Yeah, I don’t know what that title means either, but my 4th and 6th grade children probably do (and would tell me I’m being “cringe”), and I thought it would be funny to capture some Gen Alpha slang. I’m so far behind with posting that I’m just going to combine August and September. Maya started middle school this year, and the transition to having two different schools to keep up with has been hard for me.
We started August beautifully with an action-packed trip to Hawaii, visiting three islands: Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island. We loved our Hawaii trip so much, that we tried to extend our trip culinarily. We had yummy Manoa chocolate bars to slowly work our way through and some variously-flavored Hawaiian shortbread cookies to enjoy as well. There’s rum too, but we haven’t cracked into that yet.
But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Since we’ve been back, I’ve also made Kalua Pork (which all of us loved), complete with pink alaea sea salt. With Maya in mind, I’ve made Spam Musubi a couple times now – we even bought a special musubi mold, which makes the process fairly painless. (She loves them, and she loves making them – double win!) For Mom and Dad mostly, I’ve also been making a coconut syrup for our pancakes. I tried to do this after our first Hawaii trip in 2008. Turns out I was probably trying way, way too hard (I was attempting to roast and crack coconut and infuse the syrup with the freshly roasted coconut, when really I just needed nice coconut milk). All these things let us remember the aloha as we go about our hectic everyday lives, which is nice.
As is normal for the middle of August in Central Texas, we made the pilgrimage to our local HEB Central Market grocery store to buy all the hatch chile festival things, stocking the freezer very nicely with easy to prepare marinated meats and chile-centric sausages and burgers. One of the best and most interesting things we tried though were these blue corn tortilla and hatch chile cookies. The kids weren’t into them at all, which was fine by me because I LOVED them.
We tried another run of tropical fruits since the Central Market often has a nice selection. We bought rambutans for Ian since they’re similar to lychees, which he tried in Hawaii and loved. We bought dragonfruit for Maya because she wanted to try them in Hawaii and we never quite worked it out. We picked up a carambola / star fruit as well, since they’ve liked them in the past. And we grabbed some kumquats which Maya especially adored because you eat them skin and all, which gives them a bitter edge that she finds very appealing.
Maya and Ian started back to school on August 20th. Since the schools have a staggered start times, and Sean starts work later in the morning, he is still dropping them off at their two schools. At my request though, to maintain my work sanity, they have started riding the bus home after school. Their first week back contained some of the hottest days we’ve had all summer, highs reaching 106 and 107 on a couple of the days. And when they get dropped off from school, it’s about the hottest part of the afternoon, so we took an umbrella up and met them at the bus stop. After the first day, they requested that we not meet them again – that they could get home on their own, thank you very much. Fine by me; it was hot out there.
In middle school, Maya has to move between her classes each day. She is not prone to hurrying for any reason, so I think it’s been a bit of a struggle for her to get her bag packed and move to her next class on time. I get the impression now that we’re nearly through the first quarter, she’s got the hang of it, but I still don’t think it’s easy. I went to back to school night or whatever it’s called and “walked” her schedule. I haven’t ever had to find my way between the different buildings at her school before, but even once I knew where they were, I struggled to get to her classes during the 5-minute gap between them, and I didn’t have a bag to pack.
She is taking Band this year and has begun to learn how to play the oboe. In addition to a weekly piano lesson, she now has a weekly oboe lesson immediately after school. While the music reading skills she’s acquired with her piano study help with this, playing the instrument is a whole different deal. It’s a hard one to learn, and at least so far, she’s had to work really hard to figure it out. Scholastically, things come fairly easily to her, so I think this may be a point of frustration.
Sean surprised the kids that first weekend after school started with Dr Pepper doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. I can usually eat one doughnut before the sugar, fat, whatever gets to me, but I tried one out anyway, and there’s definitely a nice Dr Pepper flavor hidden amongst all that pure sweet.
Ian is participating in Cub Scouts again this year. As a fourth-grader he’s in the Webelos den, and at the first pack meeting they made paper rockets. These were launched with compressed air, and whatever combination of construction paper and packing tape Ian landed on this time was definitely the right one because his rocket went REALLY far. It was astonishing.
It was very marginally cooler over Labor Day weekend, so one afternoon, we headed down to Pease Park to check out Malin’s Fountain. Malin’s Fountain is a sculpture by Danish artist Thomas Dambo, who is famous for making large troll sculptures using recycled materials (over a hundred so far – maybe one is near you: trollmap). It was installed this past March and, according the Pease Park Conservancy website, will be in place for 15 years.
Malin is apparently a water protector, something we badly need in perpetually water-strapped central Texas. Protector or not, she’s amazing to behold. She’s larger than life and has friendly, inviting eyes. The kids seemed astonished that such a thing would just be sitting in one of our city parks. And then, Maya and Ian even got to play in the nearby “treehouse” and have shave ices.
I’ve been delighted with the quantity of bumble bees that have been hanging out in my my flowering plants this year. This was mostly happening in late August and early September, before things died back in this long, hot dry spell (the yard is largely dead or dormant now in mid-October). Several of the flowering plants had come alive after a few August rain showers, and the bees seem to have a particular affinity for the pink Turk’s cap plants. (I have an affinity for them too – they’re natives and hard to kill.)
Ian had been wanting to try his hand at cake decorating again, so we decided to make a little confetti cake and let him mess around with a star-shaped piping tip. Ian chose to make a Pac Man cake. We left some of the icing white and dyed the rest yellow, and he went to town. All in all, I think it turned out well, and he seemed happy with it.
Rather than let our kids hoodwink us into eating at the same three or four restaurants over and over and over again, we decided to try out a place called Buddha Burger. It’s a food trailer in a gas station parking lot, which in and of itself isn’t so bad, but it’s still so hot out. Thankfully, they had picnic tables in the shade, and everyone seemed to enjoy their food.
In mid-September, Maya was invited to her friend Maclin’s birthday event – and they went fishing! Evidently she had an excellent time, and when she wasn’t actively fishing, she was busy catching bait. What a fun way to celebrate a birthday!
That same weekend, Ian had a Cub Scout pack meeting wherein they built sailboats. While his sailboat floated well, it wasn’t quite as successful as his rocket had been the month prior. Either way, he seemed to enjoy building it.
The Monday after that busy weekend, at Maya’s band teacher’s urging, we all went to the Toney Burger center and watched the AISD High School Marching Band Jamboree. Sean, who played alto saxophone in his high school marching band, was old hat at this sort of thing, but it was entirely new to the rest of us. All told, all thirteen high schools performed, and then the evening was capped off by a performance from the Texas State University Bobcat Marching Band.
It was so much fun to watch! Even Ian, who had campaigned hard not to go at all, was getting into it. The schools all put on fairly different shows, so it wasn’t boring or repetitive. The big wall of sound that hit you when the brass kicked in was genuinely uplifting, and the choreographed movement, for some reason, was an unexpected surprise for me. The sizes of the bands varied pretty widely, and probably school size and student interest were the prevailing factors. But I couldn’t quite shake the idea that it was a display of the haves and have-nots of the district.
Maya has been told again and again that oboe players don’t march, and to be fair, this one didn’t either. But one high school, during the jamboree performance at least, had an oboe player, and she even got to play a solo. Guitars were featured by some of the bands too, though their players also seemed to be stationary.
The next weekend, Ian got to perform at a farmer’s market in his guitar teacher Chris’s neighborhood. It was just Ian and Chris, so their set was pretty fluid, with Ian restarting or abandoning ship if he didn’t remember a piece as well. He did a good job and seemed happy to be there. Plus, Maya and I were able to go along and watch, which doesn’t always happen.
Maya has been playing piano since she was three and loves it very much. She’s lately been delving more into the theory side of things, working on different scales and modes. She spends a lot of time holed up in her room, playing on her keyboard, messing around with different chord progressions, transposing pieces she already knows into so many different keys. She was delighted when one of her weekly practice pieces – a series of little sea shanties – had a challenge at the end to develop her own. Maya, ever the favorer of the weird, came up with a sea shanty, and her teacher Ben made a video of her playing it!
The last weekend of the month was a doozy. Ian went on an overnight trip to the San Antonio Zoo for a Cub Scout activity. Normally, since the whole family can participate in Cub Scout overnights, I like for all of us to go, but we had a conflict. Maya’s former piano teacher Hannah and her husband Michael would be putting on a four hands piano concert at a local church and Maya wanted very badly to go.
I stayed in Austin and took Maya to her piano concert. Sean rode down to San Antonio with a fellow scout family and had fun at the zoo. The piano concert was only an hour long, and Maya might have gotten a little antsy, but she seemed to really enjoy it. There was a point where she was calling out chord juxtapositions with the admiration of a sports announcer calling out a good play. I felt compelled to shush her, but I was thrilled that she was so into it.
It helps that Hannah and her husband put on a spectacular performance, full of variety, helpful explanations, and a good dose of humor. They ended the evening with some pieces by P.D.Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) who appears to have died before he was born, and who toyed with his four hands performers by making them cross over one another at the keyboard in a sadistic version of piano Twister. Joke’s on him though – they didn’t miss a beat.
After the show, Maya hung around and talked to Hannah for a while. You could tell Maya didn’t want to leave – she really loved having Hannah as a teacher – but eventually we had to go home. Maya had another happy-sad. She loved seeing her former teacher perform, but she was sad all over again at her absence. Life can be hard.
My zoo information is secondhand, so I’ll do my best here. As I understand it, the zoo adventure started quite late and maybe the zoo folks weren’t quite prepared for the sheer quantity of scouts and scout family members. But, once things got started, they clicked along pretty well. Ian got to touch a hognose snake, which I’m sure thrilled him. That kid loves amphibians and reptiles, especially snakes.
They did some evening activities at the zoo, but I hear the real treat was the zoo walk the next morning. They got to head through the zoo before it opened to the public, so they were able to see the animals in a more alert and active state than they normally would have. I was particularly impressed with a bright-eyed tiger photo they managed to capture.
They managed to get home and we got things squared away juuuuuust enough for Sean and I to head out on our Sunday evening adventure. We were headed to Stubb’s to see James and Johnny Marr! I won’t lie. We were both tired, especially Sean who had slept on an inflatable mattress at the zoo the night before. And I know I sound like a broken record, but it was so hot. Even after the sun went down, it was still in the 90s.
James sounded great and even though I know literally one song by them (“Laid” which was released way back in 1993), it was an enjoyable show. The had a lovely ditty explaining that we were all going to die, but their trumpeter was fun to watch, so I guess I’ll forgive them.
I tried listening to the Johnny Marr solo stuff a few weeks before the show, just for curiosity. I don’t know, it was fine I guess, but nothing really grabbed me. Like so many other performers though, all that was out the window watching him live. He and the band put on a great show, and while I expect most folks were there for the old Smiths tunes, I thought the whole set was excellent. (And I know I’m far, far in the minority, but I don’t really love the way Morrissey sings – it’s just too precious for me, I think – so for me, it was a delight to hear music I genuinely enjoy being sung by a voice with a little more life in it.)
There we are, mid-October, and I’m finally writing about August and September. It’s funny how musical our September was. Weirdly, I’m not sure I noticed in real-time. Maya seems to have adapted ok to middle school, at least so far. Ian is holding his own in elementary school. I think at least for now, we’re all doing ok.
