe for less than three weeks, starting my junior year abroad in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. One weekend, our little group of friends decided to take a super-cheap Schoenes Wochenende ("beautiful weekend") train ride to the Dutch border. In Germany, the Deutsche Bahn rail system offers Schoenes Wochenende train rides, only within the borders of Germany, for dirt-cheap prices. The catch is that the trains are super-slow and often feature numerous stops for connections and transfers, so going to a city four hours away may take double that on a Schoenes Wochenende train. 

We were very young, adventurous, and able to bounce back easily from little to no sleep. Our group thought it would be simply fantastic to hop a Schoenes Wochenende train from Freiburg at about 1 in the morning on a Saturday, get as close as we could to the Dutch-German border, and then depart on a Dutch train at Enschede in the eastern Netherlands province of Overijssel to catch a train to Amsterdam. 

And we did it! It took us 14 hours to reach Amsterdam. I'm also pretty sure that we rode the train from Enschede to Amsterdam for free; we kept hiding from the train conductor, moving ahead of him or her as they walked through the aisle.   

We finally stepped off the train at Amsterdam's Centraal Station on a beautiful Saturday mid-afternoon. The station was stunning, unlike most of the train stations I had seen in the U.S. Our group ate dinner at a sidewalk cafe, and as we sat at our outdoors table, our feet rested not on pavement but on layers of soft sand. I was struck by that. We had Heineken beers with our meal, which I also thought was novel: to be drinking a Dutch beer in the capital of the Netherlands! As an aside, I loved Heineken; it was one of my favorite beers.

Given our incredibly brief time in Amsterdam, we didn't see the Anne Frank House. The lines were far too long. We toured the canals, ate and drank, and later that evening tried to find a youth hostel to stay for our solitary night in the city. Finding nothing as the clock inched closer to bedtime, my friends Dan, Sara, Moira, Sarah, and Virginie, and I opted to sleep outdoors. 

Oh, my parents would have been thrilled to hear this if I had told them! 

I spent a few hours from midnight until about 5 a.m. in some area between deep sleep and fully awake on a little, beautifully carved park bench in Dam Square, below, in the heart of Amsterdam. For mid-August, it was a chilly night, and I remember thinking it felt comparable to a late fall night back in New England. I felt safe doing this. I don't recall thinking I could be mugged, stabbed, maced, kidnapped, or killed. I'd never sleep outside in any American metropolis, but Amsterdam felt (at the time, at least) light-years safer. 

Having slept very little on Friday night into Saturday, and a bit on the long train ride Saturday morning, to then not sleeping much Saturday night...it's a wonder any of us were functioning Sunday morning, when we schlepped back to Centraal Station to begin our 13-hour train ride back to Freiburg! Obviously, I would never attempt such a fiasco-risk farce at my age now, but when you're 20 years old, you can recover rather easily from such shocks to your system. 

Plus, it makes for a wild tale, especially for your envious friends back in the States. 

I always wanted to return to Amsterdam. A full year loomed ahead in August 1996, and I thought I had plenty of time to re-visit this place, and especially to see the Anne Frank House. It wasn't to be, perhaps because Amsterdam was a victim of relatively close proximity. The city was reachable within just a few hours' train ride (more, of course, if I opted for the Schoenes Wochenende ride, which, of course, I wouldn't do again), so instead I chose to take trips to further-afield locations such as Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic, thinking that I could return to Amsterdam on any weekend during school vacations. 

"Sometime this academic year" became "I won't get there before I return home" became "I'll definitely plan a trip there when I return to Europe" and is now "Maybe Amsterdam will be on a grand European vacation when our kids are older and more self-sufficient, so Becky and I can see it together." 

As for this little group of weary travelers, within a few weeks we disbanded. Dan went on to the university town of Konstanz, Virginie returned to Spain, Deb departed for the university town of Ulm. Sara, Moira, and I were to stay in Freiburg for the year, but our friendship was short-lived. We were all very different people, bound together momentarily mostly because we were all Americans who had arrived in a foreign land within days of each other, and our language and customs and dress brought us together. It literally hurt our heads to speak and hear and try to keep up with the German language all day, every day, after having learned it in hour-long college classes a couple days a week back home for the last few years. We were suddenly thrown into a language mixer. 

Nothing against any of them, but we weren't destined to be long-term friends. I think of them now with a smile and recall our antics from this excursion two decades ago. 

Summer of Fun, Summer of Slumber

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity in Chez TimBeck6. We went from Santa's Village, to me then leaving for a work conference in Nashville the next week, to then winding down July with camps for our girls, to our long family vacation of the summer: Pennsylvania! 

This vacation deserves numerous posts, but all of the hubbub of the last few weeks can be summarized by this photo of Yours Truly and Our Baby Grouse:

Crashed out on our friends Kim and Boris' air mattress in their spacious, awesome home in the Pennsylvania countryside. It was a little slice of heaven to be reunited with them and their kids, all of whom line up nearly perfectly in ages with our tribe. Much more about this trip soon! 

10 Years in 1 Place

Sometime this month, exactly ten years ago, the Misses and me became first-time home owners. I never have, and won't until we move on, post exterior photos of our house or pictures of our backyard or neighbors' houses that feel like pulling back the curtain on our privacy and safety. So if you like text-heavy posts, today is your lucky day!

We liked the potential that our first home offered: it was spacious (3 bedrooms, an attic, a massive though unfinished basement), had a decent backyard for the area, and was close to both Becky's job as a teacher and my job. The price was right, too, but it was only right as a result of the home needing a tremendous amount of TLC. 

It needed a new roof and windows. It needed new carpeting in the bedrooms, new sanding of the hardwood floors downstairs. It needed a new water heater, a new furnace (and a switch from oil heat to natural gas). It would need a kitchen overhaul. It could certainly do with a second full bathroom, on the first floor. I kept an Excel spreadsheet outlining each necessity, its anticipated cost, and its timeline, which adjusted for each item as other needs became more (or less) pressing. For example, converting the upstairs attic into a massive playroom for our children quickly dropped down in priority once our heater needed to be ripped out and sent to the museum for ancient household appliances. That sucker was almost as big as Becky's Mazda Protege!

With all of that, why didn't we walk away? Since we envisioned being in this home for at least 5 years, we accepted the long list of to-do's that this home would require us confronting in time after we signed the purchase-and-sale.

While we were on our cross-U.S.A. trip, a window guy installed new windows. In that summer of 2006, we ripped out the old, nasty carpeting in the three bedrooms and waited for a few weeks for new carpeting to be installed. Since we didn't want to cram all of our stuff into those bedrooms -- only to have to remove them once the new carpeting arrived -- we kept our entire inventory of furniture, books, kitchenware, etc. -- everything that had filled our first place together, a 2-bedroom apartment in a neighboring town -- in our living room and dining room! 

You could not see out of our dining room windows, because we had them blocked by bookshelves. We ate our meals sitting on our double bed, which was in our dining room.

The only time we went upstairs was to use our solitary bathroom. Being naturally prone to spooking myself, I kept envisioning the upstairs as potentially spooked. It kind of gave me the creeps to go up there even in the morning, since Becky left around 7:00 for her job and I was home for another hour before I left for my work. We did not have an outside light on our back door for an embarrassingly long time (hint: about 4 years!), so we had to keep our back hallway lights on and leave our back hallway shades up before we left home after dinner so that we could return in the later evening to a somewhat-lit home.

Speaking of shades, our living room did not have shades, blinds, drapes, or curtains from August 2006 until the spring of 2007. I was never comfortable with that, but we had huge repair expenses for other, more pressing needs at the time.

Such was the state of our first home when we moved in, a decade ago. The last ten years have been all about transforming our house, room by room and bit by bit, furniture item by furniture item, paint color by paint color, through all kinds of weather and all seasons of life. 

Our last major renovation was now 4 years ago, so it's been nice to have a break -- although not really a break, since this home now houses 4 kids and 2 adults! But you know what I mean.

2 More Weeks 'til Kindergarten

Our Mighty Moose has only a few more weeks before his school years begin. Sure, he was in pre-school this year, but it was just 3 days a week for a few hours each day. 

I am excited to see how he transitions, not only to full-day school but also to a Spanish immersion-focused Kindergarten class. Our town has such a program, a pilot first for our town. Town officials asked for a 5-year commitment from the parents of kids accepted to the lottery. Kindergarten will be conducted 80% in Spanish and 20% in English; over the 5-year tenure, the percentages will meld closer each year, so that by fourth grade, it will be 50-50.

Moose's number was picked in a lottery, and he's going to be in a Kindergarten class with 19 other kids, at a new school, with a new playground that we've watched being built this summer. Moose, his brother, and we his parents toured the school at the end of June, and we liked what we saw and heard. It has a lot of potential to be great. 

It also, naturally, has potential to be not so great. Case in point: Moose has vociferously raised his objection to not being in the same school as his sisters, and to not being in an English-only Kindergarten. His reaction has made us a little uneasy, so we're not talking about this looming transition much right now. Instead, we're focusing on enjoying summer. 

We're fervently hoping that Moose's opinion changes for the better in time. He is a very sociable child, and I think he's felt starved for attention and friendship these last two years, as friends have moved out of town; as his baby brother dominated a lot of parental focus; as his sisters brought friends over to our house; as older friends end their school vacations and summer breaks and return to full-day schooling. I really hope he makes some good friends, which would be helpful to steer his Kindergarten transition in a positive direction.

Just Along for the Ride

This is my idea of a fun family ride, especially as the clock ticks toward our 8th hour of park-going at Santa's Village and our four kids are all making demands gentle suggestions about which ride to invade patiently wait in very small [thank goodness!] lines. All 6 of us crammed into a single Skyline Sleigh ride at Santa's Village for a very leisurely, not-so-high above the tree tops ride. 

While not nearly as thrilling as most other attractions, it was a nice break from the occasional break-neck pace at which we explored the park. That must be by design, to let parents whose dogs are barking get a few minutes of down-time. We were told by a ride operator that the unofficial record for most people squeezed onto a single Skyline Sleigh was 14 -- mostly skinny teenagers and their friends, plus some little kids, all in one sleigh. We were to six, and that felt cozy enough, thank you. 

We also opted to keep that $18 burning a hole in our wallet and instead took a photo of our Skyline Sleigh photo. I'm sure Santa's Village found another way to make us hand that amount of loot over before we were done, though! 

Grouse and the Penguin

Grouse was amazed by this costumed penguin on our visit to Santa's Village. He kept toddling after the penguin when he saw him. We ran after this character a bunch of times to let Grouse give him a high-five. At the end of our amusement-parking, the penguin and these other characters were making their way to the clocking-out booth after another day of amusing park-goers. Grouse spotted the penguin again, and was enamored of this creature that he momentarily forgot about his ice cream!

But up-close and personal was clearly too close for comfort for Our Baby Grouse:

And a huge hat-tip to the dude to the left of me. He was entertaining in a quartet of singers that morning, belting out Christmas songs in the middle of July as overly-tired parents meandered into the winter wonderland, with 8 hours of more meandering facing them as they ferried their kids around the sights. 

Hours later, this same guy was dressed as Jake Frost, a sarcastic trickster beguiling park-goers with card tricks and other slights-of-hand. I am an adult, and feel that I should have this stuff figured out, but I was honest-to-goodness completely stumped on how he did some of his card tricks. Whatever Santa's Village is paying this guy, it isn't enough in my book! 

I have more than your average park-goer sympathy for park workers. For three summers in high school, I was one of them, so I felt a kinship with Jack Frost, the penguin, and Kris Kringle [or, at least the college-aged people playing them!] 

Ice Cream for All!

We ended our day-plus visit to Santa's Village with heaping cones and cups of ice cream. It was a delicious end to a fun day of amusement-parking with four kids. 

We left it to the one not eating ice cream to take our family photo! But I think she indulged her limited sweet tooth to "help" Our Baby Grouse finish his serving. 

The next time I'm planning to take our family to Santa's Village, it will be far too cold for ice cream. The park is open, and most rides are in use, on weekends throughout Christmas, and they have a New Year's Eve celebration complete with fireworks to ring in the new year at 8 p.m. That sounds heavenly to me! I just need to convince our Mrs. Claus that this is a wise idea in the dead of a northern New England winter. 

Pre-School Graduation

So...yeah this happened over a month ago, well actually almost two months ago. But what gems one can find while pouring through hundreds of photos on one's laptop labeled "Summer 2016." Some are just too good to not post. Our Mighty Moose "graduated" from pre-school at the end of June, and we his parents were both able to be there for his little ceremony. Three pre-school years down, one more to go in a few years.

Here is our little graduate, in his glory. He humored us for a few seconds to permit us to take his photo, all while impatiently eyeing his melting orange creme-sicle. As with so many school and church and sports events, the pre-school graduation was basically an opportunity to ingest more snacks and treats, as if these kids are traipsing with hush-puppy eyes through a daily wonderland of only fruits and veggies, begging for a sticky, sugary, salty, way-too-bad-for-you snack diversion!

Our Baby Grouse got in on the action, too! If memory serves me right, he dropped his creme-sicle upon seeing a huge slab of cake. He has his priorities! We're very curious to see two things: How Our Mighty Moose transitions to full-day Kindergarten, and how Our Baby Grouse adapts to being the only one of our four kids home with Mommy all day each week. 

Mouse Goes on a Hunt

Our Little Mouse loves collecting small things, scavenger hunts, and looking at maps. At Santa's Village, she was able to scratch all three of these itches. The park features these elves throughout the place, one for each letter of the alphabet. Kids are given a Christmas tree-shaped blank punch card when they enter the park, and are then sent off by their parents to find each elf and punch their card. 

Mouse was the most enthusiastic for this excursion. There were several times when she was much more interested in this pursuit than any ride or other attraction. She collected all of her stamps between 3 and 6 on Monday afternoon and within a half-hour. She was mighty proud of herself! Mouse loved this activity so much, she returned around lunchtime, by herself, to the place where these punch cards are given out, to get a second punch card! 

We were getting down to the wire as the park's closing at 6pm approached on our only full day at Santa's Village. I was glad to step in to help Mouse collect her stamps while she focused on going on all of the rides that she had ignored earlier on our visit while she was getting her card stamped. Each kid who collects all 26 stamps earns a certificate and a small Santa's Village ornament.

Mouse, of course, collected two of each!

Biased

Yeah, I am totally biased. Unabashedly biased. Reveling in my bias. But Our Little Grouse was by far the cutest two-year-old in the joint when we visited Santa's Village. We even had amusement park actors and ride operators stop their performances and attractions to gaze in misty-eyed awe at our little man. I cautioned them that his cuteness is legit, but so are his temper tantrums and his obsession with binkies.

Looking forward to next year's trip to Santa's Village, where Grouse will be able to go on many more of the rides that, this time around, were off-limits to him due to his height. This restriction resulted in him repeatedly going on smaller rides, like this one:

It's kind of cute, but also kind of sad, isn't it, seeing Grouse ride all by himself. 

Here, take this photo instead to cheer you up:

Grouse and Mommy on an inflatable tube ride that gets riders just mildly misty with water. 

Pretzels!

It's what's for lunch! Here is Yours Truly returning to a Santa's Village ride where Mommy and our kids were eating PB&J's and drinking water. I was swept up in the nostalgia of this amusement park, jealous of less health-conscious park guests sauntering around with heaps of fatty grossness, and looking for some treat that was not French fries or onion rings or ice cream or cookies. Sure, it is a lot of carbs and sodium, but it's not oozing saturated fat like all of the other wares being hocked at one of the many Santa's Village cottage eateries.

I was also enamored of my own body for having lost and kept off 15+ pounds since January and hoping to treat it [and myself] [okay, and my family] to a snack. 

These pretzels were dynamite, and yes indeed these pretzels made us thirsty!

Close Quarters

We ran into a lot of trouble trying to find a place to stay for a 3-night vacation in the White Mountains. Given its remote-ness, that is not as simple as booking a place in a more touristy area. A lot of options that we saw online were either nasty, too expensive, located 45 minutes away in Vermont or Maine, or [on Airbnb and similar sites] too creepy. One place had a mold infestation earlier this spring. Yeah, we'll pass. We considered camping, but we're just not there yet as a full family. 

Getting down to the wire, Becky found a motel and booked it for 3 nights. It was not far from Santa's Village, which was key. This was one of those situations where whatever would cover our basic needs would suffice. This place was it. The surroundings were beautiful, it had a pool, it had a little, very out-dated playground, and plenty of trees. 

It also had some beds, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a sink, along with a roof and a door.  

It didn't have soap, shampoo, fans that breeze silently, or air conditioning. 

Also, as I experienced first-hand, it did not have friendly staff. I was that guy who unfurled the poolside umbrella on a hot Monday mid-day while my kids swam. I was that guy who failed to furl it back up when gusts of wind unexpectedly and suddenly cascaded over the motel grounds. I was that guy chasing said umbrella across the pool platform as it tumbled precariously near my kids. I was that guy that got a passive-aggressive scolding from the motel owner for not asking him to help unfurl the umbrella, though there were no signs instructing us to ask for his help in this regard. He was also unpleasant to Becky, which for me is grounds for steam-inducing, childish behavior on my part. 

Case in point: Motel owner dude, I saw your envelope on the breakfast table, the one labeled "Gratuities welcomed." Minutes after we drove off, never to return, I hope you came in to clean this cottage and saw that said envelope was entirely, gloriously empty. 

Our kids loved this cottage. Our girls slept in the second bedroom next to us, mommy and I had the master bedroom, and our boys slept in the kitchen/dining room, Moose in a fold-out bed and Grouse in his pack-n-play. They conked out around 9:15 each night and were totally unable to sleep in past 7 each morning. 

But at least we made some memories, and we'll certainly remember this cottage for the bad and the good. Living for days in such close quarters made us try to be more accommodating of each other, though we're not perfect.   

Two Trios

Mommy and our girls in the White Mountains. Goose is almost 9 and a half, and Mouse is almost 8 years old. 

Becky is on the cusp of finally turning 30!

Me and our boys in Santa's Village, waiting out a rain delay. Moose is 5 and Grouse is 2 and a half years old. 

Dear Old Dad was fortunate to get his AARP discount on his Santa's Village admission.

10 Years Ago: B&T Hit the Road East

As a follow-up to my earlier post about my first-ever [nearly] cross-country road trip in the summer of 2006: Becky was in the depths of first trimester misery when she and I left Utah 10 years ago this summer after visiting our family out there. The long drive back home was not nearly as enjoyable or memorable as our drive to Utah. A couple of factors played into that:

Becky's sickness. My worry over work that contractors were doing at our home in Boston while we were out of town. My worry over being first-time homeowners. Terrible nights of sleep on the drive back home. BOR-ing landscapes. An overall more rushed desire to get the heck back home, for all of the above reasons. A route home that we chose, for all of the above reasons, that resulted in driving through BOR-ing landscapes. We did not have the luxury of copious time-off. I had to be back to work on a Monday, and we left town on a Tuesday, after being gone for almost two weeks.

On our trip home, we followed most but not all of the red-outlined Interstate 70 shown above. We drove through Colorado, then Kansas and Missouri, southern Illinois, Indiana again, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and on into New England. I did knock Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia off my "States I Need to Visit" list, though.

Like my fantasy about Wyoming being green, mountainous, and beautiful, I thought much or most of Colorado would be a teeming landscape paradise of soaring peaks, thick green forests, and wide vistas. How naive, especially for someone like me who loves maps and geography. I clearly hadn't done my homework. 

Once we got just outside of Denver, Colorado to the east of the Mile High City loomed before us as an expansive, nearly feature-less and nearly boundless terrain. But hey, I did imagine it being "a wide vista." See above! 

It was just a wide vista of nothingness. Same with Kansas. Having experienced hundreds of miles of nothingness through Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming on the drive West, I somehow could not fashion more excitement or enthusiasm for hundreds more miles of the same exact barrenness for days on end. I loved being under such a massive dome of sky for a while, unbroken by trees or mountains or urban ugliness. But after a while, shockingly, the sense of awe loses its luster.


Oh Kansas! I was excited to see you for the first time. Of course, images of The Wizard of Oz immediately sprang to mind. Somewhere, what felt like 4 days through just the first 5 counties of western Kansas, I spotted a weather-worn road sign for a Wizard of Oz museum. It was about 10 miles off the highway, and while I'm not a huge Oz fan, the idea of taking a break from 424 miles of Interstate 70 through all of Kansas was tantalizing. 

Good notes: thankfully, we avoided twisters. We drove through the flagship University of Kansas campus in Lawrence. I am a big sucker for college campuses. Exploring them is one of my favorite pastimes. 

Much to my delight, Kansas does have an eastern border, so we left the state eventually. But our delight was momentary, because Mighty Missouri came next. Heaven help me, I was about ready to put us on the next flight home for Becky's trimester sickness and me to stave off insanity brought about by tremendous treeless terrain. We just first needed to arrive at a major metropolitan area, and that goldmine wasn't reachable for what felt like another 31 hours. 

Speaking of college campuses, I just Googled "western Missouri" to add some photos to this post. How did we miss this gorgeousness? It is Missouri Western State University. Not sure why "Western" doesn't precede "Missouri," as geographic adjectives tend to do in other college or university names. 

This campus would have been well-worth a major detour off I-70. We also originally planned to visit Mormon history sites in Nauvoo, Illinois, but health, time, and my attitude derailed this idea. A decade later, and we still haven't been to Nauvoo. We do intend to visit this town someday and see its beautiful temple:

In Missouri, we also missed driving through its capital, Jefferson City. Visiting state capitals was another must-do on our road trip for me, but I-70 is about thirty miles away, so we skipped this stop. But we did see the Gateway Arch and briefly drove over the Mark McGwire Disgraced Steroid Cheat Highway in St. Louis. This was years before the city corrected its mistake and renamed this small portion of I-70 in honor of a far more worthy Mark, Mr. Twain.

To be honest, I don't remember Illinois or Indiana. I wanted to make a major detour and stop by Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky, to perhaps see Secretariat's grave. Likewise, driving by the University of Kentucky in Lexington was a major draw, but we passed on that, too. Instead, we stuck to Interstate 70.

At this point, I was unsure of three existential things:

Would I ever sleep more than 5 hours a night again?

Would Becky ever talk to me again?

Would we ever reach the bosom of tree-filled, humid, super-green Massachusetts? 

Goodbye, Kentucky. We will visit you sometime! We breezed through Ohio again, stopping in Columbus to visit the last remaining York Steak House in the country. I loved this place as a kid, when there was a York in the town where my grandparents lived. My Dad loves to remind me of the time when he and my Mom took me to a York Steak House when I was about 18 months old. It may have been my first dining outside the home experience, and I was reportedly doing just fine, until a much older kid accidentally kicked my high chair and I howled in fright. Check, please!

Being back in a York Steak House after a nearly 25-year absence was bittersweet. Reality cannot compare with sacred memories, embellished with the passing of time. There were no outside-facing windows in a York Steak House, and this one in Columbus kept to that bizarre, how is this not an occupational health and safety violation? tradition. The steak was meh, but the chocolate pudding was delightful, like eating a slice of my childhood. I was in heaven. 

For about 15 miles, I-70 slices through West Virginia. That felt good enough for me to check this staff off my must-see list, though it deserves a week's vacation at some point, if only to see this:

And of course we sang John Denver's majestic Take Me Home, Country Roads. And of course we got misty-eyed in Becky's gray Mazda. That song was 35 years old in the summer of 2006, and yet it felt timeless and still is. 

Pennsylvania was the next drive-through, and we could finally see the end in sight. At least we were now in a geographic area (the Northeast) that felt close to home. And as our home got ever closer, and our road trip got shorter by the mile, we both felt like it was somehow ending too soon. No minor- or Major League baseball games. No museums. No Nauvoo. No seeing friends along the way [though we didn't have friends in most of the states we drove through at the time].   

No stop-off at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece in southwest Pennsylvania. Again, a must-see for another time:

 

We did reach home in August 2006, our apartment that was the first placed we lived in together. After that, we checked in the next morning on our new place in a neighboring town that, weeks later, would be our first place of our own. It felt great to be back home, where new adventures as homeowners and expecting parents awaited us! 

This trip, now a decade behind us, obviously remains quite memorable for good and bad reasons. But I did come away from it convinced that road trips are fun, that this earth is beautiful in all of its variety and shades of beauty and levels of attractions, that sitting or standing or driving under a massive sweep of horizon is breathtaking and quite impossible to properly describe, and that such scenery -- the wondrous, the plain, the boring -- are to me proof of a God who organized all of this wonder.