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Journal Key:

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

8/1/13 (Thursday)

This morning, since I didn't have to go to work, was very pleasant. Owen and I did some drawing in the basement. He drew a big squiggle, and I asked him what it was. A rhinocerous. I gave it horns, ears, and a face. We gave it some carrots and flowers to eat, and then we added a bunny, who was also eating carrots. I did the bunny; Owen did the ears. Owen made the sun in the sky all by himself: it was a circle, and he added not simple lines but petal-like triangles all around it.

This evening was also pleasant. I read to Owen. We read the two Larry books that we have from the library. They are lovely books. A polar bear lives with a girl and her parents in their hotel. In one of the books, he discovers that his brother is living with two other polar bears at the local zoo and invites them all for dinner. The girl and Larry go to get the other bears, bringing coats, hats, and sunglasses like the ones Larry wears as a disguise when he goes out. On one page, they are helping the other bears into their coats. On the next page, three disguised bears are staring around, clearly tourists. One bear is slightly ahead, his back to the reader. The girl is explaining to a policeman that they are her four uncles from Milwuakee.

At this point, Owen tells me that "those are not them." They are, in fact, "ahead of that guy," the leading bear. He is very sure about this. Their disguise, apparently, is very effective.

Owen's toy Scooby Doo was very active this evening. He kept yelling "Rooby, rooby, roo!" and jumping wildly up into the air. When he landed on Owen's dresser and knocked over the luckily empty bowl from Owen's Cheerios, I told him that he was lucky it hadn't been the cup of water and that he needed to be more careful. Owen admonished Scooby and told him that he was in time-out. Scooby had to sit on the foot stool while we got back onto the bed to read. When we got settled, though, Owen went to get Scooby. "Are you ready to be nice?" he asked (that's what I ask him in similar circumstances). "Yes,I am," he answered himself.

8/3/13 to 8/10/13: Our Trip to the Poconos

On Saturday, we piled into the car and drove out to the vacation house that Grandmama and Grandpapa had rented for the week. Steve and I had worked hard to organize and pack things, and we soon realized that we had put no thought at all into entertaining the kids in the car. Owen had happened to have an old toy keychain in his hands. Cara had a plush cat. They had a wonderful time! For much of the two hour drive, Owen was asking the cat, "Mr. Fluffsalot, do you want to hear my sounds?" Mr. Fluffsalot, for the most part, did. Owen would push the buttons on his keychain. Somehow, playing with those two toys got them through the entire drive.

The house was big and beautiful and right on a lake. The back yard was all stones, with a hot tub by the house and an outdoor fireplace in the middle. There was a path down to a tiny beach and a dock. From the back yard you could walk in two sliding glass doors to the basement, or you could walk back up the hill to the driveway and then up a couple of steps onto the deck. The deck wrapped around the back of the house. That was the main level, with an open living room, dining area, and kitchen as well as one bedroom (Claire's) and bathroom. Up a long, turning flight of stairs was a balcony overlooking the main level; the back wall of the house was mostly huge windows with two big sliding glass doors, so there was a great view of the lake. There were four bedrooms up there, as well as another bathroom, and we took the back two bedrooms, which were down a little step and which I suppose were really the front bedrooms, since they were nearest the front of the house. They were the farthest from anything, though, so in that way they were the back. They were at the end of the hall and actually down a little step.

The kids were delighted to have a bunk bed! Cara, of course, got the top. Owen got to climb up sometimes, which I found really scary. At first he was pretty sure he couldn't do it, which made me happy. Gradually, though, he gained confidence. Fortunately, he never did it without an adult there, and he never really tried to climb down! I was a little worried that he'd wake up from a nap or in the morning and decide to head up, but he never did. The strange thing, though, was that in the mornings, instead of popping in to announce wake-up time, as he usually does, the kid would just get up and head downstairs. For the first few mornings, Steve or I heard him thumping down the stairs and followed him. A couple of times, he got loose without us.

We spend a lot of time just sitting around the house. We'd brought a lot of Owen's guys and their big castle, which was soon installed on the coffee table. Owen also liked playing with Cara's Nook, but often the biggest draw was Claire's Surface. She has several games that he likes. One is a paint program in which the random shapes that he draws are instantly filled and affected by gravity; they fall to the bottom of the screen and settle on top of each other. I'd have liked a turn with that. Another was the game Pirates Love Daisies. It is a "Tower Defense Strategy" game in which you get to place lots of pirates along a path which will be walked by successive waves of sea creatures on their way to steal daisies from the patch you're defending. The pirates, once you place them, will act on their own initiative. Having Owen playing with you is a serious handicap, but it's still winnable. One problem is that he doesn't seem to understand what "near the road" means and places pirates in the middle of nowhere.

Everyone had a good time one night, when we went out to a hibachi restaurant. When we sat down, everyone got a little dish of edamame. I squeezed the beans out onto Owen's plate, and he ate them with his fork. He ate all of his and at least half of mine, and then we asked for another bowl! Potty training was one of our goals for the week, so I took Owen to the bathroom a couple of times. It was interesting, from a strategic point of view. The sink was a raised basin on a wooden counter, so I let Owen kneel next to it. He enjoyed that part; before I could stop him, he had ducked his head under the running water!

The restaurant provided other entertainment. Their huge windows looked out onto a hill at the edge of the forest. While we were eating, a family of deer came out to eat at a feeder. We got to see them eating and playing--there were little fawns with their spots still on. Our chef came and put on a good show. He tossed his knives around and lit things on fire, he made a tower of onion rings, he lit his spatulas on fire and got the kids to blow them out. Well, he asked Owen to do it, and Owen went to work immediately, but nothing actually happened until Cara interceded.

On the way home, we wanted to keep Owen awake. Grandmama had a long conversation with him about his school. (I like to ask Owen whether he went to school today. He always says yes.) He told her about his teachers and his friends and the things they like to play with. We asked who his best friends were. He still says Audrey's name first, even though she moved to Texas a couple of months ago.

I suspect that the best part of the trip for Owen, besides having so many relatives around to bother, was playing on the beach. Given some shovels and buckets, he was happy. There were a couple of little toy wheelbarrows at the house, and we brought one out. The project that Owen and I spent the most time on was shovelling sand into the wheelbarrow and then finally dumping it and starting over. Grandmama came out and helped. I was a helper. Owen announced that he was a good helper, too. Grandmama and I looked at each other. We'd thought we were helping him. Who, we asked, are we all helping? Nobody.

It was chilly there for the first few days. I'd put Owen in to a hoodie to go outside. He discovered, to his astonishment, that he had pockets in it! "When I go back to school," he told me, "I am going to show my friends that I have pockets." I'm sure they'll be thrilled.

One thing that developed during this trip was that Owen started to replace the starting sounds of words with the letter M. I like this more than his habit of randomly saying "mama!" My clearest memory of his M-sound thing is of my asking him what book I should read next and him jumping on top of me and crying, "The Mears Micnic!"

A great thing about a vacation that you drive to instead of flying is that you can pack more indiscriminantly. Particularly, you can choose books based on what you like, without having to consider their weight. We brought lots of good things, including the Bears Picnic. It's a lot more fun to read aloud when you (and any other adults around) can also enjoy the books. We brought the Larry books as well as The Cats of Mrs. Calamari, which we honestly all are still laughing about as I write this, two weeks later.

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