"My turn! My turn!"
Or perhaps the solution is to double up?
The Swing
Bookends
My mother sometimes would be telling someone stories of her youth and mention her best friend, S, and how they could get together after not having seen each other in years and it would suddenly be as if they were back in school together.
"Years melt away" is the cliche, I suppose.
Old friends,
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the 'round toes
On the high shoes
Of the old friends.
Or old friends hang out in the driveway, taking turns playing badminton with the Girl.
While the Boy watches intently
Occasionally Mama gets into the game, and then we're all in trouble.
Meanwhile, the Old Friend calmly entertains everyone.
Especially the Boy.
Last Day Portraits
Sunday in the Park
L has had the same best friend, E (for the sake of simplicity, Big-E), for five years now. They met at preschool, thus bringing our families into a closer orbit than would have otherwise naturally occurred: play-dates became dinner with both families, or even a short vacation together.
Five years, for seven-year-olds, is virtually eternity. It stretches even longer than the endless nights of childhood when we simply can't wait until morning.
"How long until morning?" we as mom, and the resulting answer might as well be expressed in scientific notation.
So every now and then, the two families get together for an afternoon at the pool, dinner, or perhaps an afternoon at the park. The five kids have great fun together, the parents chat and take turns tag-teaming with each others' kids ("E, slow down!" "Big-E, you interrupted her!"), and in the end, we all return home satisfied. What's not to love about an outing that gives the kids great joy while simultaneously exhausting them?
Over the past year, though, a second connection has developed. E has been in the same preschool class as E (gosh -- this is getting confusing: three kids with the initial initial "E." Let's just call her "Lady-E"), and when we asked E if he was excited about seeing Lady-E today, he smiled hugely and said, "Taaaaak!" (The question was posed in Polish: he's much better about answer in the same language than L is at this point.)
So L and Big-E zoomed ahead on a scooter and bike respectively while E and Lady-E tended to hang back on their less speedy models. And I (initial for the middle child, not me) sort of hung in the middle, like a middle child would.
We saw some lovely views, including a beaver dam,
had fun pulling our vehicle when we got too tired to ride it,
and had a nice picnic to fill the bellies and stop the complaining.
E and Lady-E are now the same ages (roughly: Lady-E is about a year older) as L and Big-E were when they met. And while five years have passed in the interim, none of us could have possibly believed how quickly it would have gone. Five years for a seven-year-old -- forget about it. You might as well be talking the age of the universe.
Five years for any of us? It's a flash, a blink, a second degree, a mere half-a-decade.
It's absolutely nothing. Indeed, for us, the passage of twenty years has become nothing. I see on social media that a twenty-year-old beauty contestant boldly wore an insulin pump with her bikini (never mind the ethics of judging someone's worth or beauty -- oh, never mind), and I think, "Twenty years. That makes it 1994. I was starting my senior year of college."
These kids are still learning how to control their arms and legs: college seems like an impossibly distant reality for them, but for us, it will just be a blip. A few birthdays, a Christmas or two, and suddenly this child or that is packing up to head to this or that college.
I keep writing about this because it keeps becoming more and more obvious. "Hold on to these moments as they pass," sings Adam Duritz in "Long December," and the older I get, the more that rings true.
Camp Food
Sometimes we eat better at camp than at home;
sometimes, not so much.
Standing on their Heads
We played a little bit tonight instead of reading. It’s summer, after all.
Home Away from Home
With the addition of a new camper, we had to buy a new tent. This time, though, we looked at the experience of our "four man" tent and realized that tent sizes (i.e., the number of people that can sleep in it) assume that the campers are crammed in head to toe with nothing else in the tent. The thought of the four of us in our four man tent was horrifying, so we bought a six man tent.
We're not into roughing it with a two-year-old, and we knew we would need quite a bit of room for storage, including toys for two. We shopped around, bought a tent, put it up, decided we hated it (and saw a small small hole in the canopy), took it back, shopped some more, and finally bought a tent online.
The result: utter comfort. Enough room for everything, a protected storage area, and plenty of space for toys.
Having room when we slept made every other part of the trip more enjoyable because it really became a home away from home, with similar daily routines. Of course there's the eating and the sleeping, but with the creek just a few feet away, daily laundry trips make the rituals complete. Oh, of course we didn't wash anything in the creek for real. The excellent campground facilities made that really unnecessary. But for a quick rinse, say from accidents...
Motorcycle Camper
Great Smoky Mountain Railroad
Day two, we messed up. We turned a vacation into a trip, complete with deadlines and alarm clocks.
Not that these are bad things, or that the outing itself — a trip on the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad — was a waste.
There was lots to see, including a quarry that absolutely fascinated the Boy.
Not to mention the simple fact that we were on a train: it’s hard to over-estimate the excitement of a little boy who loves Thomas and Friends almost as much as he loves Bob the Builder, and to combine the two was a moment of sheer perfection.
The views weren’t bad either.
But we decided, in the end, that perhaps it would have been better just to hang around the camp site — to keep it a vacation.
Down By the River
Vacations shouldn't really be planned. Sure, you have to plan when, you have to plan where, but the what, for a true vacation, has to be spontaneous. There might be a thousand and one possibilities or five, but for it really to be a vacation, none of those attractions can really be put into any kind of schedule. Then it becomes a trip, and a trip and vacation are two totally different animals.
Vacations have flexible schedules, flexible activities, ice cream at half past ten in the morning, late mornings, late nights, kids begging to "do it again" and parents being able to reply, "how about tomorrow?"
If all of that is true, we don't get to go on vacation very often. K and I have always been all about the "plan maximum" for a given trip: see as much as you can, do as much as you can. Go, go, go!
This weekend, though, we finally had a vacation. Almost. One planned activity. That doesn't count, does it? The rest were sort of spontaneous decisions, choices drawn from the various options presented by camping in a small North Carolina mountain town.