I sat in the audience watching the children shuffle back and forth across the stage muttering and stammering their lines, reminding myself its the effort not the results that matter in the third grade play. Surrounded by parents, I could hear them shifting around on the metal chairs, just as I was, optimistically trying to find a way to sit for the remainder of the performance without their entire behind falling asleep. There was little chance of the parents themselves falling asleep since there were a couple "main" characters who must have heard "speak loud and clear" a few too many times. One little boy in particular I will never forget. His character was one of the many farm animals, the pig, but he had a remarkable amount of lines in the production.
"OINK, OINK!!"
Those were his only words (well what else does a pig say?), but he made four of five different entrances, and each time delivered in same exact way, yelling at the top of his lungs. We, the collective (captive?) parent audience, chuckled each time, it was a nice marker to break up the monotony. Halfway through, a tall red-headed boy stepped out from the wings. He looked nervous and must have decided that if he didn't look at the audience he could pretend that they weren't there. Clearing his throat carefully, he delivered his lines. I don't remember what they were, but I remember that I was able to hear them over the shifting and shuffling. Afterward, before he made his exit stage-right, he stole a glance out into the audience to where I was sitting. I gave him a big smile and a thumbs up. After he exited, I allowed my mind to wander to what I was going to make for dinner and whether or not I remembered to start the laundry before I left the house, until it was time to clap and cheer as the cast came out for their final bows.
I have found that as children get older, performances get longer - whether they are plays or concerts - and yet the seating arrangements stay uncomfortably the same. Sitting in yet another folding metal chair with a numb rear end, I decided that next time I would change things up and sit on the bleacher seats instead - same butt-numbing results, but the advantage of a higher viewpoint which comes in handy when attending a middle school band concert. At least with concerts there is no worry of being unable to hear, microphones and speakers flanked the bank to amplify the piece enough that even the parents who stayed at home could hear it. Sadly at this level there are few solos, and since technique is still rather questionable most songs are jauntily called "marches" while sounding more like a "funeral dirge." They also sound remarkably the same. Having heard the trombone portion of these pieces many many times at home the week prior, there were few surprises aside from the accidental squeaks from one of the clarinets or saxophones.
I shifted a bit more and glanced at the parent next to me. She was sitting at an angle with her arms stretched out in front of her, holding a video camera not shifting a bit, to ensure a steady shot. I wondered with a smile, seriously how often would that home movie be watched? Honestly I was hoping that I would be able to get the tune out of my head in the near future, forget watching it over and over for fun (altough the idea of watching it while sitting on a couch was appealing). It was also rather depressing when I rembered my son telling me the coolest part of playing his instrument was the little valve that he opened occasionally to blow the spit out of the long brass arm. I guess I could be glad that he sat in the back row of the band at least.
High school concerts are the big leagues of the public school concert world. Programs are handed out at the entrance. I took two just in case, one for reading through and using as reference during the performance (and then as a fan once the air became sifling) and the other to tuck carefully away to take home and put in the scrapbook with the pictures I would take. I had my digital camera, video camera, and tripod all stored in my handy camera bag, along with extra rechargable batteries and AC adaptors tucked in the side pockets. Over my other should I carried my purse, hastily cleaned out at home and refilled with bottles of water, granola bars, tissues, and a foldable seat cushion (it was a large purse). I saw a lot of familiar faces as I found a seat. We were all like an extended family by now, seeing each other four or five times a year at these same functions. I set up camp mid-way up the bleachers in the center section, just 5 rows down from the top where there were several wall outlets, just in case. I waved at another mom heading up the steps with similar gear in tow. She scooted past me and began setting up as well. We chatted a bit while getting comfy, placing our jackets beside us to make sure no one encroached in our territory, and looked through the program commenting on the soloist selections and pieces that the children were performing.
The audience hushed as the performers quickly and quietly entered and took their beginning places. Scanning the group, I turned on the video camera and adjusted the zoom so that I would be able to see all of them so that I wouldn't have to adjust it except to get closer for the solos. The director stepped up and described the different pieces for this performance, introduced the soloists and walked towards the small band that would be palying the music. As the band began, the singers all began the choreographed steps, smiles in place. I spotted my son near the back with most of the other boys, all looking rather dashing in white dinner jackets and bow ties, and snapped a few still photos of him, and them, as they stepped and moved to the music.
I find that the show chior is aptly named, it certainly is a complete show with amazing vocals. The song shifted to another as the ladies melted away and the gentlemen stepped forward. My son took a step further toward the microphone and I zoomed in the camera as he began his solo piece. I held my breath. He had been practicing all week, humming under his breath and doing scales while in the shower, and it had paid off - he was fantastic. I managed to get a picture or two of him before I had to dig for the tissues in my purse. What an amazing journey he had brought me on, from school to school, group to group, concert to concert, and I was so thankful that he did. Standing there in the spotlight, smiling as the applause (his applause) began to swell, his eyes met mine and I gave him two thumbs up.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Week 4 - Childhood memoir
In my opinion, grocery shopping is just about the most unpleasant of the "household chores" that fall upon me as the full time, stay-at-home parent. I never seem to time it right, so I am always squeezing through the jam-packed aisles, trying to navigate around unruly and wandering children, and avoid getting stuck behind the little scooter carts. On top of all of the navigation issues, I have to remember what I need to buy, since I almost always forget my list on the counter at home, or in the car, or somewhere that I haven't remembered yet. So as I am crawling down the aisles, I scan all the items on the shelf in an attempt to get everything that I need so I don't miss anything and have to make yet another trip.
This week I clearly remembered my son yelling out from the kitchen about my lack of jelly options available.
"Moooommm! We don't have any good jelly"
"We have three or four different kinds in there. There's grape, blackberry, raspberry, and I think I have some of the blueberry stuff left. What good jelly don't we have?"
"We don't have any strawberry! Geeze, how un-American can you be? What's a PB&J without strawberry?"
It was true, we didn't have strawberry jelly. I had this thing about strawberry jelly ever since I was a kid.
One particular summer stands out in my memory. I wasn't going to be babysitting everyday for Mrs. Adams this summer and I had been looking forward to long quiet days, with trips to the lake and camp out sleepovers with my girlfriends. Just as school finished for the year, my mom and dad had bought this huge old cargo-type van. It was brick red and I remember thinking how creepy it was since it was the kind of van you picture when you hear about kids being abducted, or creepy guys selling drugs. It was almost completely stripped inside, no carpeting or vinyl covering the bare metal of the floors, walls, or roof. It also had no seats in the back. My parents, being rather clever I suppose, had bought a couple of school bus seats and bolted them to the floor off to one side, so that there were seats for us four kids to sit in, instead of sliding around on the floor. Mostly I refused to ride in it at all, as a pre-teen there was no way that I wanted anyone to see me in it, although there were no windows in the back so that wasn't much of an issue, but it was the principle.
Mom was really excited this particular summer because we would be able to take the van when we went strawberry picking. Instead of squeezing quarts of loose berries in the trunk of the car, we would be able to neatly lay out the quarts on the floor in the back of the van. We all packed in the van and rumbled down the road towards the strawberry farm. When we got there, we found a "good spot" according to my dad, although any spot looks "good" when you are in the middle of acres of strawberries, and I was sent to buy the quart boxes. Usually we got ten or so. I would watch the man carefully count out ten from the huge sleeve of odd green colored cardboard boxes, and pay him with the two quarters my parents gave me. This time, dad pulled out his wallet and gave me a five dollar bill.
"Go ahead and buy a whole sleeve this time. Mom wants to get a whole bunch of berries since we have the room to bring them home in the van."
"But that's a hundred quarts! That will take forever! And what in the world are we gonna do with that many strawberries?"
He just smiled and waved my objections away, turning to help my mom smear the little kids with sunscreen. Handing the man the five, I noticed his smirk as he pulled one of the towers of boxes out of it's plastic wrapping. He must have noticed the disgusted look on my face as I took the boxes. I tromped away, up the mile long aisle of plants with the stack of boxes leaning on my shoulder. Arriving back at our "base camp," I was waiting for Mom to see the huge stack and tell me that was way too many, but she didn't. She just smiled and told me to set them next to the side door of the van. My bothers and sister scampered up to get boxes to fill, although I knew that they would spend most of their time eating and throwing the berries at each other, leaving the actual filling of the boxes to Mom, Dad, and me.
We were there for hours. I kept the van in sight, glancing now and then to see how many boxes were left to fill. The stack of empty boxes was slowly shrinking, but even after all that time, it was still tall enough that it was leaning against the door of the van. I heard Dad eventually call out for us to come back to the van. Thinking that he was finally giving in and admitting that we weren't going to fill all of those boxes, I quickly filled my last quart, thankfully, and headed to the van.
As I rounded the front of the van, I expected to see Mom and Dad packing up, counting the quarts, and washing berry-stained faces. Instead I saw Dad laying out a small blanket between rows and Mom handing out sandwiches from a large paper bag. We weren't done, we were taking a lunch break. Taking my sandwich and sitting on the bumper of the van I thought it was kinda funny that I was eating a PB&J with strawberry jelly in a strawberry field. Chuckling I mentioned it to Mom, and she smiled along with me.
"That's why we're getting so many berries. I'm going to make jelly."
The smile slipped off my face. I remembered the jelly making a couple of years before. We had made eight or nine big mason jars full last time, but it was a long, tedious, nasty, hot, steam-filled memory of strawberries in my kitchen. Looking in the van I could see that we already had three or four times as many berries as we had when we made jelly last time, and my stomach clenched. Since it was summer vacation, and since I wasn't babysitting for Mrs. Adams this year, I was going to be home everyday with little chance of missing the great jelly-making.
I spent the rest of the day trying to think of suggestions of what to do with strawberries that wouldn't turn our house into a sauna. Picking and picking and picking more berries, filling the stupid green boxes, hating the berries more and more and more. Near dinner time we finally stopped. The pile of empty green boxes was gone, and so was the floor of our van. Two little spaces were left next to the bolted-down seats, so us kids wouldn't step on the stupid berries on the ride home, but the rest of the floor was covered in mounds of red berries. You couldn't even see the green of the boxes anymore, since Dad always took a quart or two and poured them over the other boxes, just to make sure they were as full as possible, since we paid by the number of quarts. I remember thinking, as the van rumbled off down the road, leaving the fields behind, that Dad could have just as easily spent the money he paid for all those berries on jelly at the grocery store - eliminating the need to make jelly and all of the steamy work that went with it.
We did end up making jelly that week, tons and tons of it. I spent two whole days escaping the kitchen by hulling and slicing strawberries on the front steps of the house five quarts at a time. Finally, surprisingly, depressingly, there weren't anymore to be hulled or sliced, and I was pulled into the kitchen work. I don't remember a lot about working in the kitchen with Mom to make the jelly, maybe my mind blocked it out because it was just too awful. I know that I spent a lot of time putting my hands into the kitchen sink filled with ice water after spilling hot water or even hotter, liquid molten strawberry on them.
I have hated cooked strawberries in any form ever since. Obviously after our jelly-making, we had dozens and dozens of jars of strawberry jelly. We gave some to family or friends, but mostly we ate it - all summer, through the fall and winter, and again all the next summer, and on, and on, and on. I wouldn't be surprised if my parents still had some of it in the back corners of the pantry in our old house. We also were able to strike jelly off of every grocery list, 'well, we don't need jelly' they would say, chuckling like it was funny. For the next five years, until I moved out of the house after high school, I had nothing but strawberry jelly for my morning toast or PB&J unless I was at a restaurant or friends house. I didn't own strawberry jelly for years afterward, only buying some when my son wanted it for lunches after preschool. Even today, I would rather eat toast plain rather than put previously molten, strawberry jelly on it. I will never look at a strawberry the same way.
So in the store, standing before the plethora of jelly options, I looked for the tell-tale red label of strawberry. Grimacing at the various brands and sizes, I grabbed the smallest jar of no-name brand of strawberry and continued on down the lane.
This week I clearly remembered my son yelling out from the kitchen about my lack of jelly options available.
"Moooommm! We don't have any good jelly"
"We have three or four different kinds in there. There's grape, blackberry, raspberry, and I think I have some of the blueberry stuff left. What good jelly don't we have?"
"We don't have any strawberry! Geeze, how un-American can you be? What's a PB&J without strawberry?"
It was true, we didn't have strawberry jelly. I had this thing about strawberry jelly ever since I was a kid.
One particular summer stands out in my memory. I wasn't going to be babysitting everyday for Mrs. Adams this summer and I had been looking forward to long quiet days, with trips to the lake and camp out sleepovers with my girlfriends. Just as school finished for the year, my mom and dad had bought this huge old cargo-type van. It was brick red and I remember thinking how creepy it was since it was the kind of van you picture when you hear about kids being abducted, or creepy guys selling drugs. It was almost completely stripped inside, no carpeting or vinyl covering the bare metal of the floors, walls, or roof. It also had no seats in the back. My parents, being rather clever I suppose, had bought a couple of school bus seats and bolted them to the floor off to one side, so that there were seats for us four kids to sit in, instead of sliding around on the floor. Mostly I refused to ride in it at all, as a pre-teen there was no way that I wanted anyone to see me in it, although there were no windows in the back so that wasn't much of an issue, but it was the principle.
Mom was really excited this particular summer because we would be able to take the van when we went strawberry picking. Instead of squeezing quarts of loose berries in the trunk of the car, we would be able to neatly lay out the quarts on the floor in the back of the van. We all packed in the van and rumbled down the road towards the strawberry farm. When we got there, we found a "good spot" according to my dad, although any spot looks "good" when you are in the middle of acres of strawberries, and I was sent to buy the quart boxes. Usually we got ten or so. I would watch the man carefully count out ten from the huge sleeve of odd green colored cardboard boxes, and pay him with the two quarters my parents gave me. This time, dad pulled out his wallet and gave me a five dollar bill.
"Go ahead and buy a whole sleeve this time. Mom wants to get a whole bunch of berries since we have the room to bring them home in the van."
"But that's a hundred quarts! That will take forever! And what in the world are we gonna do with that many strawberries?"
He just smiled and waved my objections away, turning to help my mom smear the little kids with sunscreen. Handing the man the five, I noticed his smirk as he pulled one of the towers of boxes out of it's plastic wrapping. He must have noticed the disgusted look on my face as I took the boxes. I tromped away, up the mile long aisle of plants with the stack of boxes leaning on my shoulder. Arriving back at our "base camp," I was waiting for Mom to see the huge stack and tell me that was way too many, but she didn't. She just smiled and told me to set them next to the side door of the van. My bothers and sister scampered up to get boxes to fill, although I knew that they would spend most of their time eating and throwing the berries at each other, leaving the actual filling of the boxes to Mom, Dad, and me.
We were there for hours. I kept the van in sight, glancing now and then to see how many boxes were left to fill. The stack of empty boxes was slowly shrinking, but even after all that time, it was still tall enough that it was leaning against the door of the van. I heard Dad eventually call out for us to come back to the van. Thinking that he was finally giving in and admitting that we weren't going to fill all of those boxes, I quickly filled my last quart, thankfully, and headed to the van.
As I rounded the front of the van, I expected to see Mom and Dad packing up, counting the quarts, and washing berry-stained faces. Instead I saw Dad laying out a small blanket between rows and Mom handing out sandwiches from a large paper bag. We weren't done, we were taking a lunch break. Taking my sandwich and sitting on the bumper of the van I thought it was kinda funny that I was eating a PB&J with strawberry jelly in a strawberry field. Chuckling I mentioned it to Mom, and she smiled along with me.
"That's why we're getting so many berries. I'm going to make jelly."
The smile slipped off my face. I remembered the jelly making a couple of years before. We had made eight or nine big mason jars full last time, but it was a long, tedious, nasty, hot, steam-filled memory of strawberries in my kitchen. Looking in the van I could see that we already had three or four times as many berries as we had when we made jelly last time, and my stomach clenched. Since it was summer vacation, and since I wasn't babysitting for Mrs. Adams this year, I was going to be home everyday with little chance of missing the great jelly-making.
I spent the rest of the day trying to think of suggestions of what to do with strawberries that wouldn't turn our house into a sauna. Picking and picking and picking more berries, filling the stupid green boxes, hating the berries more and more and more. Near dinner time we finally stopped. The pile of empty green boxes was gone, and so was the floor of our van. Two little spaces were left next to the bolted-down seats, so us kids wouldn't step on the stupid berries on the ride home, but the rest of the floor was covered in mounds of red berries. You couldn't even see the green of the boxes anymore, since Dad always took a quart or two and poured them over the other boxes, just to make sure they were as full as possible, since we paid by the number of quarts. I remember thinking, as the van rumbled off down the road, leaving the fields behind, that Dad could have just as easily spent the money he paid for all those berries on jelly at the grocery store - eliminating the need to make jelly and all of the steamy work that went with it.
We did end up making jelly that week, tons and tons of it. I spent two whole days escaping the kitchen by hulling and slicing strawberries on the front steps of the house five quarts at a time. Finally, surprisingly, depressingly, there weren't anymore to be hulled or sliced, and I was pulled into the kitchen work. I don't remember a lot about working in the kitchen with Mom to make the jelly, maybe my mind blocked it out because it was just too awful. I know that I spent a lot of time putting my hands into the kitchen sink filled with ice water after spilling hot water or even hotter, liquid molten strawberry on them.
I have hated cooked strawberries in any form ever since. Obviously after our jelly-making, we had dozens and dozens of jars of strawberry jelly. We gave some to family or friends, but mostly we ate it - all summer, through the fall and winter, and again all the next summer, and on, and on, and on. I wouldn't be surprised if my parents still had some of it in the back corners of the pantry in our old house. We also were able to strike jelly off of every grocery list, 'well, we don't need jelly' they would say, chuckling like it was funny. For the next five years, until I moved out of the house after high school, I had nothing but strawberry jelly for my morning toast or PB&J unless I was at a restaurant or friends house. I didn't own strawberry jelly for years afterward, only buying some when my son wanted it for lunches after preschool. Even today, I would rather eat toast plain rather than put previously molten, strawberry jelly on it. I will never look at a strawberry the same way.
So in the store, standing before the plethora of jelly options, I looked for the tell-tale red label of strawberry. Grimacing at the various brands and sizes, I grabbed the smallest jar of no-name brand of strawberry and continued on down the lane.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Week 3 - Tone, Travel
Every year my husband and I plan a family vacation. Since we would rather not sell one of kids to pay for airfare, we usually drive to wherever we want to go.
As a child my family would go on vacations like this, everyone piling in the pickup camper and tooling down the road for a day or two, headed for Disney World for spring vacation. This is where I learned that driving through the night with small children is an AWESOME idea. Sleeping children are happy travelers, as my father used to say. My younger brothers and sister became bored quickly with the confines of the moving camper, familiar from previous years' vacations and travels. They passed out early on convenient little fold out beds, strategically placed throughout the camper, and I would revel in the quiet little world I was in. With my mother and father in the cab of the truck, I was left in back to keep an eye on the kids and get some sleep so that I could help navigate when one of my parents needed to take a break from the front. As a teenager I spent less time sleeping than I should have and instead occupied myself by reading a new book, working on word puzzles, or occasionally foraging in the small camper fridge to look for the snacks my parents hid from the little kids. Part of the fun and adventure of the vacation for me would be to see all of the cities, towns, tourist attractions, and billboards we passed on the way. I would marvel at the different fast food chains we didn't have (Waffle House, really?), or the fireworks stands that were illegal at home (stupid, boring Maine). These were snapshots of daily life for these people living so far from my home. I would spend hours lounging on the over-the-cab bed looking out the front window, feeling as though I was flying as I watched the lights and buildings zoom by in the dark.
Traveling with my children is a bit of a different experience. We do not have a camper, or a pickup for that matter. We have a standard, soccer-mom, 7 passenger minivan. My husband and I plan out the route we to take, and since I have family living in a few different far-away states, we would will plan a trip to their house and look for interesting places and things along the way. We do try to drive overnight, so that the kids sleep for a majority of the boring drive-time. Rather than the comfortable fold out bunks, as it nears evening we stop for the last (hopefully) bathroom break of the night, and as everyone piles back in I have them take off their shoes and my oldest son passes out the small individual blankets and pillows stored behind the rear seat. "Settling in" takes a while, complains ring out over the sound of the GPS directing back to the interstate. Once everyone has leg room, whatever electronic item they need to amuse themselves (with headphones please), and no one is accidentally touching anyone else in any way, I try to work the kinks out of my back and neck from spending an hour supervising the controlled chaos. Those are the times where I curse the laws against open containers of alcohol in a vehicle. I spend less time gazing out the window, instead I pour over the maps (good, ol' fashioned paper ones I won't leave home without) and directions I printed out - programming all of the correct turns into our GPS that seems to have a diabolical sense of humor when we are traveling away from home - getting my hubby all set to drive safely without distractions like decisions about exits or interstate changes, so that I can get some of that sleep that I used to scoff at.
Driving across country, I admit, has lost some of it's mystique for me. I know now that "South of the Border" is an insanely overpriced strip mall of crappy, not even locally made trinkets. The neon billboards counting down the miles to the oddly, and somewhat creepy bow-legged cowboy monument, are annoying because they block out the small towns and the signs gas stations close to the interstate. Waffle House can stay safely in the south where it belongs, since we narrowly missed disaster when my oldest son found a bulletin board tack in his pancakes, although they were nice enough to discount our meal 25% (insert sarcasm here). Although they probably don't want us back anyway after Colby managed to throw up all the way to the bathroom, even though I did leave a 25% tip that time. However, Sonic can build a franchise across the street of my house so that I have a lifetime supply of foot long chili dogs and cherry limeades. The roller skates might be tricky in the winter, but maybe they could do ice skates instead?
Traveling with my kids has had its ups and downs. It's cramped and everyone is sick of the van by the time we get there, but it's so amazing to close your eyes in one place and then open them and be in a totally new and different one. I hope that they are able to remember these trips as adventures rather than torture. Like when Branden was on the rope swing at the "crick" by Nana's house, or when Derek caught a snake in Grandma's yard and she screeched and yelled like she was on fire. I want them to have these new and interesting memories of all of us together as a family - laughing and playing, learning and discovering - instead of just the sometimes monotonous lives we lead on a daily basis.
As a child my family would go on vacations like this, everyone piling in the pickup camper and tooling down the road for a day or two, headed for Disney World for spring vacation. This is where I learned that driving through the night with small children is an AWESOME idea. Sleeping children are happy travelers, as my father used to say. My younger brothers and sister became bored quickly with the confines of the moving camper, familiar from previous years' vacations and travels. They passed out early on convenient little fold out beds, strategically placed throughout the camper, and I would revel in the quiet little world I was in. With my mother and father in the cab of the truck, I was left in back to keep an eye on the kids and get some sleep so that I could help navigate when one of my parents needed to take a break from the front. As a teenager I spent less time sleeping than I should have and instead occupied myself by reading a new book, working on word puzzles, or occasionally foraging in the small camper fridge to look for the snacks my parents hid from the little kids. Part of the fun and adventure of the vacation for me would be to see all of the cities, towns, tourist attractions, and billboards we passed on the way. I would marvel at the different fast food chains we didn't have (Waffle House, really?), or the fireworks stands that were illegal at home (stupid, boring Maine). These were snapshots of daily life for these people living so far from my home. I would spend hours lounging on the over-the-cab bed looking out the front window, feeling as though I was flying as I watched the lights and buildings zoom by in the dark.
Traveling with my children is a bit of a different experience. We do not have a camper, or a pickup for that matter. We have a standard, soccer-mom, 7 passenger minivan. My husband and I plan out the route we to take, and since I have family living in a few different far-away states, we would will plan a trip to their house and look for interesting places and things along the way. We do try to drive overnight, so that the kids sleep for a majority of the boring drive-time. Rather than the comfortable fold out bunks, as it nears evening we stop for the last (hopefully) bathroom break of the night, and as everyone piles back in I have them take off their shoes and my oldest son passes out the small individual blankets and pillows stored behind the rear seat. "Settling in" takes a while, complains ring out over the sound of the GPS directing back to the interstate. Once everyone has leg room, whatever electronic item they need to amuse themselves (with headphones please), and no one is accidentally touching anyone else in any way, I try to work the kinks out of my back and neck from spending an hour supervising the controlled chaos. Those are the times where I curse the laws against open containers of alcohol in a vehicle. I spend less time gazing out the window, instead I pour over the maps (good, ol' fashioned paper ones I won't leave home without) and directions I printed out - programming all of the correct turns into our GPS that seems to have a diabolical sense of humor when we are traveling away from home - getting my hubby all set to drive safely without distractions like decisions about exits or interstate changes, so that I can get some of that sleep that I used to scoff at.
Driving across country, I admit, has lost some of it's mystique for me. I know now that "South of the Border" is an insanely overpriced strip mall of crappy, not even locally made trinkets. The neon billboards counting down the miles to the oddly, and somewhat creepy bow-legged cowboy monument, are annoying because they block out the small towns and the signs gas stations close to the interstate. Waffle House can stay safely in the south where it belongs, since we narrowly missed disaster when my oldest son found a bulletin board tack in his pancakes, although they were nice enough to discount our meal 25% (insert sarcasm here). Although they probably don't want us back anyway after Colby managed to throw up all the way to the bathroom, even though I did leave a 25% tip that time. However, Sonic can build a franchise across the street of my house so that I have a lifetime supply of foot long chili dogs and cherry limeades. The roller skates might be tricky in the winter, but maybe they could do ice skates instead?
Traveling with my kids has had its ups and downs. It's cramped and everyone is sick of the van by the time we get there, but it's so amazing to close your eyes in one place and then open them and be in a totally new and different one. I hope that they are able to remember these trips as adventures rather than torture. Like when Branden was on the rope swing at the "crick" by Nana's house, or when Derek caught a snake in Grandma's yard and she screeched and yelled like she was on fire. I want them to have these new and interesting memories of all of us together as a family - laughing and playing, learning and discovering - instead of just the sometimes monotonous lives we lead on a daily basis.
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