| Previous Week | Back Home | Next Week |

Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

7/4/13 (Thursday)

Happy fourth of July!

This morning, Cara was in the Milltown 4th of July parade with her dance school. Grandmama and Grandpapa met me and Steve and Owen on some back street where we'd all managed to park, and we walked and walked in the hot sun down Milltown Road until we found a good place to stand. We were amazed by the crowds!

After what felt like a long wait, the parade appeared in the distance. Owen sat up on Steve's shoulders, playing with a pair of my sunglasses. He wore them. He waved them. He held them in front of Steve's face. When someone in the parade dropped a flag, Owen waved that, too.

We'd forgotten that you should bring a bucket to a parade. People throw candy! Soon my purse contained a lot of tootsie rolls, gum, and dum-dum lollipops. Owen ate at least three dum-dums. None got in Steve's hair.

It was a long, long parade! It just kept going. Finally, after about 40 minutes, Cara's dance school came into sight. They had a truck and abig banner and then a cohort of about twenty girls. They looked great in their black spangled T-shirts. The girls had a brief dance routine, and occasionally they would stop and several girls would come out in front and do some very frightening flips in the street.

After they passed, Owen went home with Grandmama and Grandpapa for the day while Steve and I followed to pick up Cara. "I think we were the first thing in the parade!" said Cara.

Now, this is an Owen journal at this point, but I do want to write about our day. We made our way back through the parade, which was still going on, and found our car. The reason we'd sent Owen south was that we were going out on the Loefflers' boat! We sped down to Keyport to the dock 'n dine for lunch, and then we got ourselves back into the Raritan to go tubing.

Em had warned me, and I had warned Cara, that if anyone needed to use the bathroom while we were out on the boat, that someone would have to jump into the water. Sure enough, Casey needed to use the bathroom. While Steve got into the tube, she and Em climbed out of the boat. Steve drifted away at the end of the tether, while they floated together. It seemed to take a while. Soon, Cara decided she had to go, too. She climbed in. Ron steered the boat in gentle circles, Steve drifted, and we waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently, they had a tough time not using a toilet! Em had to do a lot of coaching.

When they were finally done and making their ways back aboard, we found out that Em had in her hand both of their swim suit bottoms, which they had had to take off in order to go!

Eventually we moved on to part three of our day: the pool. Grandmama and Grandpapa and Owen joined us, and the kids all had a blast. It was the first time in a week that I'd had Owen in a pool, and it was a very different experience: this time, he objected to being held. "Let go of me!" he cried. I'm not sure what he thought he was going to do.

Then he decided he really wanted me to take him into the deep end. He really, really wanted it. Fortunately, Grandmama figured out that what he wanted was a toy that was sitting near the deep end, so I put him on solid ground and he could trot over and pick it up.

He also did some more jumping in, which is becoming a lot more like jumping and less like being picked up. One thing that surprised us was when he got Grandmama to let him walk out on the diving board, which, holding both of her hands, he jumped off of sideways.

Owen is still little enough that Steve put him to bed while I took Cara, after her shower, back out for a driveway glow thing/fireworks/pajama party.

7/5/13 (Friday)

We had to wake Owen up today so that we could all get into the car and head for the airport! We drove in our car, rode in a bus, went through security, found some breakfast while we waited, and got onto our first plane. We had a three-and-a-half hour flight to Dallas, and Owen sat and played with his daddy. "March, march, march!" he chanted as he strutted off into the airport. We had two hours to run around (and to have lunch) before we got back onto a plane for our second flight, under two hours, to Albuquerque.

I sat between Owen and Cara this time. Owen happily got out all of his little guys and stood them up on his tray. Then he shut the window and announced that it was time for them to go to sleep. He lay them all down. Then he opened the window and it was wake-up time. Then sleep time. Then wake-up time. Then sleep time. Steve explained afterwards that he had shown Owen how to open and shut the window in the final few minutes on the last flight, figuring that, with just a few minutes left, it couldn't be that annoying. It kept Owen happy for a long time, though!

After that flight, Owen was really tired. He was tired through the airport and baggage claim. He was tired on the bus to the rental center. He was tired while we got the car. He was revived a little bit by being out in the very ironic rain that started falling on us in our first five minutes outside in New Mexico. However, in the ten-minute drive to the hotel, he fell asleep. He slept on me as I carried him into the hotel, as we checked in, and as we went up to our room. He slept on me on the bed for a while. When it was time to go to dinner, I stood up and lay him flat on his back on the bed. He stayed asleep. We changed his diaper, which did, eventually, wake him.

We drove up to Steve's cousin Caroline's house, where her two boys and her little girl, who is Owen's age, showed us their rooms and all of their toys. Sean and Nick wanted to show Steve all of their Star Wars Legos. Abby was a little shy and played with some pony toys. Owen, who had quickly taken to the boys and wanted to show off, did tricks with his lion. "Watch this," he would announce, then put the lion in front of his face and then drop it.

Soon we all drove down a few blocks to a deli for dinner, where the three boys played with Owen's Avengers figures. Afterwards, on the way back to the hotel, the kids were starting to snip at each other in the back seat. Steve suggested that we see who could be quiet the longest.

Me: Ok, 1, 2, 3, quiet!

Owen: pttttthhhhhh!!!!!!!

We held it together for a bit, but eventually Steve and I laughed. Owen was talking away. We tried again. Ptttttthhhhhh!!!!!!!! It just kept happening. With variations.

Owen: Mommy, now I will say "1, 2, 3, quiet," and you say Pttthhhhh!! 1, 2, 3, quiet! . . . . . No, Mommy, you say Ptttthhhhh!

After a while we realized that Cara was still being quiet from the first time I'd said it and might have continued indefinitely if her victory had not been recognized.

Owen started announcing, after saying Pttthhhhh, that he had won. We broke it to him that, no, it was the opposite of winning. He was diappointed.

Cara: Ok, 1, 2, 3, loud!

Owen: AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

It was late when we got back to the hotel. We gave Owen a bath and Cara took a shower. It was almost ten o'clock, New Mexico time, when we all got into bed. That's almost midnight, according to our body clocks!

7/6/13 (Saturday)

I'd been worried that we'd be waking up ridiculously early, but maybe staying up ridiculously late helped us avoid that! We slept until six. This morning we went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. It was very beautiful, with colorful pictures painted on the panes of the windows that surrounded the room. After breakfast, we went out to find the hotel pool.

By nine o'clock, we were suited up and heading out. It was a big, beautiful pool, surrounded by cushioned lounge chairs. The whole side of the pool was stairs, which was perfect for Owen. It wasn't really quite warm enough to swim (for adults, that is), but we went in anyway and had a great time.

After an hour or so we tore the kids away and got ourselves ready to go out. We got into the car and drove over to the Good Sam to see Steve's grandma. The kids weren't allowed to go in, and Owen had fallen asleep in the car, so I at first I stayed with them in a beautiful garden courtyard while Steve went in. His aunt Linda came out and I got a turn to go in, too. We brought the kids around to the other side of the building, where Grandmom could see them through her window.

Linda took us to Taco Tote, a fast food joint, for lunch. The exciting parts were the soda machines, which had touch-screen displays and offered over 100 combinations (Owen discovered fruit punch), and the prizes from the kids' meals, which were very nice little dinosaur toys.

Appropriately, our next stop was the Natural History museum, where we met Caroline, Marco, and their kids, as well as Steve's uncle, Bill. Owen was very excited about seeing real dinosaurs. However, when he saw the skeleton in the main atrium, he insisted that that was not a real dinosaur. I don't think we ever actually convinced him that that was as good as it would get.

The first stop we made was a visiting exhibit on the Titanic. For some reason, there were no real dinosaurs in there. At one point there was a movie with some catchy music, and Owen asked me to hold the things that were in his hands so that he could dance. He danced around for several minutes, very interestingly. I'm considering signing him up for dance: maybe he'll be a famous choreographer.

After that part of the museum, we got to the debatably real dinosaurs. Owen had a great time running through most of the exhibits. At first, he was running to find the real dinosaurs. Then, he was just running because he could. He stopped to watch two movies. One was about the extinction of the dinosaurs, thanks to a meteor. I tried to explain it to Owen. "The meteor," he said, "is a bad guy." That, of course, led to a question: "Are the dinosaurs good guys?"

We saw a lot of exhibits at the museum, and we were all kind of tired when we left to go to dinner. There we were joined by Gene, Sheri, and Evie, and our party of 14 was complete. We stuck the kids down at one end of the table, where they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. The restaurant had a treasure box for kids, and they all got these horrible things that were sticky hands on the ends of stretchy (and sticky) strings. The idea was to hold the string and fling the hand out, where it would stick to whatever it hit. Poor Owen kept trying to fling his, but it would get stuck to the chair behind him when he prepared to let it go.

Once again, we were up far later than we'd ever intended to be. Putting Owen to sleep in the hotel was a lot easier, though! He'd gotten used to the idea that this was where we slept.

7/7/13 (Sunday)

This morning we walked up the street to have breakfast at a Starbucks and then went back to the pool. It was colder, so I avoided having to go in the water by taking pictures. Sorry, can't come in, I'm too busy! The hotel provided towels, but they wanted them to stay in the pool area. Wanting to get Owen dry, I took advantage of his enthusiasm for making footprints by suggesting that he make "tushie prints" by sitting down. I felt that this was as good a way as any of getting his swim suit dried off enough for the trip back upstairs. He liked this new hobby very much.

We went back to visit Great Grandma again. The kids and I explored the courtyard, taking pictures of the plants, water features, and the two tortoises. I went in to see Grandmom, and Steve brought the kids around to the window. They played with the rocks on the ground, ending up covering the windowsill with them as they created a complicated "house" for Wolverine and Green Lantern.

Soon Sean, Evie, Gene, Marco, Bill, and Linda joined us. We were in the courtyard with Owen and the girls when Cara had to go to the bathroom. I asked who else needed to go. "I do!" said Owen. "Is she going?" he asked, gesturing toward Evie. No, she wasn't. Well, neither was he, then.

We said goodbye to Linda and Bill, who were heading home to Colorado, and went to lunch with Gene, Sheri, and Evie. For the afternoon, we invited all of the cousins back to the pool! This was a big success. The kids brought a lot of toys and entertained themselves. Owen played with rings and squirty animals and finally with two rockets that were intended to be tossed into the pool and retrieved. Instead, he flew them around and occasionally landed them and announced that "the people" had gotten out and were "in Africa and the other Africa." The "other" Africa was added when he got the second rocket.

Caroline took her kids home, but we met Gene, Sheri, and Evie for dinner. Owen had fallen asleep on the way there and was sleeping on me (again!), but he woke up when we sat down. We went for Thai! Owen had fruit punch. Cara had discovered Sprite at lunch, and she had that again. The drinks all had cherries in them, and the cherries were impaled on the tusks of little plastic elephants. The kids' straws had little paper bunnies on them. Both kids like chicken satay. It was another late night, and it was another very good one!

7/8/13 (Monday)

We were on our own this morning, and we took the kids to the zoo! I had accidentally read a sign for the zoo aloud yesterday, and Owen was very interested in going. "Is this the zoo?" he kept asking. Finally we were able to reply in the affirmative. Then he didn't believe us.

The first thing we got to was flamingos, which everyone liked. It was nice and cool in the morning, and the zoo wasn't too crowded. We saw plenty of animals, including some interesting ducks in a pool in front of a big stage. There were cute ducklings and also a diver duck with legs splayed out wide like ones we'd seen in Life of Birds. He paddled around, but we also got to see him swimming under water.

There were a lot of peacocks walking around. We saw several displaying their tails. Quite a few, for some reason, were on top of a building, displaying their tails to . . . each other? They were also quite noisy up there.

Arguably the best part of the zoo was the playground. It was a huge frame with webbed platforms that the kids could climb up on, with tunnels and obstacles and swings and slides and even a (very frustrating) zipline. Owen was able to climb up most of it, though there were a few places where Cara had to lift him up through a hole. He trailed after her through the whole thing, as they climbed through again and again.

The only thing that got them out of the place, actually, was that we noticed that there was a play fountain nearby. It was a big grid to walk on, and under it were a lot of spouts that would spurt water into the air unpredictably. Cara was very good at running through the water; she got soaked pretty quickly. Owen was too slow. The water would spurt and fall back through the grid, and then he would run through where it had been. Finally Steve convinced him to wait in one place for the water to come up. He managed to get slightly damp, but he believed that he had gotten very wet.

It was starting to get hot, but we soldiered on and saw a lot more animals, including the hippos and rhinos. We found the giraffes and got to see a baby; it was only a couple of months old, and it was probably less than half the height of the adults. The keeper had set leafy branches in brackets around the enclosure, so we could see them all eating. The observation deck was fun: they had built several huts with big windows to look through.

We were hot and tired when we headed for the gift shop and the exit. I shouldn't have been surprised that, in the gift shop, Owen found the books and we had to sit on the floor and read to him. Finally we helped him pick out a little set of plastic animals, who became great favorites for the rest of the trip.

Now, for perspective, I have to mention that the longest drive we had on this trip was about eleven minutes. On the way from the zoo to visit Great Grandmom, though, Owen fell asleep. We let him sleep in the car this time, as Steve and I took turns going in. Cara and I waved through the window, and we said goodbye.

For lunch, we met the cousins in Old Town, right by our hotel. We all spent the afternoon at the pool again, though I took the opportunity to go shopping! While I was gone, something very surprising happened. Steve had taken Owen up to the hotel room to change out of his swim suit. Owen said that he had to use the potty. Steve put him on, and Owen peed! It's a miracle!!!

It was our last night out there, so we all went to dinner together near the hotel. The kids got pasta. Owen was playing with his animals (as were the bigger kids), but his cousins took charge of him and managed to get him to eat. He really loved having the attention of all of those bigger kids!

True to form, we got to bed a little before ten.

7/9/13 (Tuesday)

Poor Owen had a night terror starting around five in the morning, so the rest of us woke up. He was still asleep, though, and screaming. Finally I took him down to the lobby, where there was no one else to wake up. I knew he was recovered when he was able to push the elevator buttons to get us back upstairs.

Before seven we were all ready to start our trip home. Appropriately, it rained as we went to return the car. We listed for Owen all of the steps of our journey: first, returning the car; second, a bus to the airport; third, one airplane; fourth, a stop in another airport; fifth, another airplane; sixth, a bus to our car. Finally, we would be home!

Owen did fall asleep for a while on the first plane ride (after I read him Bread and Jam for Frances a few times). I got his two stuffed animals next to him and tried to get him to rest on them, but instead his head slumped forwards. I let him rest his head on my arm for a long time.

He was not at all happy to wake up when we arrived in Dallas. We were not happy that he had woken up. We sat down for lunch, but Steve had to take Owen out to scream for a bit (and to get a diaper). He did eventually calm down and become human again.

Around 2:30 we got onto our last airplane and sat down, Steve between the two kids and me in the row behind them. We left the gate. The pilot announced that there were delays in Newark and we would be sitting on the tarmac for over an hour. There was a toddler a little behind us who was clearly very tired and very much against going to sleep. He screamed like Owen had at lunch, but he kept it up a lot longer. He was screaming, intermittently, for the six hours or so that our three-and-a-half hour flight took. Owen, in the meantime, spent a lot of his time playing with his animals and his guys, who went to sleep and woke up a lot. He dozed for a while. He was not horrible. We landed, finally, a little after nine o'clock at night.

It was the home stretch. We got our bags. We found the bus. We rode to the lot and found our car. At ten at night we picked up Wendy's for dinner. By eleven, the kids were asleep in their own beds. Thanks to jet lag and the terrible hours we'd been keeping in New Mexico, that time didn't feel ridiculously late to them!

7/10/13 (Wednesday)

No one woke up before nine. Cara and I got Owen to YBR around 10:30. He was wearing an Albuquerque shirt that glowed in the dark. This was confusing to him, because he expected it to glow all the time. He wasn't happy about being left at school. However, when Steve picked him up he was so mulchy that Steve gave him a bath before dinner. Any day when you get that mulchy has to be a good one.

Miss Vina told me she asked him whether he'd been to New Mexico. "No," he'd said, "I went to see Scooby Doo."

| Previous Week | Back Home | Next Week |