Fishing, Fun and Family Vacations

With the price of gas now closely creeping up on the price of a gallon of milk, our vacation plans have changed greatly.  We will drink less milk products and drive fewer miles.  Spring Break was spent in-state, this year,  sipping on filtered water as we explored the mountains of the Ozarks.  As we loaded the car with all of our necessary belongings, I realized that our family can probably never fly again because none of us know how to pack in moderation.  For the life of me,  I don’t know why we had a dulcimer or a 30” supersized  pink polka dot kickball with us, but we did.   We traveled to a small church retreat on top of a mountain that was closed for the winter.  Apparently, they will rent a lodge that will sleep a small church for a deeply discounted price in mid-winter.  We were instructed to only use four beds and leave the other rooms untouched.  I had visions of “The Shining” and the empty rooms of a lodge closed in winter.   Realizing I would be alone on the top of a mountain with three children, I convinced my husband to tag along for one night so he could protect us from any two headed wolves that might be laying in wait at the wood line.   My thoughts raced to pictures of us running from the toothless man who lived down the path as I tried desperately to get a few bars on my phone.  I am not a wilderness girl and having no wifi connections or immediate access to Facebook was going to be difficult for all of us. Upon arrival, we found the camp to be quite nice. The lodge was simply a large home from the 50’s filled with twin beds.  It sat only feet from a cliff giving us the most amazing view of the valley below.  This was the perfect place to have an oversized kickball…. for about twenty seconds or until it rolled off the cliff.   As I unpacked totally un-necessary items, my kids practiced cheerleading stunts precariously close to the edge of the yard and the 400 foot drop off.  One bad hurkey jump and they would be plummeting downhill with the kick ball.   There was a small stocked pond outside our front door and my husband went to fish.   Why is it that men always think that fishing with the family will be fun, until they actually have to do it?  He instructed all three kids not to cast the reels so they wouldn’t backlash the line.  They were also instructed not to reel the line in until he verified that there was, indeed, a fish on the line.  Basically, they were to sit still holding a large pole and wait.  I knew this plan would never work, unless you are sixty, smoking, and sipping on a little whiskey under a tree.    The kids looked to me for a sign that this plan was not a good one and then slung those rods and line across the pond.  Fifty feet of line came whistling out at light speed.  Two feet reached the pond and the remaining 48 feet wrapped up in a large ball of tangled filament around the reel.    I tried, in earnest, to untangle the mess before my husband could see it, but was caught red handed and now fully understand what a backlash is. 

Fishing lasted about as long as the kickball and we moved on to horseback riding leaving my husband by the pond to wonder why he agrees to these trips.   We discovered a wonderful stable with an array of horses and baby animals all just waiting for my daughter to come and love on them.  As the sun set, my son and I went to the open air chapel to watch the colors of the sky change.  Since no one was around and neither one of us can resist  an unattended podium, we took our places at the front of our empty chapel.  My son belted out “Amazing Grace” from the mountaintop and I cheered him on in our two person service.  What we didn’t realize was how it would echo across the hills for others to hear.  While the rest of my family was a mile away, still untangling fishing line, they heard the soft voice of a child come whispering on the wind, singing God’s praises.   Everyone stopped and listened and took in the beauty of their surroundings as the sun disappeared behind the hills. The reels were put away, the campfire was prepared and we all gathered round to roast hot dogs and any other food product that would fit on a stick.   The trip was turning out to be quite the successful outing.  We hadn’t spent a fortune for a vacation and we weren’t punished for our excessive baggage.   The lodge was cozy and comfortable and provided a safe haven from the two headed wolves and crazy axe-man who might be lurking outdoors.  We will definitely travel this way again.  

Let's Play A Fun Game of Touch the Sink

A curious game that my children enjoy is one known as "Touch the Sink."  This game only works if one child has an unhealthy fear of germs and in my family, that fear is alive and well.  My daughter is a true germaphobe and has developed very detailed plans on how to enter and exit a public restroom without ever touching a door handle or bathroom surface of any kind.  I have learned to manage this fear by employing my own internal time clock that tells me if she has been in the restroom too long and is trapped on the other side of the door waiting for the next person to enter so that she can make her escape.  It is common practice, while dining out, for me to leave the table in mid conversation, chewing on my last bite of buffet turkey from the Luanne Platter, to push open the restroom door and return before anyone can ask what I'm doing. This child of mine is the same one who will not use an eating utensil if it has touched the table at any point before or during dinner. Should her fork accidentally fall from her plate to the table, she will instinctively hand it to me, take my fork, continue eating and watch to see if I fall to my death as I put her tainted fork to my mouth. Once my possible demise is no longer a concern, dinner continues on with no notice to the strange exchange of germ laden forks and spoons that occurs throughout the meal without question by those at the table.  It is as natural to our dining experience as buttering a dinner roll.  We accept it as a normal practice and things go much smoother this way.   I learned a long time ago not to make a big deal of her anxieties or I would be fueling them with my own fear of germs.  I have come a long way, licking dinnerware that has fallen to the wayside simply to convince my child that we are stronger than the germs or her fears. There are times however, that my insides turn to jelly as she hands me the next germ covered item.  We were in church recently and it happened to be the day we were taking the Lord's Supper. They began by passing out tiny crackers that represented the body of Christ.  We each took our cracker and as we waited for the juice to arrive, I heard a gasp come from my child's lips as she stared down at the floor at the tiny representation of our Savior, now lying amongst the germs. She carefully picked it up and handed it to me.  She instinctively took my cracker and left me with the one from the floor.  Panic set in as I realized you can't just throw out the cracker that represents Jesus.  I had to ingest it.  I stared down at the cracker in my hand and knew that I had to place it in my mouth after it had been on the floor where many a sinner had trod.  With wide eyes, my daughter looked on as I carefully put the tiny cracker in my mouth and swallowed, praying that eating from the floor would not kill me.  As luck would have it, I was saved and life continued on. We deal with my daughter's fears as best we can and have taught her to laugh at the situation whenever possible. Which brings us back to the nighttime game of Touch the Sink... My son will grab his sister and drag her down the hallway, giggling and screaming, in an attempt to make her touch the bathroom sink.  While the sink is clean, to a germaphobe, it is teaming with bacteria and deadly organisms that can cause you to drop dead upon contact.  She will scream with fear and delight as she knows the sink is getting closer and closer. While my own brother used to tackle me, pin me down and threaten to let spit drool down onto my face, I can't imagine that "Touch the Sink" could be much worse.  I survived my brother's spit and I'm certain my daughter will make it past a few nighttime games of "Touch the Sink."   I understand that facing your fears is a cognitively sound way to move past them, so I allow this game and will continue to lick a few dirty forks on our way to wellness.

Homey the Autocrat

Many a stray animal has sought refuge at our home and while some are simply passing through, others tend to stay for a while.  The latest addition to the clan is Bella, the lab that nobody noticed was pregnant until suddenly there were eight dogs in her house instead of one.  We have taken in flying squirrels, tail-less lizards, baby deer and a chicken that fell off a Tyson truck on its way to certain demise.  My daughter claims each and every one of these pets, immediately names them and picks the smallest, weakest one to begin dressing it in tiny pet clothes much against its silent protests.  My son makes it quite clear from the onset that none of them, but one, is his.  He lays claim to a temperamental Siamese cat named Homey.  Homey is a self proclaimed autocratic leader of all the animals in this little Kingdom.  He has no use for the sick, lame or lazy and will run them off when nobody is looking.  Thank goodness my daughter is two steps ahead of him, nursing the ill in private hideaway places out of sight from Homey and his unfair practices.   Our guest bathroom has seen its share of injured woodland critters. 

Homey spends his days roaming the woods and stalking the neighbors.  It is nothing to see him bolting across the neighbors yard, four or five houses away (That’s four or five towns away in people distance).  I catch glimpses of him racing from the woods or jumping from the roof. He will dart in front of my car at precariously unsafe distances and he always comes out unscathed.  I have great respect for Homey and his survival skills.  While I don’t have an ex-husband, I think that Homey is much like one would be. He’s always out there, somewhere in my peripheral vision, just out of clear focus, having fun, chasing she-cats and enjoying life.  He is smart enough to know when a storm is coming and always makes it home just in time, to shoot through the back door, completely unnoticed, and bed down in my freshly washed linen or lay backwards on my couch.  He is quiet, sneaky, bold and self-sufficient, yet still has an attachment to us that will never end.  He is one of those guys that you will always love, even thought you know they are absolutely up to no good.   For a short period, we hosted a family of chickens that lived behind the pool near the wood-line.  Homey’s mouth watered for just one big tasty chicken and he would lounge on the roof of the chicken coup mapping out a plan of how this might come to be.   His tail moved back and forth in this rhythmic pattern of anticipated satisfaction while droplets of cat drool fell from the roof onto a few nervous hens.  Unfortunately,  someone or something beat Homey to his Chicken delight meal and one morning we woke to find the chickens were all gone.  This was, oddly, just about the same time, we discovered a den of red fox living even further back in the woods.  I don’t know if Homey felt he had been robbed or if it was just his natural curiosity, but he went to meet the fox family.  This was not one of his wiser choices.  I was lounging in my hot-tub that particular afternoon, enjoying the peacefulness of the day, when Homey came bolting from the woods like a streak of lightning.  Right behind him was a red fox with the same chicken-eyed look that Homey had recently had.  Homey flew over the top of the tub and while certain that I was about to be bathing with the fox, he stopped short, turned and ran back to the woods.   It only took a few days before Homey came limping home with a giant red fox bite out of his leg.  My daughter immediately scooped him up and planted him on a bed of clean towels in our guest bathroom to begin his recovery process.   A few weeks passed and he was soon good as new.   He currently spends his days lounging on the lid of the hot-tub, soaking up the heat and moisture to continue his healing.    I can only imagine that late at night, when all is dark and still, there is a tension out there behind my house as a family of fox are keenly aware of Homey, seven puppies hunker down in a bed of hay unaware, two white shephards patrol the property eating shoes left outside and one mean cat sits on the roof swooping his tail back and forth just waiting for one wrong move and an opportunity to exert his complete power over them all.  

Homey in his early days learning of the world....

Look Mom.... No Cavities

While shopping for linens and boring my children to tears, they managed to find creative things to occupy their time.   Who knew of the fun that was to be had at the 90% off clearance table. I was happy going about my business of comparing thread counts and searching for alternative down filling when I received this photo on my phone.  Now positive that the children were still safe in the store and cavity free, I continued with my shopping while they magnified each other's body parts and suited up for mock battle with barbecue utensils and colanders in aisle three.   I have to admit that I had forgotten how much fun a big magnifying glass can be.   I remember as a child that we would sit on the sidewalk with bits of paper and a magnifying glass trying to make fire from the sun.  We were never actually successful in this endeavor, but I think we may have blinded a few neighborhood children participating in this activity.  I should point out that trying to look at the sun is never a good thing to do.  Attempting it with a giant magnifying glass is even worse.  "Hey, look how big the sun is now...aGhhhhhhhh."   The fun always ended about the time your best friend's retinas were burned to a sizzly crisp.    The simplest things have always made the greatest toys, no matter what generation you are from.  In the 70's, we were surrounded by Schwinn bicycles, EZ Bake Ovens and the complete cast of Star Trek Miniatures and Barbie and Friends.   We had giant Tinker Toys (what I wouldn't give for those now) Lincoln Logs and enough Legos to build a city. Thousands of dollars were spent on toys to entertain us and yet you could find us all piled in the basement sticking flashlights to our skin in hopes of seeing blood and bones shining through.  Some of the best toys of my life were found down in our basement.  We had a wet bar there where we would make up lizard juice and serve it to nervous guests who were secretly hoping it was really only Kool-Aid.   Behind the bar was a cash box full of play money and as we collected revenue from our bug juice bar, we would hide it from the make believe robbers who would arrive on scene as soon as we turned out all the lights.  Many a child was traumatized in the dark of our basement as we attacked the robbers with giant Tinker Toys and dusty erasers. This was life before Atari and it was wonderfully fun.   My children, who were born into the Apple Generation, are usually wired with ear phones, cables, cellular devices and the ability to stream the latest unreleased movies.  One would assume that these items would come in handy while waiting for their mother in the linen store.   But no, a magnifying glass and a set of Barbecue Utensils provides much more fun.  While the other bored children were standing in the corner of Linens and Things playing Angry Bird and sending mass texts to their friends announcing that... "I'm Bored",  my kids were shooting zoom photos of the insides of their mouths and uploading them for the world to see.  Oddly, there seems to be a fair amount of people who enjoy viewing such as proven by the 24 comments that followed these pictures.  Case in point... Just months ago, my daughter was doing a perfect handstand on my coffee table.  Her dismount was textbook until she crash landed on the corner of a chair sending us immediately to the Emergency Room for stitches.  Instead of crying in the back seat of the car, she was shooting play by play photos of the injury and sharing it with her friends.  Before we could arrive at the Emergency Room, she already had flowers and balloons waiting at the house and 14 comments about how cool the wound looked.  If only she would have had a giant magnifying glass and a flashlight.... that would have been icing on the cake!

Busting Right Through the Language Barrier

A recent opportunity surfaced that allowed me to use the Rosetta Stone
language series for free. Dozens of languages were only a click away
from my attempts at mastery and perhaps I could use them if I ever traveled the world.  While I had already taken two years of
French in High School and could proficiently conjugate verbs and announce to foreign strangers that I wanted to go to the beach in a blue car, I was curious
about other languages. The blue car phrase was about as far as my
French skills would take me. Of course... do you really need to go any
further than the beaches of the French Riviera? I say no.  A few years ago, I did, in fact, take my kids to Paris and was actually able to maneuver throughout the city without speaking any useful French.  The kids had no need for language skills when one could simply point at all the things they needed.... ice cream, a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower, crepes with Nutella and a hotel outside of the 18th ward.  I did almost board all of us on an outgoing train to nowhere and realized quickly that it could have been helpful to understand the language a bit better.  Rosetta Stone would have been helpful back then.  So now that it was available to me.... what would my new language be???  I selected Italian and hoped that
soon I would know what Andrea Boccelli was singing to me as I floated
lifeless in my hot-tub in the late hours of the night. Since I'm a
read ahead kind of person, I skipped the first few tests and jumped
right over to the Spanish lessons and realized that the images and
learning strategy was the same, no matter the language. The only thing
that was different was the words. The same boy was jumping from a table
and the same group of children were throwing balls. The words to
describe these actions changed from language to language, but these were
definitely the same people. I had friends in foreign languages and it
was comforting. I realized the choice of statements I was practicing was
geared at basic actions of daily living and I quickly learned how to
describe running mothers, jumping children and red cars. A peculiar
phrase included in the training was one declaring that the boy is under the airplane. For the life of me, I can't figure out why one would ever need this phrase. However,
it seems to be a common phrase in all languages. I've yet to find the
opportunity to use it properly and once while on Delta, I shared this
phrase with my children, only to the dismay of the Italian couple
sitting in front of me frantically looking for the heinous act occurring
below deck.   In fact, as I think back, most of my opportunities to use key foreign language phrases have been on airplanes.  I was once seated next to a blind man on a plane who was reading a braille version of Siddhartha and the journey to enlightenment.  Curious about the book and unable to resist conversation on the two hour flight,  I engaged this man in an oral report on his book.  Come to find out, my new friend was French.  You know I couldn't resist and I had to practice my one French phrase.  He smiled and I knew that we could both clearly see how ridiculous I looked with my total lack of foreign language skills.  So... perhaps it's time to return to Rosetta Stone and try to get past the first two tests.   Until then,  the boy remains under the airplane and English, Piglatin and pointing are my top languages.  

Southern Boys and Their Toys

Recipe for Disaster... or maybe not....

Ingredients....  Southern boys, too much time on their hands, a dark summer night, and a bag of fireworks.

Mix well and get the following video.  Watch closely in the dark for the faint glow of two lighters, the sounds of the summer night and what comes next......

Thank you Corey and Baily.

Nocturnal Stirrings of Mice and Men

It's unusually cold in the South and terribly dreary out. I haven't seen the sun in days and it's feeling a bit medieval out there.  I find myself wrapping in cloaks and scarves and layers of clothes to fight off the cold.  While inside our home is toasty warm, my daughter has taken up a new practice of sleeping with her Northface jacket on.  She isn't fighting off the cold, but rather has found comfort in the feel of the fleece.  Often I wake in the middle of the night to find what I think is a small bear sleeping next to me.  She has made a habit of sneaking in my bedroom dragging a heating pad and a stuffed platypus with her.  She quietly crawls in my bed, fires up the heating pad and leaves me to roast under the covers.  I thought I was approaching menopause with night sweats, but realized it was just a long extension cord and a small furry child curled up next to me.  My children have always stirred during the middle of the night and have mastered crawling in bed with me without waking a soul.  I suppose they get this nocturnal problem from me. My son struggled with sleep for years and I assumed it was his genetics at play. One night, I was lying in his room with him when a light bright enough to burn retinas came crashing through the window.  It seems my neighbors had installed a motion sensor light that was pointed straight in my kid's bedroom.  No wonder the boy couldn't sleep!  We moved him into the spare bedroom in the center of the house where no light enters the room.  He has a soft mattress that he sinks deep into as it molds itself around him. With the darkness and being wrapped up in micro-plush memory foam, I imagine it's much like being back in the womb.  He sleeps like a baby again.  As for the rest of us...we are up all night climbing in and out of bed, changing the thermostat, lighting fires and cursing the neighbor's ill-placed security lighting. The other night, I woke to see a small hooded being standing at the foot of my bed.  Had it not been four feet tall, I might have panicked a bit at the possibility that the grim reaper had come calling.   I asked my daughter why she was up and she told me that the hamsters would not stop running on their wheel.  I told her to move them out of her room and a tiny voice replied, "okay" as she disappeared quickly out the door.  My husband and I lay there for a few moments in the darkness rejoicing in the fact that she had returned to her own bed. A few more moments passed and I had to ask the obvious question.. "You don't think she...."    Before I could finish the sentence, the whirr of the hamster wheel began as tiny hamster feet ran like out of control vermin on hamster crack. "ALLLLLLIIIIEEEEEE"  I shouted!  But she was already back in her bed of pink fluff, hunkered down in the silence under layers of cover and wrapped in a fleece hood.  She was not coming back.  I knew our son was curled up in the fetal position in the blackness and silence of his room and he wouldn't be coming to my rescue either.  This was now a test of endurance between my husband and me to see who would crack first under the pressure of the hamster wheel and get up and move the jogging little beasts at the foot of our bed.  Needless to say, he can sleep through anything, and it was I who had to crawl out of the warmth of my bed to relocate hamsters at 2:00 a.m.   Wide awake now, I turned on the television to catch the latest infomercial on Amish Heaters.  How timely, I thought. They were free if I ordered immediately and paid $250 shipping.  They were guaranteed to ward off even the extreme cold of a Cryogenic Ice Age.  I wanted one.  I wanted it in several colors and I would have had one except I bumped the remote and accidentally changed the channel to a station where some guy was selling weight- loss smoothies and my focus was diverted.  I watched this thin man in his little spandex suit promise women that they would look trim and slim by summer.  Knowing full well, that we were never going to see warm sunny days again and unconcerned about looking trim and slim in layers of fleece and fur, I threw on my jacket and hat and went back to the warmth of my bed to remain there until Spring shows signs of arrival.