Who knows what got into the dudes this AM? Having gotten up early, I thought I’d sneak downstairs to do a little work—only to be intercepted by G-Man standing in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Both boys announced, “We’re ready for brutalizing!!” and demanded a little “sugar fuel” in the form of chocolate ice cream (a tiny dose of which I was happy to supply; hey, I grew up on Bill Cosby). Finn literally pumped his fist (below) over some buttered bread, after which we were off to his room for a solid half hour of wrestling (me: Doug the Dog; Henry: Doug Jr.; Finn: a dog named “Skateboard”). To borrow from the Marines, “We horse around more before 8am than most people do all day.” 🙂
Sometimes a guy just has to be a good bad uncle. 🙂
For years we’ve driven past a large collection of rusting, abandoned mining equipment, along with a bunch of huge rocks that get used in each year’s Boom Days drilling competition. We’d never stopped to explore them, though—until now. On Thursday nephew Patrick joined the Micronaxx & me on a little excursion. Because the gate was locked & marked “Private Road!,” we parked nearby, then swung the “minor miners” across a little stream & scrambled up a 20-foot slope made of loose rock. “Brea-kin’ the law, brea-kin’ the law!!”
At this point if you’d imagine I was thinking of Will Ferrell’s hilarious bit about George W. Bush exploring an abandoned mine shaft, you’d be right. 🙂 Happily we avoided all manner of scrapes, tetanus, lockjaw, cave-ins, lightning strikes, and more. (Seriously, it wasn’t dangerous, or I’d never have taken the guys there; it just seemed a bit rakish & daring.) The four of us hoofed it to avoid some impending rain, and the next day we returned with Mom-O. Here’s a gallery that combines shots from both visits.
Finn’s explaining some grim tales to Henry regarding their “family” of plastic dump trucks:
The mom died last summer. The dad will probably die on a trip, so they’ll have to live with the grandma & grandpa. Instead of blood coming out, it’d be oil and gas. She went to Moffett Field when they were working on that big hangar, and it still had the skin on, and she got some bad chemicals. She ate a lot of chemicals, like fuzz & grass and stuff. Probably people will find her & make her a mummy & toss her in the air, then put her in a hole to bury her up. And the kids will say, “Waaaah, where’s our mommy??”
This isn’t the first time mortality has come up. A few months back poor Finny got tearful talking about death. Things got pretty heavy until he blurted, “A-a-and, we won’t get to eat any dinosaur meat!”
We survived! Our guys are officially seasoned campers, chomping at the bit to go again.
Margot & I brought the boys over to Big Basin the Friday before last, rendezvousing with another 15 (!) or so other kids & their parents. Because she had Pilates training on Saturday & Sunday, Margot didn’t sleep over with us, but she did a brilliant job packing & helped us set up the tent. Without her I’d still be out in the woods—if I even got there to begin with!
We borrowed camping gear from my friend Dani at work, but it didn’t occur to us to get air mattresses until we saw all the other families pumping up theirs. The first night was more than a bit bumpy, literally & figuratively. (Note to other parents: When introducing kids to camping, maybe don’t pick the longest day of the year!) The guys bounced around the tent for hours like a couple of popcorn kernels. I was the old maid.
The next day, however, our friend Shay showed up with some good news: “I’m the camping fairy!” she announced, then went to get something from her car. Finn turned to me: “Is she really a camping fairy?” No, she claimed: she was just a “mattress mule,” having been recruited by Margot late the night before to carry a brand new set of air mattresses to us! As I had no phone coverage at the camp site, this was a terrific surprise!
Can I claim we then slept like kings? Well, not exactly. Ensconced in our tent, I thought of the Passover scene from The Ten Commandments: I kept hearing periodic wailing arising from other tents & just thought, “I don’t know who that is, and I don’t know what’s happening, but man we’re just staying behind our door and riding this thing out!” In any case, our backs sure appreciated the “close air support.”
Oh, by the way, parents: When it comes to kids in sleeping bags, it seems there’s about a three-inch window that separates “cozy” from (on one end) “hypothermia” and (on the other) “asphyxiation.” I kept waking up to find Henry totally exposed & turning blue, and then (having remedied that problem) completely missing, having slipped entirely into the bag. Yeesh!
During our hike to a nearby waterfall, Henry quickly migrated to my shoulders, but he hung onto his “walking stick.” The net result was that he held it in front of me, making me feel like a donkey chasing a carrot. Normally it’s the parent who get to dole out the carrot-and-stick routine!
The guys were fascinated that bold raccoons kept infiltrating the campsite, even making off with a bag of marshmallows. They liked hanging out in and around the metal containers meant to protect food from raccoons & bears.
Finn got a very quick & intimate familiarization with banana slugs, accidentally laying his hand on one of the big creatures in a log. He freaked out (hey, I would too), demanding that I wipe off the stickum. Soon, though, we incorporated a banana slug named Bonobo into our T.A.L.B. ritual, alongside a charismatic raccoon named El Bandito & “Ranger Mary” (pictured in the gallery singing to the guys at the ranger station).
Our friends Doug & Jodi occupied the tent right next to ours, and Doug remarked on my patience dealing with the guys’ “20 questions” routine. It was a nice bit of encouragement. Your can see their son Dillon sporting an eyepatch with Finn in the little video clip below.
Seeing all the kids coming & going from tents reminded me of the German phrase “Nein fisimatenten.” It means “no foolishness,” but it’s said to derive from a French occupation of Germany during which French soldiers would call to German girls, “Hey, visitez ma tente!” (“Come visit my tent!”) You can see how Henry’s Graham-cracker-powered solicitations would be hard to resist. 🙂
“Well,” Finn tells a visitor, “there’s a guy named John, and his wife has this cat, and the lady wastes up all his money on a hat & some fancy cat food. So the next day John finds a note that says ‘Dear John honey baby I’m long gone.’ So he goes and asks the railroad station guy who says ‘She went that way!,’ and he asks the grandma & finds the lady at a restaurant & takes her & the cat home!” And that, friends, is a pretty dead-on summary of Johnny Cash’s Mean-Eyed Cat. I think it deserves a commemorative shirt, don’t you? 🙂
Who needs biology books when one has a body to observe?
Poor Finn can be predictably clumsy as he grows, and lately his feet have borne a rain of terror. A few months back he dropped a Mater toy on his big toe, producing a big red bruise under the nail. He was fascinated to learn that the “hurty” would slowly migrate off the end of the toe, “like a little conveyor belt.” We were almost to the end of that race—but dang it, down fell more metal objects!
Now Finn offers tours of his foot-wounds, kind of like a historian would show the rings of a giant sequoia: “Yeah, that’s where Mater got me, and then that’s where the iPad fell, and over on this foot you can see where I dropped the WD-40 can…”
Man, who knew that for the last several years, a seriously terrific toy was sitting right under—or rather, over—our noses?
In the bath the other night, the guys became drinkin’ buddies, discovering the joys of chugging water straight from the tap. Here’s a little set of photos showing their antics, complete with requisite tummy-jousting (“Look how big my belly is!” “No, my belly’s bigger!”). The drinking has become a recurring ritual, and in seemingly related news, we’ve had to upgrade Henry’s overnight pull-ups to Extreme Deluge Control level. 😉
On Sunday the boys and I had a ball scrambling around a 70-year-old B-24 Liberator (a model of which my folks may remember hanging from our rafters for years) together with our little friend Anja. Either Americans were smaller years ago, or this plane was designed for operation by the 3-to-5 set. The boys enjoyed getting into turrets, and when hanging out in the clear nose turret with Anja, Henry insisted on closing the doors and saying “We need a little privacy!”
Following this thorough inspection, I got to fly in the old sucker with Anja’s dad Bruce! He was able to borrow some great video gear from work, even sticking little cameras on the chin & belly. Talk about crazy, open-air excitement! (Seriously, when I was looking out the tail turret, I saw a fellow passenger’s hat zoom past into infinity. “Hey, how’d we fly past a hat?” I initially wondered.) We haven’t yet edited the videos, but here’s a gallery from the adventure. Bruce jokingly complained, “I’m not sure these photos of you will turn out: you don’t look happy enough.” 🙂
Oh boy… we knew this day would come. Much as Henry discovered “Ollie’s brother,” Finn has uncovered a second Leo. The other night he misplaced his little buddy before bedtime, and in desperation Margot & I tapped into “the nest” of looens stashed in her closet. We figured that the MIA buddy would turn up after Finn’s bedtime–but no such luck. A few days later, I came home to find Finn bouncing off the walls: “Dad-O, Dad-O, I have an exciting surprise for you!! Wait here!!” He emerged brandishing “TWO LEOS!!” I think he just lit up the western seaboard with his smile. 🙂 And logically enough, as he’d dubbed Ollie’s brother “Catamaran,” Finn named Leo’s bro “Leomaran.”
Perhaps needless to say, the two buddies have been accompanying us everywhere, appearing in new T.A.L.B. stories (where they’re rather emotionally reunited, having been separated as cubs back in Ghana, after which they try to catch bats in a pillowcase) and trying to “sneak” into preschool. Here’s a little gallery of one happy kid & two smooching looens.
I will say it’s getting a bit tough to answer Finn’s repeated inquiries as to exactly how and why Leomaran showed up (or Catamaran, for that matter–“because toys can’t flutter on their own!”). He’s noting little differences (notably a little string protruding from the “old” one’s face) that’ll make future rotations (for “baths”) and replacements tougher. Ah well–I guess we can treat it all as practice for future discussions of Santa Claus & the Tooth Fairy. 🙂
“Dad-O, I think Van Halen lives in a Led Zeppelin!”
“Henry and I are Steppenwolfs. We’re steppin’ all over!”
Paul Simon:
Finn explains his pile of stuffed animals: “I’m making them my bodyguards & pals.” (And yes, he’s now calling me Betty, and I call him Al.)
“Dad-O, I love that Paul Simon song, ‘Diii-nos on a skateboard, Diii-nos on a skateboard, With nothing to lose.'” (He’s singing “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.”)
Johnny Cash:
I hear Finn singing Johnny Cash to his Legos: “I shot a man named Guido, Just to watch him die…”
What’s a terrific 7am wake-up? A yellow lion blankie poking its head around our doorway & growl-singing “Folsom Prison Blues.” (“RAwr! I hear that train a-comin’…”)
Our sugar-addled boys are tearing around the hardware store’s garden section yelling “My name is SUE, how do you DO?? Now you gonna DIE!!“
Finn’s loving Johnny Cash: “I’m building a car out of ice cream in my tummy, One Piece At A Time! (Can you tweet that?)”
I tried hipping the boys to OutKast’s frenetic song “Hey Ya.” Finn: “These guys are berserkers!” Henry: “Yeah, give us Johnny Cash!”
Midweek we received a long-awaited package from Grandma Nack–the famous Lego cargo ship! Finn’s been overjoyed with it, naming it “The USS Dubuque Iowa.” (“Well,” he explains, “It’s kind of like the USS Iowa, and it was in Dubuque.”) Henry’s taken over the smaller Lego boats, and on Saturday he was in charge of filling up the kiddie pool (“Kitty pool?” he asked, quizzically) for some high-seas adventure.
Later in the day we decided to visit the USS Hornet, a retired aircraft carrier famous for its service in World War II and beyond (e.g. recovering astronauts returning from the moon). Unlike the Iowa, which is currently sort of a floating construction site, the Hornet is a fully finished museum ship. After some nervousness below decks (maybe due to the haunting?), the guys enjoyed scampering around the flight deck. They especially loved learning about catapults & running down the old launch tracks, pretending to burst into the air. Finn was fascinated to learn that fuel-handling crew members wear purple shirts and are dubbed “grapes.” (He insists that the green-shirted guys must also be “grapes.”) Seeing the ships moored nearby was also a treat: Finn loved seeing the cranes & hatches (“Like my Dubuque, but more massive!”), and Henry liked one ship being named the Cape Henry. Here’s a gallery of the goings-on.
[Special thanks to our friends the Sturtevants for inspiring the trip by posting about their recent visit.]
Man oh man were the Micronaxx ever eager to bring Mom-O her first breakfast in bed! Well, to be honest, they were excited to sample the fruits of our “secret mission” to nearby Flower Flour. (Finn kept gleefully threatening to “ruin the beans” by disclosing what we were up to.) In fact, both guys were excited to the point of being train wrecks, nervous that somehow Mom-O wouldn’t share, or (in Finn’s view) that I’d get sidetracked changing Henry before escorting them upstairs (“Don’t get into the poop stuff–it’s always a big deal, and he gets upset, and blah blah blah!”). Happily, a few bites of sugary goodness restored their pluck:
My only regret is that I couldn’t find a tube of brown frosting with which to change “Mom” to the much more fitting “Mom-O.” 🙂
Afterwards we all delighted in the boys’ first boating experience–something they found especially exciting given our recent nautical exploring (more on that shortly).
