What There's Time For

Glamor Shots

I finished Mr. P's mittens on Friday and brought them with me to the Olympic National Park on Saturday entirely with the intention of photographing them. Frost covered moss is a thoroughly charming background for mittens, don't you think? (Although, Mr. Right points out that these particular mittens are a bit too good at camouflaging themselves in the frozen rainforest.)

Holy Cow, Washington State is Beautiful

Here We Go Random

We've been bouncing along in a pleasant busy bubbliness of holidays and vacations for a few weeks now and I keep completely forgetting about the blog. Which is probably a good sign, overall, about my level of relaxation, but which doesn't make me entirely happy, since I tend to find the longer I haven't posted, the more weight seems to attach itself to the next post in my mind and the harder it therefore is to get on with it.

I'm fighting back with an early morning brain dump before Mr. Right and I set off for something I never quite expected to do: 4 days just the two of us, a plane ride away.

Mr. Pants is not happy. I feel a little bad. (He's becoming such a sweetheart! He picked out earrings for me for Christmas - modern doodley hearts inside of circles, which he explained were hearts inside of "thought bubbles". He makes a big show of hating pink and purple and especially princesses, which make him want to throw up, but he adores hearts. "They mean love.")

Shmoogie is not entirely happy, either, but it's tricky to tell because she's showing it by refusing to allow me to give her a kiss or a hug. She's three. Very very three. We spent ages in the school parking lot the other day as she struggled valiantly, if rather ineffectively, with the seatbelt. Shrieking and swatting away my attempts to assist, however subtle. "I do it myself!!!!"

I've got a new app in the wrap-up stages and this one's for knitters! (As I think I've alluded to before?) I'm quite excited about it when I'm not filled with self-doubt or anxiety about the coming (final!) semester. Hopefully you'll see an announcement here sooner rather than later.

And I think that brings me to a close. A week ago, we were running down the first flight path at Kitty Hawk, imagining the Wright Brothers' triumph. Barely a hundred years and the skies are filled with planes. Planes filled with ordinary people like me, and their knitting. Wondrous world this is.

Homeward Bound

We are almost home after quite the week of travel and weather!

I missed the earthquake since I was driving on the highway at the time; it took me hours to remember that I'd felt like I might be getting a flat tire for a minute or so.

We had a great trip and enjoyed my cousin's lovely wedding, backdropped by a stunning Maine lake near sunset. The children loved the lake and I loved that none of them drowned, though several of them tried pretty hard.

Our trek home has been smooth, although we delayed our start a half day to wait out most of the hurricane's rain. We still had some moments, with gusting winds and small debris all over the roads, when I worried I'd been under-cautious. And then, once we finally stumbled into a hotel near midnight, both kids were howling like offended monkeys instead of laying their exhausted heads down and snoozing.

I got sucked into a wrestling match with Mr. Pants, which only made him howl even louder (what was I thinking??) and Shmoogie woke me and MarMar three times as we finally dozed off, but whatever.

We're almost home, unaccompanied by stolen towels. ;)

Not the Donau

When we took the Metro across the Potomac a few weeks ago, we excitedly pointed it out to Mr. Pants, "Look! We're crossing the river!" and he said, "Oh! The Donau!"

"No, not the Donau, sweetie, this is the Potomac."

Ten or eleven hours of driving yesterday and quite a few bridges. We'd say, "Look! We're going over a bridge! Can you see the water down there?"

For the first few, he asked, "Is it the Donau?"

"No, sweetie. It's the harbor."

"No, sweetie, it's the Susquehanna."

Finally, he started asking just, "what river is this?"

"It's the Hudson! We're in New York!"

"It's the Merrimack! We're in New England!"

(Here he asked, "What does 'new' mean?" but just as I was trying to figure out how to answer that one, he launched into a tearful exhausted fit about wanting DiDi and PaPa on the trip with us and how he "didn't want to miss them!"

So we called them.

One Moment from Three Splendid Hours in New York

So Worth It

A vacation at an alpine ski resort, even just a three-day one, is not something I ever thought we'd do.  But friends we haven't seen in ages were going (with boys near Mr. Pants's age), the website was persuasive, and it was only a four hour drive.

And it was the Heidi Hotel, one of Europe's Kinderhotels, which are designed especially for families and make a vacation with little kids a real vacation.

We didn't even use the free childcare(!) provided every morning and evening, but we were grateful for the kid-friendly options (and adult-friendly buffet) and cloth bibs provided at every meal, the bowls of fruit available for between-meal snacking, the wipes and shampoo and lotion and bathrobes for every family member stocked in the room, the multiple play rooms full of books and games and legos (which Mr. Pants could use on his own, though he scared himself once at the end being there alone and not being able to figure out the stiff door handle to let himself out), the quiet time observed for afternoon naps, the beautiful heated pool with a slide and a baby pool (Shmoogie was entranced with the full-sized Heidi statue pouring a watering can), and the general friendly understanding from the staff and other guests.  Also, the arrangement of the room; we had the smallest one, but there was still plenty of space and the bunkbeds were in their own alcove with a light-blocking curtain!

I can't think of any other hotel I've ever been to where it actually felt easier to deal with the two kids by myself while Mr. Right was sick in bed (he's better now, yes, thank you) than it would have been at home.  

I didn't have to cook or do dishes or clean anything.  We just had to show up in the dining room during meal hours and if I looked like I was struggling to carry everything back to our table, a waiter would swoop in and grab it for me.

I could leave Mr. Pants in the room for down time with a video  (his choice, I offered to let him come with us) and go spend a really delightful hour in the pool with Shmoogie, who almost never gets that kind of extended attention from me and who loved it (after we recovered from my stupid idea of putting her straight into the baby floaty thing instead of holding her - freaked her out).

We could bundle up and walk right out the door and grab a sled and whoosh down the hill to a playground (both Mr. Pants and Shmoogie seemed to enjoy a sled run with me, but had no interest in repeating it; sigh - it was a nice idea).  Mr. Right rallied himself enough to sit huddled on the bench and supervise a VERY pissed off Shmoogie - she couldn't figure out how to walk in her boots so she just stood there scowling at the world - before it was her turn.

We could, after Mr. Right's fever finally broke (though he still wasn't feeling well at all), join in the starlit walk to fondue dinner at the Zirbenhütte, with the kids riding on sleds pulled by parents and the majestic rocky peaks just visible above us, dressed in snow.  There was even a shooting star.

If I had pictures of any of that, it would have been it's own post but, perhaps understandably, we didn't take many pictures on this trip.  Except of Shmoogie in her bathrobe.  I took a lot of pictures of Shmoogie in her bathrobe.

All of this had me wondering why I've never heard of children's hotels at home (though it is quite possible there are some, I've run out of time to check - must prepare for party!) and it occurred to me that maybe having kids in Europe doesn't make you as poor as having kids in the US.  And it turns out, if child poverty rates are any indication, that's absolutely true.  (See page 4 of this 2000 UN report. And  slightly more recent data from 2005, I found the chart on page 11 of that one particularly interesting.)

A Grammar Poorly Suited to Emergencies

In Mr. Pants’s most hair-raising exploit yet, he disappeared after being showered off and wrapped in a bathrobe following a long swim on our first day of vacation.

I don’t have a great explanation.  He’d been swimming with Mr. Right (not yet sick) and our friends while I was in the room with Shmoogie napping.  When Shmoogie woke up, I took her down to check on them in the pool and they were minutes from getting out, so we settled on a lounge chair in the moist warmth and admired the snow-dazzled peaks out the floor to ceiling windows.

From this point of calm and contentment, I happily watched Mr. Right get the boy out of the pool and out of his suit and into the shower and into one of the hotel’s kiddy bathrobes.  Then, as Mr. Right was getting himself ready to go, I saw Mr. Pants slip out the door of the pool into the hallway.

Knowing no harm could come to him out there and figuring he was just checking out the surroundings, I remained blissful and stationary on my lounger.

But two minutes later, when we all headed out to go back to our room, he had VANISHED.

We split up to comb through the area, checking bathrooms and disturbing the naked tranquility of the adjacent sauna, then I started getting panicky and sent Mr. Right back to check every nook and cranny of the pool room for our boy who cannot swim, even though I KNEW I had seen him leave through the locks-behind-you-and-only-an-adult-could-open-it door.

Soon, we were both running all over the busy hotel searching for a small boy in a bathrobe just like all the other bathrobes and even though Mr. Right insisted he was NOT IN THE POOL that was obviously the image that wouldn't leave the front of my mind.  Because I'm a mother.  Or because I'm crazy.  It might be the same thing.

In this state of not-quite-sanity I passed the very nice lady who had checked us in and began to explain to her, “Wir haben unseren Sohn in...  Bade-…” I mimed incoherently, trying to get across the concept of “bathrobe” despite using all the wrong vocabulary words while she smiled sweetly and tried to help and I stammered out the all-important VERB that comes so inconveniently at the END of the sentence*, “VERLOREN!”

She still looked quite unconcerned and I went on, more sure of my vocab here, “He’s not in the swimming pool, we know that for sure, but we can’t find him,” and her expression changed and she said, “Oh!  You have lost the whole SON!  I thought you meant you had lost the bathrobe!”  And then she turned to inform her colleagues while kindly assuring me, “We have never lost a child, they always turn up somewhere.”

Precisely on cue, just at that moment, down the main staircase comes Mr. Right holding a pitiful-looking Mr. Pants, still wearing his hooded bathrobe.

“I went to find the boys,” he pouted, “but their door wouldn’t open!”

Which would be because he’d taken the elevator one floor too far and was tugging on the handle of some stranger’s locked room.

 ***

*There are ways of constructing a German sentence so the verb comes earlier, but I was on auto-pilot, obviously, and by the time I was struggling with the word for "bathrobe" I was already committed to the verb-comes-dead-last quagmire.  Reminds me of my elementary school librarian's favorite book, Tikki Tikki Tembo.

Postcard from Kärnten

We've been away.

To a gorgeous place with severely limited Internet access.

Even so, I would have posted SOMETHING... but Mr. Right was in bed with a fever nearly the whole time and...

I never got the camera plugged into the laptop.

More tomorrow, I hope...

although Mr. Right is still not himself (except that it is VERY himself to get dreadfully ill while on a fabulous vacation)...

and Mr. Pants's party is Sunday...

and I'll be trying to get over this bizarre ellipsis addiction before I let myself near the computer again...

Metamorphosis Pending

I have a clear memory from some time when I was about Mr. SleepyPants's age and my family was staying at a friend's cabin for the weekend and I woke up one morning to find that everyone was awake and busy doing all kinds of things that did not include eating breakfast (my mother in particular was doing sit-ups after returning from a jog) and I was deeply, deeply confused.  "It's OK, honey," said Mom, "You just slept really late; you must have been really tired.  We've already eaten lunch!"

It was extremely disorienting.  But the point is, really, that I remember it happening and I definitely remember there was nothing wrong with me.  Which is why when Mr. SleepyPants was still asleep on Sunday morning at 10 AM (after going to bed at 8 PM), I argued in favor of letting him sleep.  We did turn on the monitor, just to make sure he was still breathing.  Then, at 11:30, Mr. Right went to take a shower, which, sharing a wall with Mr. SleepyPants's room, generally wakes him up.  But it didn't.  So then I went to take a shower.  And that didn't wake him up, either.

So, at 12:20 PM, I  cautiously opened his door, an irrational corner of my brain seriously fearing I would find a full-grown teenager snoozing in the toddler bed, or possibly a three-foot-long cockroach...

Blessedly, my own little boy picked up his head and chirped, "Hi!  My nap was good.  But I was just a slug," I'm pretty sure that's a DiDi-ism, "I got a lot of sleep!  But I was a little bit scared."  Of monsters.  In his closet.  I'll try not to mention in his hearing the possibility of turning into a giant cockroach.

If he'd actually climbed the "difficult" Alternative to some incredible castle ruins in the Wachau the day before, it would have made some sense.  But that was a workout for Mommy and Daddy, not so much for the backpacked Kinder.

To his credit, Mr. SleepyPants did beg to be let out of the backpack about three-quarters of the way up, but by that point even Daddy was a little concerned about the height (and also reasonably concerned that a three-year-old's pace would never get us off the mountain before sundown; we did end up letting him walk back down once we discovered the "easier" Alternative).

Despite being a bit cold and a bit grey, it was a spectacular hike.  When we'd slogged the path (really more of an uneven rocky staircase) up to that level spot between the tall standing rocks, I thought we'd made it to the top, but you can tell from the picture (no flying contraptions involved, honest) there was quite a bit more opportunity for climbing.

Mr. Right took that one from the highest point, a big rock sitting well above whatever no-longer visible dungeon a famous crusading English king was kept in lo these many centuries ago.

Want to play where did we go?  For glory and honor and all that, no prizes.  :)