Family

Gleek would dearly love to have a pet. Her desires are hampered on two points. First, Howard and I require children to express their commitment to pet ownership by saving up enough money to buy both the animal and all the accouterments. Gleek tends to spend her money impulsively. Second, I am allergic to the pets she would enjoy most. This really stinks for both of us, because she’ll sadly cry to me about how she would love a furry pet and I will feel guilty because it is my fault that she can’t have one. (Yes I know there are hairless, and hypoallergenic options, none of them has felt right for us so far.) An additional barrier, which Gleek does not see, is that our lives are incredibly busy right now and I’m mentally rejecting anything that would add complexity to our lives.

So we’ve been force to be creative in attempting to fill Gleeks emotional need to nurture. I try to make sure she gets a chance to play with other people’s pets. I also try to give her chances to play with young children. These things help. But they are still not the same.

Yesterday we got something of a welcome surprise. The cat we rescued over a year ago, kept for two weeks, and then returned to her owner, has shown back up at our house. Her owners went on vacation and she came to stay with us. We’ve already called the owners and left a message. When they get home I’m sure they’ll come claim her. Until then it looks like we have a part-time cat.

We also have Sea Monkeys. Two little bowls of brine shrimp are sitting on windowsills. At first it was just one and we thought that all the shrimps had died. But there was one left. It grew quite large and Gleek named it “It”. She spent significant amounts of time anthropomorphizing the little beastie, telling me what It liked and did not like. I knew that one day It would die, so we invested in the second bowl. Once again it looked like all the little shrimps died. But yesterday we discovered that half a dozen were still there. This is good because It died the same day. We’ve started a fresh batch of eggs in the bowl. And so the colonies continue.

A longer term solution would be good. There would be significant emotional benefits for Gleek if she had a pet. There would also be significant impacts on the rest of us. I have to make sure that we can all commit to supporting and meeting the emotional/physical needs of the animal before I agree to add it to the family. And so my mental circling continues, not unlike the circling of Gleek’s sea monkeys.

“How long till we get there?” Patch asked for the third time.
“I don’t know.” I sigh. Rush hour traffic made time estimation difficult, as did the unfamiliarity of the destination. I did not dare use the length of the hand drawn line on the map as an accurate measure of distance. I was sure the map would get us there, I did not know how long it would take us to arrive.

50 minutes. I’d estimated 30, so we arrived at the camp 20 minutes late. This was when I discovered that finding a campsite inside a Scout Camp was more complicated than I had anticipated. during 30 minutes of walking, in the heat, with no water, we circled the entire scout camp the long way to find where my son was staying. Good thing the woods were filled with scouts willing to share their water and give directions using their camp maps. I’ll admit to being grouchy and hungry. The scout motto is preparedness, and I had no one to blame but myself for the unpleasantness of the trip. I could have planned much better.

But there was Link. He was sunburned and grinning. He told me story after story about his experiences. He showed me the target paper where he had clustered seven rifle shots near the bulls eye. He displayed his purchase from the camp store. (A ball-shaped ice cream maker.) He announced that he’d earned 5 merit badges. He chased Gleek and Patch around, scolding them when they broke Scout Camp rules. (This did not endear him to Gleek.) He had so much to tell, and I listened.

Then we all trekked down to the Friday night presentation. I sat in the amphitheater, looking out over the lake. Wind rushed through the trees and sometimes ruffled the surface of the lake, making the boats shift against the dock. Camp songs were sung. Counselors jumped about for the amusement of scouts. Other counselors infiltrated the audience and helped flagging scouts regain enthusiasm. Gleek and Patch loved it all. They loved the snake and the deer we saw while trying to find the campsite. They loved the two story tall US flag. They stomped and sang and laughed. Gleek tried to take home pockets full of rocks, but settled for just one. Then they both saw deer cross right in front of our van on the ride home.

The visit was totally worth the minor frustrations it took to arrive. Link will be home tomorrow and I’ll get to hear the rest of the stories.

I knew when I agreed to watch my two nieces that there would be some inconvenience involved. I know that my brother’s family has been inconvenienced when I leave my kids with them. This is part of what families are for, to bear personal inconvenience to help each other out.

So Kiki entertained the toddler for an entire morning while we shifted, signed, and stamped 1200 books. Everyone was tired at the end. I’ve spent days airing out toddler entertainment skills that I’ve not used in years. In some ways having a visiting toddler is more difficult than living with one. Life in this house is not scheduled properly to meet toddler needs. If she came here long term, we’d have some serious shifting to do. But her mom returns today. I just need to keep muddling through until time to give her back.

All my kids have loved having the nieces here. Niece one blends right into my family without a hitch. There have been many back yard adventures. This evening there was even a swim adventure. Niece2 has gotten to participate in much of the fun. The older kids have been really good about including her and watching her. But she really is a quiet little person and she prefers to hang out wherever I am. She wouldn’t have a thing to do with me until her mom left, now she’s pegged me as the mom figure and will hardly let me out of her sight. Which is actually a pretty good survival strategy when you can’t provide food for yourself.

I’m glad they came. I just wish it had been in a week when I could have just hung out and played more. Instead I’ve been holding Niece2 on my lap while doing my work and handing her safe office supplies to examine in lieu of the keyboard. The fact that this tactic works at all demonstrates how much more obedient Niece2 is that my kids ever were. No doubt part of the obedience is because she still feels unsure with me, but she’s also a less head-strong person. It has been a good visit.

Six months ago I wrote “family vacation” on the calendar in black ink. I knew that this was the only way it would happen. To reinforce the edict, I paid the money for the hotel in advance. Thus my past self forced my current self to take three days out of a busy week and trek to the wilderness for family time. When I scheduled the vacation it was all by itself in the middle of an empty month. It was my intention to keep that month empty. But deadlines slid around, new activities and projects shoehorned their way into our lives. And the calendar around the vacation filled to overflowing. But the vacation was written in ink. It was our stake in the ground that some times business things had to bend around family things. Howard and I both knew that we were not allowed to move it.

Last week I fretted at Howard. I worried that we would go on the vacation, but that he would spend the whole time stressed and cranky. I worried that because of the vacation we would get even further behind on work, but that the existence of the work would prevent us from enjoying the vacation. I worried that we would come out of the three days having accomplished none of the things I hoped for.

The worries were not groundless. It took lots of conscious effort from all six of us. In the end, Howard had an easier time letting go of stress than I did. I left it all behind just fine for the travel, but when I checked my email that night it lay in wait for me. It was a fretful night for me. But the next day there were other things to do. We were all so far outside our habit patterns that it forced us to interact in new ways. I played games with the kids. We all went swimming. Howard got out his minis and paints. We all watched for wildlife and scenery. We figured out how to get six people to fall asleep in the same room without driving each other crazy. All the business and home things drifted far away and none of us thought of them.

On the last night, just as we were falling asleep, Howard said “This was good. I’m glad we came.” I held my breath for a moment, waiting for the qualifier that never came. He was just glad for the trip. I smiled in the dark.

On way home we drove through Provo Canyon. The scenery in Provo Canyon is every bit as astounding as the scenery we drove five hours to go see and it has the advantage of being a mere 20 minutes from our house. It is true that the canyon lacks herds of elk and buffalo, but you can see deer and big horn sheep if you know where to look. Howard and I looked at the canyon walls impressively high above us, and felt no regret. The trip was never about going to see things, it was about getting away from our regular things and spending time together. This we did. It was an unqualifiedly marvelous vacation.

On the day following a five hour drive through heavy rain and gusting wind, we loaded everyone back into the car to spend five hours driving around staring out the window at scrubby brush and trying to spot wildlife. There were headaches, and squabbles, and the weather was too cold for us to go hiking. We even got to watch the rare June snow flurries before they vanished on the shoulders of the light jackets we had brought just in case. We shivered as we ran from the warm car to the warm visitor center. All of this on top of the fact few of us slept well during the first night at the hotel, and I was ambushed by work stress via email. The elements were present for misery, and yet misery itself never showed up.

Instead there was a bison who chose to cross the road in front of us when I stopped the car for him. He looked at us and started walking directly toward our van. Just before he got to us, he veered and galloped right past our car, almost near enough to touch had anyone dared to roll down a window. The visitor center had video screens in the floor so the kids could imagine themselves plunging through the tumult of spring run-off, or jumping from mountain peak to mountain peak. Once Gleek drew my attention by shouting “I’m riding a moose!” as she crouched atop the video image of one. There was a chuckwagon breakfast which captured all the adventure of food while camping, but without all the work. We did see moose and elk from afar, but the bison was our only close encounter. Then we discovered that the hotel pool is delightfully deserted in the middle of the day.

So all the elements are here for either a marvelous vacation or a miserable one. I just have to pick which pieces will define the event.

I was sitting here in my office, staring at the things around me because my brain felt too tired to work, and I noticed lots of red and green marks on the wall. There is also a large purplish blue smudge. I was staring at this odd array and wondering how it had passed my notice. The wall is white and the marks are very obvious. As I stared, I noticed that the marks define a somewhat rectangular shape of cleanliness. Memory dawned. A whiteboard used to hang on that wall back in the days when it was still Howard’s office. Pre-school Kiki and Toddler Link would come and draw on the board, but they often missed. One particularly elaborate spiral shows exactly how enthusiastic they were about missing. We tried to wash off the marks, but the dry erase marker defied our clean up attempts.

Since those days we’ve re-arranged the office multiple times. The dry erase board was removed and is still kicking around the house. But somehow I stopped even seeing the marks on the wall. They were so familiar that my brain just dismissed them. My home is filled with marks such as these. There is the gouge upstairs where a full length mirror once fell. There are the divots created by the child gates which used to barricade the stairs. The ceilings in several bedrooms are speckled with yellowed glow in the dark stars, once invisible against white paint, now peeling and falling off. Sometimes these damages make me feel quite bleak, because they show so clearly the fact that we need to spend more time fixing up the house. However, on the day when I repaint the walls I hope I spend just a moment contemplating the stories behind the marks before I obscure them.