Teradactyls Over D.C.

We just got back from Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg, Virginia. I really think the colonists had it easy compared to traveling in a mid size car with three kids in the middle of an August heat wave.

After a few hours of arguing, I began pointing out, “Look, see those nice families in the car next to us? They’re talking together and playing games with license plates and state capitals. Why can't we be normal like that?"

Philip interpreted this observation as a request to teach his younger sister the sound a teradactyl makes. Teradactyls used to be Philip’s favorite animal, back when he was seriously interested in dinosaurs. Emma, being a girl, missed that phase and was bored enough to make the screeching sounds along with her brother. (Christopher, amazingly, slept through this, though he was listening to his Ipod)

I forgot new batteries for the camera, so I handed Philip my phone and asked him to take pictures -- but he had to stop the teradactyl noises. We got some great shots this way:



That's the road we were on, or it might be The Baltimore Tunnel, and here's a bridge:



But at least the prehistoric screeching slowed down and we stopped arguing long enough to reach the hotel. They had a rooftop pool which the kids and I loved. Most of the people around us were speaking French or German and the kids were amazed that we were the only English speakers.

After the pool, while everyone was getting dressed, I decided to go down to the lobby to get some restaurant menus. I had on new clothes (no stains! no cat claw holes!) and I had just come from swimming, so I was feeling pretty cool in that elevator. I was thinking how we could pass for a normal, maybe even a civilized family. Elegant folks all dressed for dinner got on at each floor.

That’s when my phone rang. Except it didn’t ring: it screeched like a teradactyl. Right there, with all the international people in their evening wear, in a small, urban elevator, I heard Philip and Emma going ARRRRRRHCCCCCCCCARRRAGHHHGARRR or something like that. The sound came right from my new black purse that I had bought to go with the new clothes. I had forgotten how he liked to change his ring tone every ten minutes. I fumbled for the phone. No one said a word. They just got off the elevator and walked away. Actually, they walked a little fast…

Human Teradactyls:


Williamsburg was better. We had a bigger space which is always good for family harmony, and there was enough history and canons and things along those lines to interest everyone.

I did escape a demonstration on colonial weaving by sneaking off to this bookstore. Christopher got this shot as I broke free:


I really did want to buy some books and a lamp as souvenirs. I explained to Christopher the style I wanted to get, how it would look colonial, and we would have a reminder of the trip.

Christopher looked at me for a long minute. "Mom," he reminded me, "the colonists did not have lamps."

He thinks he's so smart.

Nature Girl Meets Her Nature

Since it’s August, most of us are thinking about vacations. We live on the Jersey Shore, so it’s not like we don’t see vacationers all around us. They are the families who look really, really stressed at the beach with little kids running around and plastic toys spilling everywhere. Since we live here, they are kind of a seasonal oddity to us along with ticks and mosquitoes.

Of course, we want to go on vacation, too. While I was teaching and working on fall syllabi, I decided the kids should have some kind of vacation until we leave for Virginia in a few days. There’s a campground a few miles from us, so I went on a mining expedition in the basement and found a brand new tent. I remember buying this tent about ten years ago while in a postpartum haze with Emma strapped to me in one of those cotton papoosey slings. I had no idea what I was thinking at the time since I can barely stand in the yard for fifteen minutes before the bugs and the humidity get to me.

“What is that?” Christopher asked as I dragged it up from the basement.

“A tent. I think we should go camping.”

“Camping.” He looked at me for a second. “Mom, do you sit around and think up these ideas for us? And don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s like you’re getting early dementia. Your ideas are getting worse and worse.”

“I don’t have dementia because I want you guys to get close to nature. It would be good for you to leave your computer and video games for a night. I think you should consider it.”

“So now, exactly why do you want us to pretend we’re homeless?”

I never looked at camping in quite that way. But I decided to put the tent up in the backyard. Maybe if they fooled around with the tent back there, they would want to go to the campgrounds.

Now I have never put up a tent before, and this slept four so it wasn’t that big. Emma had a couple of friends over and we took the box and some poles out to the backyard.

We struggled for about half an hour. One of the girls looked at the box. “There’s a door!” she exclaimed, “I don’t see a door on this tent.”

“Maybe we have to cut a door,” the other girl suggested, “you know, just cut it out.”

“Really?” I asked, “I never saw anyone do that,” I said. "They just zip them, don't they?"

“I think the door appears magically once the tent is up,” Emma suggested hopefully. "Remember the closet to Narnia?"

I looked at Emma. “I think I better see if there are directions.”

Of course there weren’t. The box was nearly ten years old, and it had been snooped in a few times and there were no directions. I stared at the box for a few minutes trying to figure out what went where.

We were still out there without a tent when Philip and a friend came into the yard.

“Oh,” Friend said, “we used to camp all the time. I love putting tents up!”

After a few minutes, Friend looked at me. “Umm, you know why this isn’t working?”

We all looked at her blankly.

“You guys are putting the tarp up. This is only the piece you put up when it rains. This isn’t a tent.”

We did find the tent in another part of the basement. Philip and his friend put it up. No one went near it. It's still out there, now being used as a trampoline for our psychotic squirrels. I am waiting for that friend to return because I have absolutely no idea how to disassemble the thing.

We have found a lovely hotel in Virginia where you slide a card into a slot to get to your room.

I think that’s a really good idea for me.

What Kind of Day at the Beach Are You?

The other day, we got our first chance to go to the beach this summer. I am admittedly at odds with this area and its Nascar-loving, small animal hunting denizens, but when I go to the local beach, I don’t want to live anywhere else. These are pictures of the beach about fifteen minutes from us:







I remember getting so annoyed when my adult relatives asked me to look at the sand dunes. Who wanted to do that when there was a beach with an ocean right there? I tried pointing out how amazing these places are to my kids. They responded with such a blank stare that I could hear mental tapping and the low whisper of: “When will she be done talking about sand?”

I think you can tell a whole lot about folks when you see them on the beach. My husband, the engineering type, is a logician. He reads the table they post about water temperature, tidal patterns, and the danger of rip tides before even putting the blanket down. I’m not sure what difference any of that makes; I figure out the water temperature and currents once I’m in the ocean - if I remember to think about that stuff.

Of course, he grew up inland so the beach isn’t home to him like it is to me. I grew up on a beach and never remember, not even once, having any kind of scientific table to consult before swimming. Then again, if people like me ran the world it would be a whole lot messier and way, way more bridges would collapse. I usually dump everything in a kind of territorial scatter and plunge into the water. Son #1 is like that, too. He heads straight for the water, only now, he makes sure he is really, really far from the middle aged lady in the bathing suit. When we bump into each other in the water, he nods at me and paddles away as if he has just spotted my dorsal fin.

Son #2 has become a herrmit crab. Angry that he could not spend the afternoon redesigning his myspace page, he sat with towels covering his head. I think he was texting under those towels, but he refused to budge off his spot. I did slide a juice box and some snacks under the towels which were silently accepted. (Please tell me that some day he won’t be fifteen anymore; I think he‘s been this age for three years…)

Emma is an arts and crafts beachcomber. She collects shells, “great rocks” (meaning weirdly shaped or super flat ones) and anything glittery or interesting. These usually get made into weird sculptures that she puts together with gorilla glue and acrylic paint. They look like mini gargoyles when she is done and we put them in the garden to keep the psychotic squirrel at bay. (He’s a squirrel who swings down from the branches and sits right near us when we are outside -- then he leaps back into the tree without warning and makes a screeching sound -- we never knew squirrels made sounds. They shouldn’t make sounds in case you’re wondering what he sounds like)

But most of the people on the beach are barges. I never understood this behavior, and I still don’t. They come down to the water in bathing suits, set up an umbrella and just sit there and watch everyone. I guess they watch crazy people like me shivering in the water. Occasionally, they turn their lounge chairs to or away from the sun, but they don’t get up too much. I guess everyone likes the beach, even non swimmers.

So what kind of beach visitor are you? A barge, a beachcomber, a plunger, a logician or a hermit crab?

Are You Smarter Than MY Fifth Grader?

I am a television grump: I can't stand most tv, and I'm always nagging my kids not to watch it. I say subtle things like, "Do you want to maintain ANY kind of visual imagination?" and I point to ditch diggers on 90+ degree days and say, "He used to watch hours of television and now..." The kids roll their eyes and say things like, "Right, mom,'cause it's not like he was dumb to start with." They are so sarcastic -- just like their father.

Anyway, I was on the couch recently, and I wanted to read, but I couldn't focus enough from the a) pain and b) the pain killers. So I watched tv, at least for a little while. And my kids showed me some of their favorite shows:

16 and Pregnant

SpongeBob

South Park

Family Guy

I sort of liked the first two since the first was scary and the second was actually funny sometimes. The other shows just seemed mean and uninspired. They reminded me of jokes I heard when I used to supervise a time out room in a terrible high school.

Then Emma, a fifth grader, put on the show, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? I, thinking the obvious, said to her, "Are these questions you get asked in school?" She started laughing. "No, Mom, they're so easy. It's the adults who are dumb." I didn't believe her. Then I watched it. Is it possible to be given a drivers license and not know there are seven continents? I mean, could there be nine? Or did one melt? Good Lord.

Since I live with a fifth grader, here are Emma's two latest questions that she asked during a long car trip:

What shape is the universe?

She has not been able to accept Dad's answer that it has no shape. We are at a loss on this one.

The other is this:

Since I'm here now, where was I before I was born? Was I a spirit? Not after I die, but before I was born, what was I doing? And WHAT was I?

That's the show I want to see.

Losing Time

I haven't been around these past week or so due to dental surgery that I thought would be just annoying. I didn't realize it would be so extensive and that I would have to take pain pills that left me an insane person, living on the couch and jotting down outline notes like this:

birds, with the field, not within the scope, seven isotopes

At the time, I explained to anyone who stopped by my cushion how this was going to be an amazing novel, very similar to the writing of Bram Stoker.

Who?

He wrote Dracula which is the only horror book I ever read that I liked. I have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

I had to spend more time on the couch than I liked (which is none; I am kind of the opposite of a couch potato), but the kids were great. They made tortellini dinners with Ragu and I am now not sure if I can ever eat a Lean Pocket again. Ever.

I alos made some great discoveries about American tv -- I now know -thanks to late night infomercials - that there is a new science termed YOUTHOLOGY. Seriously.

By now, I'm down to one pill a day and a sore lower jaw, and my writing notes make a bit more sense. We've had some fun, though. Baby Cat (aka Cara) the one who went to live in a basket after the arrival of the kittens -



They are so cute; here's just one more:



Anyway, Baby Cat decided she had had enough of not being the baby any more, and she decided to make a break for it when one of the kids' friends opened the door. We all ran after her, and ended up on the lawn of the Squids.

The Squids are our neighbors, the ones in the scary house that is always dark (hence, like a cave) and Emma claims the tree in their front yard is shaped exactly like a squid. We've never actually SEEN the Squids, but Baby Cat ran onto and then under their porch and we all followed. I stood right in their yard and yelled over to the kids, "The Baby is under the Squids' porch." This sentence must have sounded very strange to anyone who heard it, and I would not have hollered that right there in their yard had I not been a little assisted in my loss of inhibitions. Maybe it was thinking about Dracula, and standing there under the moonlight that made me howl that. That, plus the narcotics.

After hearing this, Emma backed away from me without bothering to turn around and Philip ran very, very fast away from all of us. But Christopher ventured under there, coming out with a dried spider attached to the shoulder of his t shirt (this discovery caused Emma to shriek when he came back inside the light), but he did have Baby Cat in his arms.

And I wonder why the neighbors think we are odd.

I can't imagine how folks who dabble in pharmaceuticals get anything done. That sense of losing time makes me feel so defeated; how do you write under the influence of anything? But I'm back. I had a lot of help in recovering:



Philip's about 175 now. Guess I'm going to have to develop stronger leg muscles.

Kreativ Blogger Award

Bish was nice enough to nominate me for this award, and even though I am late, I will play. I am supposed to nominate other folks, but I think we are in something of a blogging clique here -- all female writers of children's literature. So we know pretty much the same people and I will be double tagging them. If you haven't been nominated, and you want to play along, send me an email and I will happily nominate you.

The other piece of this is to confess seven things about you that folks might find curious or that they didn't know. I have so much ample weirdness in my life that it was hard to narrow it down to seven. That's probably not good. Anyway, here goes:

1. I am constantly thinking about moving. We haven't exactly blended in the natives here who watch Nascar all day and carve decoys for the annual duck hunting decoy show. I look at real estate markets all over the East Coast. I am currently considering Virginia, Princeton and northern Manhattan. Of course, money plays no part in these fantasies.

2. I still haven't bought curtains for our windows. We have these sheets of linen tied at the bottom (I can't even cut fabric straight let alone sew). Every time I walk into one of those curtain shops and the domestic divas start discussing "window treatments" I get panicky and flee. Maybe installing window treatments would help imbue a greater sense of permanency to our house.

3. I think cats are connected to some kind of mystical energy that is invisible to humans. I won't say anything more about this belief or I will have to move to L.A. - or at least Oregon.

4. I write several pieces at once even though most other writers are baffled by this habit. I absolutely have to be in the mood for a certain character or I end up looking at seven bedroom homes in Alexandria. (Those virtual tours can be compelling)

5. I steam organic vegetables for dinner and when the kids are done, I sneak outside with half a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

6. I worry that I like to read blogs now more than talk to actual people. Bloggy people never ask me to bake or watch their kids, and I can think about what they wrote before writing anything back. They demand so little...

7. I can't decide whether I like or don't like the Internet. I really can't. It's probably the only area of my life where I don't lean a little more to the yes or no area. Sometimes I think it's wonderful and sometimes I feel lost when I'm online --like there's this big party that's been going on and I just arrived. It's exactly 50/50. In fact, the older I get, the less able I am to make decisions in general, but this one is the only one that's still completely yin/yang.

Those are the first seven that come to mind, but I'm sure if I dug a little, there's way deeper and stranger stuff. For now, I'll just let this stuff float out there.

Return from the Zone of Non Presence

I have been swamped lately, and not with work which has been wonderfully part time. We had a lot of family stuff going on involving hospitals and a few other other huge life events.

I couldn't access the Internet at all for most of the time because we had, as the guy who just left my house termed, "intermittent connectivity" -- I love that phrase. I'm sure the cable guy didn't realize I was thinking that's pretty much a perfect phrase for describing how it is to raise teenagers.

I secretly like being unable to use the computer because it forces my kids to spend more time with me. I also got a lot of writing done because I can still access my WIPs without the Internet. I suffer from Internet-induced ADD: Wow! I can find out exactly how falcons communicate! Is THAT what Emily Dickinson's room looked like? Maybe I can figure out how to clean the bathtub without using chemicals...you get the idea.

Anyway,since I'm back now, I would like to first thank Bish for awarding me this very cool award:



It's probably too late to play along, but I appreciate it!

In other news, my kids found out about the cat colony that lives in and around the Atlantic City Boardwalk. We already have four animals, so I explained to them how, as much as we wanted to help, we are already so busy and the vet bills, how I still owe money for Mazy's Lyme disease and they really understood. So here is Coco, relaxing in our living room. (Her sister is under the sofa)



They are incredibly cute, but one of our older cats, Cara, has now taken up residence in a basket used to hold school papers. Good thing the school year is over.



I am really scared that I am going to be one of those old women living in a house impacted with books and cats. I am so headed in that direction. Here is another one of Coco. She has a weird eyelid (it's flipped out) and may eventually have to get her eye removed. We knew that before we adopted her. Anyone remember Poe's story, The Black Cat?



I just heard Christopher say to his father (who has a tendency to undercook meat), "Hey Dad, do you think my appendix still works?" Think it's time to see what's going on.