Starting with Halloween every year, things are kind of non-stop for us through the end of the holiday season. This year, I honestly felt like we were in good shape to get everything done in a reasonable timeframe, but toward the end of the month, things took a turn.

I started the month with an interesting cooking project. We used to be able to get ribeye cap at our local Costco. (A ribeye kind of has two parts – its center eye and the separate round of fat-striated muscle around it.) It was delightful, because it was bar-none some of the most flavorful meat I’ve ever eaten, and it had the added bonus of being unrecognizable to many people. Well, Costco stopped selling it. Maybe people wanted their ribeyes with the caps still intact; I can’t blame them.

One of our local meat experts, Jess Pryles, posted a video showing how to start with a whole ribeye roll, separate the cap (the spinalis dorsi, for you anatomy nerds), and cut the remaining ribeye rounds into thick, lovely steaks. And so Sean bought the single-most expensive piece of meat we’ve every purchased, and I proceeded to try my best to not screw it up.

I separated the ribeye cap, taking care to trim away all the silver skin and weird bits that would ruin the texture of the cooked meat. I trimmed off what Ms Pryles called “the tail” from the remaining loin-like part of the steak. This resulted in huge piles of hard fat and a nice strip of meat that I piled up with some other meaty scraps. Later I ground these meat scraps up and again vacuum sealed and froze for future burgers. Then I tied the remaining ribeye center into good, thick sections and cut it into steaks. I kept out one piece of ribeye cap for immediate grilling. I vacuum sealed and froze the center-cut steaks and the remaining piece of ribeye cap. Later on, I rendered the beef fat to make a nice pile of tallow that I vacuum sealed and froze for future meat-pie projects. (There may be better ways, but I did this by dicing up the fat and cooking it in my slow cooker over low for something like 12 hours, stirring it occasionally.)

The grilled ribeye cap was amazing. In deference to Maya’s aversion to grilled food, I kept a serving aside and cooked it on the stovetop for her. All of this was served with a lovely red wine, Eight Years in the Desert, by Orin Swift (in case I want to remember later). All the Woodses were big fans of the steak, but especially Ian may be our next grilled meat connoisseur. He wanted to know if we could eat that for dinner every night. No, son. Neither our cholesterol-levels nor our wallets can afford that.

The weekend of the 11th and 12th, we went to Inks Lake State Park for the makeup Cub Scout campout that had been rained out in October. We got all of our training done ahead of time. We filled out all our forms. We set out all our things to pack up. We made sure we had non-grilled options for Maya.

We showed up at camp just a little early, so we wouldn’t have to rush before the scouts’ opening ceremony. We had just eaten lunch, gotten ourselves checked in, and were setting up our tent with a minimum of fuss. And then, I went to lay out the sleeping bags. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. We hadn’t brought them. The night before, we had chosen to leave them in the closet when we laid things out, so the cats wouldn’t mess with them. Whoops. After some quick discussion, we decided there was nothing for it but to go back and get them. Sean and Maya went all the way back to our house, a little over an hour away, grabbed the sleeping bags, and then drove all the way back … for a camping trip that would last a grand total of maybe 24 hours.

It turns out, there’s not a lot of downtime on a cub scout campout. There’s hiking and cooking and tent set up and meeting and eating and campfire singing and sleeping and closing ceremonies and camp breakdown and woooooooo, it was nonstop. Even though it wasn’t our den’s turn to handle the cooking chores, I volunteered to help, figuring my ability to volunteer otherwise would be limited. Ian climbed trees, sang campfire songs, and made s’mores. Plus he hung out with his scout friends. I think especially for him it was a good trip.

We rushed home and bathed quickly so we could all go to Maya’s music performance. Several members of her music school did sort of an open mic outdoor event at a small local concert venue. First, there were singers and songwriters performing. The first lady who performed, played her guitar and sang songs that she had written herself. Maya was entranced.

Maya’s performance later on was sort of funny. They usually arrange the piano students in order of increasing complexity, but there was a significant jump in difficulty in the piece Maya played and the one prior to her. So here comes Maya, hoodie pulled up, walking with absolute focus to that stage. She plops down, shoves up the sleeves of her hoodie, and proceeds to play a very well-practiced piano piece. Singer-songwriter lady was sitting next to me, and I heard an audible, “wow” as Maya played. It was awesome.

During the week, in between music lessons and swim lessons and choir practices, we snuck in a concert with the kids. We are in the alleged live music capital of world, after all. We went down to Parish and watched a Korean surf band called Say Sue Me play. Opening for them were a local band called Skateland. I think Maya and Ian liked it well enough, but it was a “standing up concert,” and they got worn out on that after a while. It got late enough that we didn’t even get to stay for all of Say Sue Me’s set. Our elementary school kids did have class the next day.

Maya’s birthday this year was at Playland Skate Center. She invited a handful of friends and they skate-skate-skated the night away. Ian discovered at that party that he really loves roller blades. That kid was flying by the end of the party. Maya for her part at one point contentedly sighed, grinning, and said, “It’s so nice to have friends.”

She had detailed specifications for her birthday cake this year. She wanted a kitty cake, vanilla with orange icing. But the icing couldn’t just be colored orange; she wanted it to be flavored orange as well. We pulled it off! Thanks to combining recipes I have since closed in my web browser, I think I augmented regular buttercream with some orange juice and orange zest. It was really delicious! (I wish I had written it down.)

On the day of Maya’s birthday, we took her out to eat at Maggiano’s. Gone are the days of kids’ menus, so Maya had a giant bowl of shrimp scampi and Ian had a giant bowl of linguine and clams. However, something you can do at Maggiano’s is order a take-home pasta for $6 for every adult entree you purchase. We figured we could put them in the freezer for nights we didn’t feel like cooking. We went home with a baked ziti, a lasagna, and a spaghetti and meat ball to stock our freezer.

Immediately following Maya’s birthday, we all boarded a very early flight to Orlando to spend a few days at Universal! I wrote about that trip in more detail in a separate post (with separate photos). It was an excellent trip and for visiting Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios, I think we definitely had plenty of time to see all we wanted to see with three park days.

Since we would be out of town the four days immediately preceding thanksgiving, I tried some do-ahead magic. We bought on package each of turkey thighs and legs and I made a confit. Then I cooled it completely, ensuring the meat was mostly submerged in the fat, and then stored the whole mess in the fridge to reheat once we were back. I planned for side dishes with easily stored ingredients and shorter cooking times: mashed potatoes, roasted carrots, a green bean saute for which I’d use frozen beans, and the must-have cornbread dressing. I was a little antsy about how well the celery would weather the week in the fridge, so I finally decided to try the “wrap it in aluminum foil” trick. And then, in case the celery would rot anyway, I diced some up and stuck it in the freezer.

I needn’t have worried. The foil-wrapped celery looked fresh from the store. My confit turkey reheated like a charm, and the kids more or less found something they’d be willing to eat from our spread.

Earlier in the month, we had booked a visit to the light show at Mozart’s for the day after Thanksgiving (when I prefer to start considering Christmas). In the past, pre-pandemic, we just kind of showed up and hung out and watched the lights. Now it’s a whole ticketed event. After getting some hot chocolate (some of us got peppermint and some got Mexican with cinnamon), we found our prepaid table and settled in. We saw their light show, synced to popular music. In between light show numbers, they had a college-level music student playing their light-drenched piano (which turned out to be a keyboard set in a piano body). He did an excellent job and it was a treat to hear him play. I bet you can’t guess which composer’s music he performed (it was Mozart). It was a fun way to see the lights this year, but it didn’t feel as festive as it has in years-past.

And then, over the next few days, every single Woods in our house fell prey to some kind of craptacular fever, headache, snotty, coughing illness that lingered for several days and zapped us all (yes even the kids) of our energy. It was all we could do to make sure everyone had food to eat (Maggiano’s and leftover Thanksgiving food, FTW!) and had meds on a schedule. Ian and Sean had the worst fevers – up in the 103 degree range. Maya and I had the worst of the coughing – she finally seems to be past it, but even a month later, I’m still coughing. That’s how we closed out our month: belting down meds and chicken soup, watching our lead on holiday planning dwindle to nothing and then become a deficit. Alas.

This year, over part of the kids’ Thanksgiving break, we headed out to Orlando to visit Universal Orlando Resort. While there are three parks that make up this place currently, we visited only Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. We figured Volcano Bay, being a water park, was best left for another time.

We often go to these beautiful places and are so busy, busy, busy that we never leave ourselves time to relax. Well, this time, we chose to arrive as early as possible on a Sunday so we could enjoy the hotel, the hotel pool, and the surrounding area a bit without the pressure of an amusement park schedule. Monday, Tuesday, and most of Wednesday left plenty of time for that craziness.

Day 1 – Arrival

To find the happy balance between maximizing our time and controlling costs, we wound up taking a 6:00 a.m. flight (direct!) to Orlando. Four tired Woodses managed to get to the airport by 4:25 or so, thinking we were being silly since most people must have left for the holiday week already on Saturday. Boy were we wrong. After waiting in a bit of a line to drop our checked bags off, we struggled to figure out where in the mass of people we needed to wait to line up for security. I may not have this quite right, but I believe that to line up for security at checkpoint one, we were backed up all the way to checkpoint two and actually began our wait in line outdoors. I was on pins and needles.

Before we left the house, Ian and I had both had a little something to eat. Sean and Maya elected to have something at the airport. With the line we were in, we’d be lucky to make our flight, never mind waiting in line again to buy food. I had extra snacks along in case we needed a holdover during our park days, but I had helpfully stowed those in our checked bags. Meanwhile, while standing in this massive line amidst throngs of humans whose demeanors ranged between half-asleep and borderline manic in the face of potential missed flights, Ian announced that he needed to pee.

Then we finally, finally made it through the gauntlet of seemingly infinite switchbacks and security personnel, some of whom hadn’t had their coffee yet, I think. And they held my bags for extra screening. And they sat and they sat with no one bothering to check them. Sean took the kids to find a bathroom and food and I stayed to deal with the situation. Eventually they just re-ran my bags through the regular line again, and I was finally free.

Sean had magically gotten Ian a bathroom visit and he and Maya some food and we skated into our boarding area more or less exactly when our group was boarding. It was amazing. I was so relieved.

The rest of the flight seemed to go without incident. The kids messed with their screens, Sean dozed, I drank some much-needed coffee and read. Upon arrival in Orlando, we collected our luggage and found our shuttle bus to the hotel easily enough.

We rolled up to the Loews Royal Pacific Resort, collected our bags, and went to check in. The place was beautiful! Maya commented that it might be a bit too fancy for us, and she’s probably not wrong, but I never found it to be stuffy or pretentious during our stay. The decor was fun – we crossed a bridge lined with wooden frogs playing various instruments to enter the hotel, and the courtyard featured stone elephants, one of whom fountained water from his trunk – and the staff were all pleasant to work with.

One of the big reasons we chose such a nice hotel (“Universal Premier” is the category, apparently) is that it included Universal’s unlimited express passes for all room occupants. These passes are insanely priced (Sean’s remembering something like $120 per person, per day), and we paid less for our room than we would have for those passes, so that’s what we did. The added bonus is that we also got to enjoy a beautiful properly, nice proximity to the parks, and a generally stress-free stay.

We arrived too early to actually check in, but they took care of all the paperwork and key distribution and whatnot so that we’d just have to go to our room once they texted us to let us know it was available. Also, they had a luggage storage service so we could leave the bags and start enjoying our day right away.

All of us were dragging a little by then, but we needed to have some lunch. Universal’s analog to Disney Springs is called Universal CityWalk. It’s sort of a shopping and dining area adjacent to the actual parks. You don’t need park admission to go to CityWalk, but you do have to pass through a metal detector and allow your bags to be x-rayed.

Our objective was a place called The Toothsome Chocolate Emporium. When Sean first told me about it, I was nonplussed, but he assured me they had savory dishes too. He actually made this reservation earlier in the day, right after our airplane touched down in Orlando. Good thing, too. That place was jumping by the time we got there.

Because he had made the reservation though, it wasn’t long at all before we were ensconced in the dark, steampunk recesses of the restaurant. We uncharacteristically had the kids sit to the outside of our booth in hopes that when the proprietor Penelope and her robot friend Jacques came by our table, the kids would have a chance to interact directly. Alas, we only ever saw them from a distance.

The food here was good. We had a fantastic tray of roasted Brussels sprouts and some avocado bruschetta (Maya’s choice). Ian took advantage of the fact that they serve brunch all day and had a giant chocolate waffle. The rest of us had savory meals and the grownups had very delicious cocktails that we hope to replicate at home. On the way out, we secured some pretty truffles from the shop at the front of the restaurant and wandered our way back out into the daylight.

All of us needed a rest after our early start, so we headed back to the hotel and had a siesta. Well, the parents had a siesta. Their foolish children had more screen time. At least they were still.

After that, Sean, Maya, and Ian suited up to play in the giant hotel pool area for a while. I went down and hung out on a lounge chair and poked around at some of the things we might do and see over the next few days and tried to get my bearings a little. The weather was perfect, so I was very comfortable on my chair, and the pool water was warm, so the kids – even Ian – enjoyed playing.

After playtime at the pool puttered out, we wandered back in, pausing to have a swimsuited photo with one of the hotel’s lovely Christmas trees. We went back into CityWalk to do a little browsing and to find some dinner. Our target for dinner had been a place called the Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar, but it was pretty much fully booked, so Sean set a reservation for Cowfish for the following night instead.

We tried out the water taxi on the way back to the hotel – less time-efficient but more fun, and at least this evening, we weren’t in any hurry. Back at the hotel, we had a perfectly respectable dinner at one of the hotel restaurants – Jake’s American Bar. Maya’s chicken and waffles came with what I thought was a really lovely pile of cooked greens, so when our server came by, I commented on them. Maya shrugged and that she preferred cucumbers. Lo and behold a couple minutes later, that woman came back with a treat for each of the kids and some surprise cucumbers for Maya. She sat there and happily ate every one, pronouncing them much better than the ones we get at home.

Day 2 – Islands of Adventure

Sean didn’t have to plan nearly as tightly for our Universal days as he traditionally has done for our Disney days. Thanks to staying at a Universal hotel, we were able to enter Islands of Adventure at 8:00 in the morning instead of 9. Thanks to a long, lingering shower by a certain daughter of ours, we didn’t get in line till around 7:30, and that line was immense.

Our plan was to start our day by queuing up for Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure. This is the only attraction we cared about going to for which we could not use our express passes. Sean had read (and we observed) that this ride starts out with a long wait and stays that way … unless it happens to be delayed for one reason or another, and then it gets even worse.

Sure enough, it seemed that everyone else had that same idea, and so our wait time ballooned to something like 110 minutes by the time we arrived. My notes say that it was ultimately more like an 80 minute wait, and I think everyone in our group would agree, it was totally and completely worth it.

I had the benefit of having done no research and having very few expectations. There are two to a “row” in the ride train, one person on a motorbike and one person in its sidecar. The kids both had first-ride jitters and decided to sit in the sidecars. Hooray for the grown-ups! On its surface, it’s just a roller coaster, but it was deeply themed and had such a fun variety of elements. The ride has several fun launches, including one particularly intense one fueled by “dragon fire.” I hate to ruin the surprise, but there’s a startling drop element partway through. At one point you head to some dead-end track and wind up riding the coaster backward for a while. Plus there are magical creatures galore. Heck, even the ride queue was fun with all its deep theming. It is saying something that over our three-day visit, we rode this coaster three times at the kids’ repeated request, and the line was nearly as long each time.

Sean had purchased some kind of vacation package that allowed us a breakfast at each of the parks at the signature Wizarding World restaurant. That means we had already paid for our breakfast at the Three Broomsticks that morning. They served breakfast until 9:30, and even with our long wait at what I kept calling the Hagrid’s Motorbike ride, we were still in our line by around 9. This was after we had wandered around for several minutes uncertain of exactly where it was in all the throngs of people. Finally Maya calmly pointed out that it was that restaurant right there … the one with the (wait for it) three broomsticks. We were astonished to find that it had its own rather lengthy queue and we were sweating that we’d miss our already-paid-for meal, but when it came down to time, they made sure that anyone who had a voucher got in to fetch their food.

The decor inside Three Broomsticks is rich and immersive, much like the surrounding Hogsmeade Village. The food was likewise solid. And let me tell you, when you order coffee with breakfast, that sucker is huge and already in a to-go cup. It’s like they know what’s required.

After breakfast, Maya and Dad decided to partake of some Butterbeers. Ian was on the fence about whether to have one, but after trying some of Dad’s decided that he definitely would like to have one later. I passed. For one, I was still working on my much-needed coffee and for another, those butterbeers were very sweet to my tastebuds. A sip or two was pleasant enough, but I knew I wouldn’t make it through the whole thing.

Since we were in the area, we lined up for the Flight of the Hippogriff. This was a relatively little roller coaster. The wait was short and it was pleasant enough, but nothing super thrilling. Seeing the Hippogriff was kinda fun.

We next went to the other big deal ride in the Hogsmeade Village part of the park: Harry Potter and the Hidden Journey (or if you’re me, you insist on calling it “the Hogwarts Castle ride”). This ride is amazing to experience. Your ride vehicle is basically attached to an arm that zips you through various screens and animatronics. And, when you’re experiencing the screens, there are portions of the ride during which they’re actually moving with you. It’s insane and difficult to explain, but this youtube video does an excellent job. As I understand it, this ride has experienced its fair share of breakdowns over its lifetime, but given the ride complexity, it’s not hard to see how it might be a hair fault-prone.

As is typical of our vacations, we had told the kids that we would purchase one souvenir for them. Anything they wanted beyond that, they’d need to use their own money to buy. After some shopping the day previous and some careful examination of the shops in Islands of Adventure. they settled on the most adorable little backpacks. In Harry Potter lore, a niffler is a creature whose favorite thing in the world is to collect shiny treasure in their pouches. Maya and Ian’s backpacks look like fuzzy black nifflers holding coin purses. We even pointed out that if we purchased these, we wouldn’t be buying any fun interactive wands, and the kids both still wanted their backpacks. And to their credit, they happily carried them around the rest of the day.

After a goodly dose of Harry Potter immersion, we made our way to the Jurassic Park portion of Islands of Adventure. The theme music from the movies greets you as you enter the terrifying tropical wonderland. We hardly paused though on our way to what promised to be the most thrilling ride of the our Universal trip, Velocicoaster.

The story is that you’re about to ride a state-of-the-art, “perfectly safe” vehicle through a paddock full of velociraptors. The ride creators do an excellent job of building tension as you wander through the ride queue. At one point you pass animatronic raptors who are entrapped in muzzles and look for all the world like they’re working their way through the mechanics of escape, occasionally rattling their muzzles, pupils expanding and contracting as they take in their surroundings.

Ian was clearly getting pretty fidgety. And as the characters from the Jurassic World movies are warning us of the dangers of what we’re about to do, that it’s a bad idea, that we should definitely be made to sign a waiver, Ian’s little body wouldn’t hold still. That nervous energy needed to get out!

Maya and I were lucky enough to get the front row, and let me tell you, that coaster was absolutely intense. The twists and turns felt unique. The initial launch takes your breath away once (0-70mph in 2.4 seconds), and the giant 80-degree, 140-foot drop over the top hat halfway through takes it away again. They tell you there are no brakes through this entire ride, not till the very end. Velocicoaster has some of the most beautiful and smooth inversions. There’s one point where you’re hanging upside down somewhere in the vicinity of 2 seconds (Sean counted), which is an eternity in roller coaster time. I’m not entirely sure Maya liked riding up front, but I loved it.

Somewhere after this joyous thrill, we had to experience the come-down. Maya at some point realized her almighty screen time would likely not be happening since we’d be spending long hours at the parks each day. This isn’t a new scenario, so it honestly caught me completely off guard that it was going to be an issue for her. Without going into detail, let me just say it was kind of a sore spot on an otherwise outstanding day.

We eventually made it over to Skull Island: The Reign of Kong (aka, the King Kong ride). The ride queue was kinda spooky, but otherwise short. The simulator ride was interesting enough – we saw Kong vs dinosaurs and fell off a cliff.

Sean and the kids rode the Dudley Do-right’s Ripsaw Falls. It’s a log flume type ride, and I hung out and guarded everyone’s bags and things while they all went and got soaking wet. As I waited for them, a fellow wandered out with a grocery bag tied around each foot. I asked him whether that was an effective antidote to walking around with squishy shoes all day, and he assured me that they worked very well. Noted.

In fairly rapid succession, we rode The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman (simulator ride), The Incredible Hulk Coaster, and The Incredible Hulk Coaster a second time, but this time without Mom. I remember really enjoying the Hulk Coaster when we were in Florida for our honeymoon some 23 years ago. These days though, with my messed up spine, I try to be more careful about what I ride. In this one, I felt pretty heavy positive G-forces, and so I opted to sit out a second run, just for self-preservation. It is a pretty fun coaster though.

After a quick baked pretzel snack, we headed back to ride Harry Potter and the Hidden Journey again. Here’s where I’ll point out a marked difference between Disney and Universal. Pretty much anything I rode at Disney, I could just take my backpack along, no big deal. Universal is more particular. At nearly all the rides, you were required to first take a moment and stow your things in a not-particularly large locker. They were free of charge and opened with your park ticket, so it wasn’t too much of a hassle. However, had I carried my normal big backpack that could hold jackets, waters, and snacks for four people, it wouldn’t have fit. They’re so particular about Velocicoaster, they make you pass through a metal detector, so for that one Sean even had to leave his phone and keys in the locker. Only once during our three days at the park did we have an incident where our key didn’t re-open a locker we had secured. Poor Ian was in a panic because it was his locker and it held his beloved new niffler backpack. The park attendant eventually helped us out, but it was a tense few minutes.

We did a little shopping in Hogsmeade, visiting Honeyduke’s candy store and swinging by for some butter beers as well. Sean and Maya this time went for frozen butter beers (which they both decided they didn’t enjoy quite as much), and Ian had an original. We were getting ready to line up for Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure again, so we’d have some time to finish our drinks. As per usual, the ride line was long, and we were maybe three quarters of the way through it before Ian simply couldn’t contain himself. We had to exit to go use the bathroom. One of the ride attendants gave us vague instructions and a slip of paper that maybe would allow us to return to the ride once Ian was relieved. Thankfully, it did work, though it wasn’t at all clear what we were meant to have done. (It sounded like one of us should have stayed and waited for the others to return, but I don’t think we were given that information up front.) This time the kids got to ride the motorbikes and the grownups loaded into the sidecars. I can tell you, the ride was just as thrilling as the first time we rode.

Sean managed to steer us into the right spot to watch the holiday light show projecting onto the Hogwarts Castle. The lights and music were beautiful and I was happy to soak it in, even though I normally have a fairly strict “no Christmas celebrating till after Thanksgiving” policy.

We had a little time to kill before our dinner reservation, so we hopped in line and rode Skull Island: The Reign of Kong again. We hadn’t ridden any of the rides in the Dr Seuss part of the park yet, so on our way out, we took a moment to ride The Cat in the Hat. It’s a “family friendly” ride, which the kids aren’t normally too enthused about, but it is testament to the power of Seuss’s books that they both remembered the story so fondly that I don’t think either of them really minded that it wasn’t especially thrilling.

We made our way out of Island of Adventure and over to CityWalk to get to our late reservation at The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar. The kids are deep into their sushi love at this point, so it was pretty much a sure thing. We had some more lovely cocktails and some perfectly fine sushi. I didn’t even fuss too much when Sean wanted to try a burgushi roll. Yeah, it’s what it sounds like – some kind of bastardization of hamburger inflected sushi, but it tasted good enough and the kids seemed delighted with their meal.

We were four tired folks when we walked back to our hotel that evening, 25% of whom were still actively negotiating for screen time. Sigh.

Day 3 – Universal Studios

The park didn’t open until 9 this morning, so we could operate at a slightly slower pace. I think we meandered in around 8:45 and made our way to Diagon Alley to have our pre-paid breakfast at the Leaky Cauldron. Sean drove us nuts by repeating the line from the movie, “The Leaky Cauldron; that’s in London.” over and over again. (“D’you hear that, Ern? The Leaky Cauldron, that’s in London.”)

We took a moment to take in the Diagon Alley scenery before the crowds really filled in. Again, the experience was deeply immersive. Shops whose names we recognized from the books jumped out at every turn, their whimsical storefronts inviting us to explore. Anchoring the scene is Gringotts wizarding bank and looming large over the crowd is the dragon who sits atop the bank, presumably having recently escaped. Much to Maya’s chagrin (and maybe eventual acceptance), that dragon would, from time to time, breathe real fire. As a fan of the series, it was incredibly cool to be there.

We did eventually make it over to the Leaky Cauldron, waited for a bit, and were treated to another delightful breakfast (and another large cup of coffee).

After breakfast, we made our way over to check out the Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts ride. We started by entering the brilliantly detailed Gringotts lobby and got to see the clever goblin animatronics busy at their work. We rode an elevator down into the depths and eventually boarded our vehicle. This is a roller coaster and a dark ride / simulation ride wrapped up into one. I thought it was fun, though maybe not quite as fun as Harry Potter and the Hidden Journey had been. Maya tells us she preferred this one.

After a bit of window shopping during which Ian finally broke down and bought one of the huge chocolate frogs he’d been eyeing, we made our way over to our appointment at Shutterbuttons to have some magical family photos taken. This is another thing that was included in whatever vacation package Sean purchased, and while I don’t think I’d have gone out of my way to partake of it otherwise, the results were pretty fun. The only bummer is that our reservation was somehow “lost” (along with many other people’s, it seemed) and so we had to wait around for about a half hour before our photo session could commence. This, as you might have guessed, was maybe not the best scenario for our fidgety kids. Still, we have a few fun prints and some special, magical moving photos as well.

After this, we used our express passes to their fullest and binged on rides for a little while. First there was The Simpsons ride, a simulator ride tucked into a gloriously eye-popping Simpsons-themed part of the park. Then we lined up for Men in Black Alien Attack, one of those interactive rides were we got to shoot up our alien attackers. Next we tried out the Fast & Furious Supercharged ride – another simulator that the kids pronounced “cool.”

And finally, at Maya and Ian’s repeated request, we tried out this park’s only real thrill ride: the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit roller coaster. The coaster was fun enough. The kids seemed to like that you could choose your music at the beginning. Maya and I again got to ride right up front, a situation I’m not sure she’s entirely okay with. Honestly, the most alarming part of the ride is that you climb straight up for the first hill, and I felt like I was going to slide out of my seat.

We planned to have lunch at the Minion Cafe, but since we weren’t super hungry yet, we decided to sneak in one more ride beforehand: Despicable Me Minion Mayhem. The idea is that we’re turned into minions for the ride and get to experience a simulated world as a minion. Things naturally go haywire and hilarity ensues. Cute enough, but I was maybe wearing out on simulators by then.

Lunch at Illumination’s Minion Cafe was outstanding. The kids each ordered ramen, which they only picked up, but that we adults found to be delightful. Our soup and sandwiches were excellent and the minion tots were as delicious as they were adorable. The kids really hadn’t eaten enough, so we did what any responsible vacationing family would do – we filled the gap with dessert. We walked over to the Bake My Day bakery and bought Maya and Ian some minion cookies.

After Bake My Day, we rode the Transformers simulator ride. After that, Dad and Ian wanted to ride Revenge of the Mummy, but Maya has a pretty serious aversion to fire, so I sat out with her. While they were getting chased by a mummy, Maya and I decided to try the Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon ride. Yeah, it was yet another simulator, but at least we weren’t just sitting and waiting. And Maya especially seemed to enjoy it.

After a quick stop by Shutterbuttons to pick up our photos, we rode the Escape from Gringotts ride again. Since it was getting darker now, we decided to wander through Diagon Alley again. Everyone but me had *more* butter beer. I had beer beer. We sat down and enjoyed our beverages and watched as folks who had sprung for special interactive wands wandered around and tried to get various “spells” to work. One particularly fun one involved making an umbrella thunder and lightning and proceed to rain on whoever was standing under it.

I had been gunning for a photo with a Transformer for most of the day. We finally made our way over and had our photo taken with Bumblebee!

Then, at Ian’s request, we rode the ET Adventure Ride. And we finished out our evening by riding the Rockit roller coaster in the dark.

Dinner was kinda tricky because no one was all that hungry, but we’d be ravenous by morning if we didn’t eat something. We first stopped by Voodoo Doughnuts so we’d set for our vacation doughnut fix in the morning. Then we wound up first stopping by some sandwich shop for Maya and then picking up a wood-fired pizza on the way back to the hotel for the rest of us.

Because we’d be leaving town the next day, Sean and I did a fair amount of strategic packing while the kids wound down for the night. We’d need to arrange things so that we could go to the park with our small packs, but then come change our clothes (it was a lot cooler in Austin than Orlando at the time) and repack our carry-ons for air travel.

Day 4 – ALL OF IT – Islands of Adventure, Universal Studios, Heading Home

After getting ready for the day and having some delightful doughnuts, we checked out of our room, dropped our luggage with guest services, and headed into the parks for our last vacation day. We started at Islands of Adventure and made a b-line directly for Velocicoaster. While we could line up early for the ride, we could not use our express passes until the park opened at 9. Either way, we didn’t have to wait long and the ride was nearly as much fun in the middle of the ride train as it had been at the very front.

We then hit Hagrid’s Motorbikes for the third time, this time waiting maybe 70 minutes all told. Then we watched the Grinchmas Wholiday Spectacular, which was colorful and silly and fun. Plus we got to sit down!

As it was starting to mist and sprinkle outside, we ducked into Three Broomsticks for lunch. Then we rode Harry Potter and the Hidden Journey again before lining up to ride the Hogwarts Express train from Islands of Adventure to Universal Studios. We had purchased the park-to-park tickets for flexibility, and that is what’s required if you want to take the train between parks. On the chance that your family is really excited about trains: this isn’t one. It’s more of a cable-car. The windows are actually screens, which is a lot of fun. You get to see interesting scenery fly past you and you hear some witches and wizards outside your compartment door.

Back at Universal Studios, we went straight to ride Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts again. After that, we tried out Illumination’s Villain-Con Minion Blast. Here, we were issued a gun and stepped onto a colored dot on a moving sidewalk that led us through a lineup of villains that we were meant to shoot. It was fine. I came, I saw, I randomly pulled the trigger in my impossible to aim gun, I left.

The kids were itching for one more ride on the Rockit roller coaster before we left the park, but the light rain hadn’t really let up, and so the ride was shut down. At Ian’s insistence, he and I went and rode Revenge of the Mummy together (and yeah, I can confirm, Maya would have hated that ride). We were just getting off, when Sean texted and told me they were running the Rockit empty in preparation for opening it again. We rushed back and he and the kids lined up, and they managed to just squeeze in their ride before we had to get back to the hotel to rearrange our bags and catch our bus back to the airport.

All of that went very smoothly. We changed clothes and juggled our suitcases a bit so we didn’t have any TSA no-nos in our backpacks. The bus was right where it was supposed to be, right when it was supposed to be. Security at Tampa was a bit lackadaisical and in absolutely no rush at all, but it was ok. We ate before running the gauntlet and still had plenty of time before our flight left.

We got into Austin very, very late, but bags were acquired and parking shuttle was caught with a minimum of fuss. And the next day was Thanksgiving, so we could take it as easy as we needed to.

Our October was a busy and varied thing. By and large, I love this time of year. Things are finally, FINALLY cooling off, and we have a great big Texas non-winter to look forward to. Plus Halloween is always so much fun.

Early in the month, the kids had school photos for fall. I initially tried my best to get Maya to wear the new dress she had picked out when we were ‘back to school’ shopping. I tried to convince Ian to wear this pretty linen shirt I found that suited his tastes perfectly. Alas, neither kid was interested in what I wanted, and I wasn’t interested having a fight over something as stupid as which outfit to wear. And that’s how it came to be that Maya re-wore the octopus dress she wore last year and Ian wore the fun 70s-era shirt he wore to Lolli and Pop’s anniversary party this summer.

Ian came home from school after picture day telling me that people were roasting his drip. I can’t say that I go out of my way to keep up with young people slang, but I read widely enough that I usually know what people are talking about. Not this time. He completely pulled me up short. I couldn’t even guess what he meant. Turns out in loosely means people were making fun of his outfit. Luckily it appeared to bother him absolutely not at all, so all good there.

The kids had a three day weekend early in October. I had been planning this epic three day trip to San Antonio to see the museums and the riverwalk and do some shopping and to spend a day at Six Flags. When the reality sunk in that I had a work trip the very next week and a whole lot of kid prep for various activities ahead of me, we decided to limit the San Antonio trip to a single day at Six Flags.

That turned out to be a really lovely idea. We had a very fun day at the park, and we could get all the things done that needed doing for me to be out of town for three days. I think I’ve mentioned before that the kids have sort of hit their stride on amusement parks. Maya especially loves all the rides, and Ian is finally tall enough that he can ride pretty much everything if he so chooses. We discovered on this trip that Ian is happier with an over-the-shoulder type restraint on roller coasters, so he sat out one of the big ones that only had a lap bar.

The one Ian sat out was called Iron Rattler. I rode on it years and years ago when it was just the Rattler and even before my back was well and truly horked, I had already vowed never to ride it again. It legit hurt my neck and back, so fearsome was its bumping and jerking. Sean told me it had been completely reworked and was allegedly a much smoother ride now, but I elected to hang with Ian while Sean and Maya field tested it. They tell me it was a pretty smooth ride, so if we ever go again, maybe I’ll give it a try.

We got to try out some really neat ones though. The most interesting may have been one called Dr. Diabolical’s Cliffhanger. This one is unique because it has a greater than 90-degree drop! The ride vehicle has three rows of seven passengers. At the top of the big hill, the front-row riders are treated to a stomach-churning view as they pause, dangling over the edge, just on the cusp of dropping. Sean, with his aversion to heights, refused to sit in the front row. Maya and I thought about it, but the line to sit up front was considerably longer. It was a cool coaster. My only complaint is that it was so, so short.

We had good food karma that day too. We started with lunch at a place called Ray’s Drive Inn, because I couldn’t remember if I had ever tried San Antonio’s famous puffy tacos and this looked like a good place to get those while still having plenty of choices to suit the kids. The people there were really nice, plus on our way in, we got to meet one of the cats they take care of. Bonus: I think we all enjoyed our food!

After the park, we ate at a place called La Gloria in the Pearl District of San Antonio. I could have lingered here. We were seated outdoors, the weather was just about perfect, and the food was outstanding. My mole was among the best I’ve ever eaten, and Sean’s pastor tacos seemed to be making him happy. I don’t remember what Maya ordered, but I know she almost single-handedly took out a bowl of guacamole. Ian, who often struggles to find anything he likes, asked if he could order a hot dog. You should have seen that kid’s face light up when the lady taking care of us asked if it was ok if the hot dog was wrapped in bacon. Emphatically, yes!

I spent several days the following week in Tampa on a work trip. I had been looking forward to Texas cooling off for so long, and then Tampa was a sweltering mess. Humidity aside (and I mean c’mon, it’s Florida), the trip was a good one, but I was glad to be back home.

That very next weekend was the big annular eclipse. An annular eclipse is not a total eclipse. It occurs when the moon is further from the earth and so at best it will appear as a black disc in front of the bright disc of the sun, resulting in the “ring of fire” effect, if one is in the right geographic position. In Austin, we weren’t quite in the right spot, however, we did experience about 90% obscuration, and we had a sunny, cloudless sky, so we could observe the eclipse as it progressed.

For us, it was enough that the sky was noticeably darkening. This was especially obvious when we were in the house. It seemed like things felt cooler, though I wonder how much of this was mental. We had eclipse glasses at the ready, but we also took out a colander to let the sun shine through it and show us dozens of tiny eclipse shapes. You could see it in the shadows through the tree leaves as well.

I tried to take photos with my phone with the eclipse glasses pressed over the lens, and it kinda worked. Sean had software on his phone that allowed him to fine tune exposure settings a bit more, and so this worked better for him. Maybe when the total eclipse occurs in 2024, we’ll spring for better gear.

The kids, especially Maya, were super into it. We started a little early and would check the sky about every 15-20 minutes. She’d then rush in to make notes about her observations. She pasted in photos too, once Sean got them to her. To my knowledge, this information gathering served no purpose other than to suit her own interests, so hooray!

The very next day, Maya had her first big piano recital since starting with her latest piano teacher. You could tell that poor kid was nervous. She had never met any of the other kids performing, so it was almost a complete unknown to her. Maya knew her songs cold, but I think nerves got the better of her. There was one point where she got tripped up, and I literally held my breath for the few seconds it took her to recover. But recover she did, and finished her performance strong! We are very proud of her.

Ian and I rushed straight from Maya’s recital to Ian’s cub scout meeting. One – he earned his “Bobcat” badge. As a new cub scout, this is sort of the initial rank he earns just by learning things like the scout oath, scout handshake, and some safety information. As a third grader, he’s in the “Bear” den, so that’s the badge he’ll work through the year to achieve. Two – he got to carve a pumpkin at the meeting. They had a giant truckload of pumpkins; each scout in the pack was able to carve one. Plus, they got to learn all about pumpkin seeds and how delicious they could be.

We went home with Ian’s carved pumpkin and a plastic bag full of seeds to clean and roast later on. Ian was so excited about those seeds, he single-handedly cleaned the pulp from them. We dried them, seasoned them, and roasted them right away …….. and he loved them! Dude even took them to school for snack the next day.

Ever since last year’s trunk or treat at the kids’ elementary school, they’ve been scheming to have us participate. It would be Maya’s last year in elementary school, so we agreed: this year we’d decorate the car and be one of the trunk or treat stops.

The kids also always have a fall carnival at school – Dolphinfest – to help raise money for the PTA. This year, it was decided that trunk or treat would be dropped and that Dolphinfest would become Boo Fest. Maya and Ian were initially disappointed, but they rallied pretty quickly and seemed to enjoy the Boo Fest. It was held on a Friday night and for the first time ever, Sean and I just kinda hung out and let the kids run. Both kids, oddly, had friends who were dressed like bananas. What are the odds?

The next day, Ian had a small concert with his guitar teacher Chris and a fellow student. It was to be held at a small farmers market in Chris’s neighborhood. As events go, it was delightfully low key, and everyone performed really well. Ian’s guitar was mic-ed for the event, so the sound was quite clear even though we were outdoors and there was at least some amount of ambient noise.

Speaking of concerts, a couple days later, we were supposed to have gone to see Aerosmith, but they broke Steven Tyler. We hear the show may be rescheduled in 2024. Guess we’ll see.

Ian had been learning knife safety as part of cub scouts. Maya, since she was interested, was learning with him. I think she found it soothing to be able to carve pieces of wood. She would often sit outside in the backyard whittling at sticks for half an hour, even a full hour at at time.

Maya enjoyed this activity so much that Sean went ahead and got her a pocket knife as well. He ordered the kids some decent little chunks of wood as well since our backyard sticks vary widely in size and quality. Maya was happily whittling away one day, and I think she either lost focus or got startled and managed to cut into her hand a bit. It could have been much worse, but it did look like it might be deep enough to require stitches. Sean hauled her into the children’s ER, where they quickly cleaned it, numbed it, and closed it up with a combination of steri-strips and glue. She’s still on the mend, and I think is already counting down the time till she can start carving again, hopefully with a renewed respect for the business end of a knife.

We haven’t had Anna watch the kids in quite a while (we really need to get out more), but we did manage to have her over to dinner so we could continue our little tradition of having her draw the kids’ jack-o-lantern pictures. Ian chose a curly lizard. Maya chose a cat wearing a tie. Once it was closer to halloween, I eviscerated the pumpkins, saving the seeds so each kid could roast their own uniquely-seasoned batch.

Ian was supposed to have his big cub scout camp out the last weekend in October. It’s a family affair, so all four of us would be going. Sean and I took training to be able to attend the over-night event. We filled out paperwork. We at least started to gather supplies (we are pretty well-stocked on the camping front, so not much would be needed). And then bone-dry, exceptional drought Texas finally got some decent rain. It rained off and on all week, though it was supposed to have cleared by the weekend. Unfortunately that wasn’t to be, and the trip was postponed a couple weeks. Maya and Ian both like camping, so they were a little miffed that they weren’t getting to go.

Grammy and Grandpa sent the kids gift cards for Halloween. They love getting mail and they love shopping online, so they were both pretty excited. Plus, both kids were in some degree of sniffly, coughing sick, and had just had a camping trip canceled, so it was a pleasant turn in a not-so-pleasant few days.

For Halloween, Ian and Maya chose to be a brother-sister pair from a manga they have both read called Demon Slayer. Ian was Tanjiro and Maya was Nezuko, and oh thank goodness both of these could be procured via Amazon. Their costumes had many layers and much fussing – Ian’s had a face tattoo, Maya’s had a wig – but the kids LOVED them. They seemed very happy with the end result. Maya went trick or treating with a friend of hers (who was also a Demon Slayer character), I took Ian around our neighborhood, and Sean hung out at our house, manning the candy dish. We had almost no trick-or-treaters this year, and so between those leftovers and the kids’ haul, we are awash in more sugary goodness than two middle-aged office types really need access to.

I didn’t even mention the little things like friend birthday parties, fun trips to the asian grocery store, all the fun Halloween decorations. I put Sean in charge of decorating the house, so we didn’t really have any decorations to speak of, but some of our neighborhood folks go crazy. It’s been fun and festive around here. And just like every year, from Halloween on, our life goes full-tilt and doesn’t stop till the new year.

September. The beginning of fall. The air starts to cool, and there’s a different smell in the air. Pumpkin spice everything gets hawked. People start to make chili and roasts and warm apple pies. But not here. We had a couple days somewhere in the middle where I thought we might have some relief, but it was short-lived. Still, whether intentionally or by circumstance, we stayed busy.

Everything started out nicely enough. We had a three-day weekend that we tried to leave mostly unplanned. We had friends over for a delightfully informal dinner, wherein we tried one of my new favorite side dishes – Hatch Chile Creamy Rice Casserole! I like working in the kitchen, and I even like the smell of chiles roasting in the oven. But I do not enjoy peeling the skin from said roasted chiles one tiny little bit, and I still thought this casserole was worth making.

The kids had been asking and asking Sean to re-teach them how to roller skate. Plus, Maya had a skating birthday party to attend and wanted to practice up a bit so she’d feel more comfortable. I hung out and helped get skates on feet, but owing to my messed up spine, I chose not to actually participate. They seemed to have fun, and at least Maya was willing to skate around the rink on her own by the end of that first outing. When she went to her best friend’s birthday the next weekend, she was able to participate without as much worry, which is nice.

We had been battling a slow drain / weird clog situation at our kitchen sink. We had deployed a plunger, a plumbing snake, hot water, even mild cursing, but to no reasonable avail. Well, apparently the clog moved downstream in the plumbing chain, which we found out later when water started gushing from our washing machine’s supply line as I was running a load of laundry!

We eventually gave up and ran Drano through the line, and even that took a couple tries before the clog mercifully resolved. The two (semi-)grownup Woodses were so relieved. Maya and Ian were mostly just curious about the new disaster.

We managed to get cub scout Ian his uniform together so he could dress properly for his September pack meeting. He got to race minnows! His minnow was funny. It took sort of a meandering approach to traversing its swim lane, and Ian was sure he’d lose. Then all of a sudden, that minnow darted to the end and back again, almost too quickly for us to follow. He won the race. Then the kids got to field test every variety of popcorn they’d be selling for their fundraiser. Ian was so thoughtful; he saved some of his popcorn so that I could try all the flavors as well.

We took the kids to the Alamo Drafthouse to watch the “Gran Turismo” movie. Our two little gamers seemed to love the notion that a regular gamer kid could get to be a real race car driver! Also, while anyone who’s watched the underdog makes the grade trope, knew what was coming, it was all new and amazing to the kids. There were audible cheers. They were genuinely uplifted. It was fun to watch.

Maya learned that she got one of the speaking parts in the musical her after school choir group will be performing in December. They’re doing a school-age adaptation of “Seussical” and she’s going to be Mrs. Mayor. On the day the parts were announced, she was very put out because she had her heart set on being one of the cats. She came around though and now is back to being excited about the whole production.

The kids had outgrown the tie-dye shirts that we had made for father’s day a few years back. Sean may have <ahem> outgrown his as well. And because they were father’s day gifts, we hadn’t even made one for me. Sean spent maybe a week or so getting all the variously sized t-shirts ordered and washed and ready to go, and then we spent an afternoon trying our hand at different tie-dye patterns. Maya’s and Ian’s turned out the best – our figuring is that dye distribution is a little easier in a smaller shirt. We each have another shirt or two that we didn’t get to because we ran out of both stamina and appropriately colored dye.

Ian has been learning knife safety as part of his cub scouts training. As a third grader, he’s currently striving for his Bear rank, and these knife safety and usage skills are part of a unit called Bear Claws. Ian knows how to sharpen his bear claw, safely transfer it to another person, and even do some introductory whittling with it. We don’t let him keep his pocket knife in his room, but he’s definitely getting better at safely using it. Maya, who’s historically been afraid of knives, has been willing to chop a few things with my kitchen knives and has even expressed interest in learning the same skills that Ian is learning.

One weekend, Sean willingly woke up super early and drove all the way to Hye to the Garrison Brothers Distillery, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes away from us to be there when they opened the doors so he could buy a bottle of the very limited release of their Cowboy Bourbon. Sean is patently NOT an early bird, except for Disney park days. Apparently he’ll also get up early for hard liquor – who knew?!

He arrived around 8:20 (they had opened at 8 that day) and was greeted with literally a mile-long car line. The release was 9600 bottles, so I think he was feeling pretty good about his odds. Each car was only allowed to purchase a single bottle per adult occupant, so it seemed likely he’d get his bourbon. Further down the line, he heard from a video crew who was on sight shooting that Garrison actually only had a thousand bottles to sell that morning; the rest had been distributed to retail establishments. At that point, it became less of a sure thing.

The folks at Garrison Brothers have this down to a science evidently – the intrepid bourbon buyers don’t even have to exit their vehicle to score their bottle – so after a little over an hour of creeping along in that car line, Sean had his Cowboy Bourbon in hand and was on his way back to Austin. We don’t know when they sold out, but as Sean was leaving, there was still a huge line of cars so no doubt the thousand bottles were sold.

The bourbon acquisition was on a Saturday. That Sunday, it was a hundred stupid degrees outside. Sunday night, a weird freak storm blew through – we got emergency warnings about 2-inch hail and high winds. In Round Rock, that hail was legit – people had car windows and house windows shattered. The car dealerships took lots of damage. At our house, there was some rain and high wind. At one point, we heard a sound like a branch hitting our roof. It was dark, and with all this mess going on, we didn’t really want to go out and examine things right then, but we did see a biggish branch – trunk maybe the size of my forearm – that likely blew into our roof.

Imagine my astonishment on Monday morning once it was light outside. I was blithely making my coffee, not paying a great deal of attention, when I finally looked up to see that a huge branch had crashed into our roof. It definitely damaged one of the gutters and may have messed with some of the roof a bit, but for the size of the limb, we’re probably lucky that’s all that happened. Sean took the morning off and sawed the limb up to at least get the weight of it off of our roof.

I have had a “bad back” for a while. I initially just took it as a sign I was getting older; these things happen. But it seemed like it was getting worse as time marched on, and one day (this was several months ago), I leaned over to pick something up from the floor and felt an intense pain that I’d like very much to never feel again. Over the course of minutes or hours, I don’t recall, that pain dwindled, but it was just another sign that I needed to get my back looked at.

I had X-rays that seemed to show disc degeneration. The orthopedist I was seeing said he wouldn’t make any recommendations without an MRI, and insurance wouldn’t pay for an MRI unless I had tried an 8-week course of PT first. My thinking was that the PT would be good for me regardless, so why not. I did the PT, and while I feel stronger, it didn’t fully mitigate the pain (and I already knew that disc degeneration was irreversible, so I wasn’t surprised). By that time, I was deep in the throes of summer vacations and back to school planning and all those things, so it wasn’t till September that I managed to schedule an MRI.

Sure enough, as seen in the x-ray, there’s lumbar disc degeneration – one disc is completely gone. There’s one nerve pinched, but for the most part, the nerves are undamaged and have plenty of room. Given all this, the orthopedist doesn’t recommend surgery, no spinal fusion, anything like that. This isn’t really a treatable condition apparently. It’s a little frustrating because the post-MRI visit was so abrupt. I think I need to keep doing PT and avoid lifting heavy things. (“Don’t move a couch,” the orthopedist chuckled.) He directed me to another office that could do some sort of injections to help with the pain. He recommended I get a relationship built with them before the pain is severe.

Mentally, I need to find a constructive way to deal with this. Already, every time I turn around, I see another thing I cannot do because of the pain it will cause or the damage it might do. This is all happening at the same time my middle-aged brain is losing track of things and my middle-aged eyes are adapting to a newfound farsightedness that seems to evolve on a daily basis. I’m worn down.

Everything in me wants to preserve what I have left of my spinal function, but I’m a little vague on how to do that. All that orthopedist wants to talk about is pain management. I’m not sure what kind of health care professional I need to seek out to obtain solid advice, but so far, I’m just trying to common sense my way through it, which I fear will only take me so far.

Anyhow, it’s not like I’m bedridden, so hopefully there’s hope. And in the meantime, both kids had really good parent teacher conferences, they seem to be enjoying their extracurricular activities, and we’re all excited that it’s finally, finally managed to cool off a little now that we’re a week into October.

I know in my heart of hearts that it’s foolish to bitch about the heat in Texas, especially in August, but this summer has been a doozy. It’s barely rained since May and the heat has been insane. We broke a record sometime this past month for number of 100+ degree days in a row. 2011 has been the year with the most 100+ degree days (at something like 90 of them), but this year has been every bit as brutal.

I just checked – Lake Travis is at 38.2% full as of September 4th. This isn’t as low as it’s ever been, but it’s worrisome all the same. I just checked our forecast for the next ten days – not a drop of rain in sight. I used to chuckle over some of our tourist literature – “300 days of sunshine” it said. I remember thinking that that was an awfully rose-colored view given our summers.

Thanks to our extreme drought conditions and the subsequent water restrictions, most of the yard is some degree of brown and crispy. We haven’t grilled all summer for fear an errant spark will start a fire. Our cold water currently measures 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Our local weather folks have told us these oppressive temperatures are in part courtesy of something called a heat dome. Evidently there was a huge and unmoving area of high pressure around us trapping in warm air from the gulf and from Mexico. That warm air evaporated the ground moisture from our nice mild spring, and once the ground was good and dry, any evaporative cooling we may have enjoyed was gone gone gone.

Thankfully, we’ve mostly been able to escape indoors this August. Lots of movie nights and family game nights and arts and crafts nights. Anything to not go outside. Even the cacti and succulents are losing the good fight. Even the weeds are browning.

Early in the month, we tried out the Museum of Illusions. It was probably a little expensive for what wound up being maybe an hour-long outing for us, but it was entertaining regardless. Plus, Ian at the time had been on a tear creating “impossible drawings” (things like the Penrose triangle) so it was fun to let him lean into that a little bit.

Maya liked bits of it I think, but spent much of the time feeling bored and audibly wishing she could not be there. She seemed to like trying to solve some of the puzzles toward the end, so at least that part was fun for her. And either way, we got a few fun photos out of the deal.

We had a night early in the month where we hung out with a few friends and played board games. I am ambivalent about board games and so for me mostly it was about trying out some interesting recipes and socializing a bit. For example, we learned that bacon wrapped pickles are friggin’ delicious. The recipe calls for smoking them, but 1 – reference my earlier commentary about our intense drought and 2 – Maya doesn’t like smoke. I made them in the oven instead and they were divine.

For our entire 20-something year history together, Sean has not been a tequila guy, much to my chagrin. However, after sampling this spicy margarita punch that I made for the event, he may be a changed man. Since then, we’ve tested out a handful of tequila and mezcal cocktails together, and I’m delighted to say that he seems to have turned a corner. Hooray!

The kids’ school ice cream social was on August 10th. It’s an opportunity for the kids to meet their new teachers and see their classrooms before the first day of school. The kids, especially Maya, have been looking forward to school starting so they can see more of their friends. Just before back to school night, we learned who the kids’ teachers would be. Maya found out that while she had one teacher, two of her best friends had a different teacher. To add insult to injury, this teacher that her friends were with had student-taught Maya in 4th grade and Maya absolutely adored her. She put on a brave face, but you could tell she was upset.

Ian had a guitar performance at a local coffee shop with his guitar teacher, Chris. It was a sort of low-key open-mic affair and for the first few songs, I’m not sure sure people really paid them much attention. I think it wasn’t till Ian started belting out AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on his nylon-stringed classical guitar, something familiar, that people noticed. He and Chris garnered some polite, coffee-house applause for their efforts.

And then on August 14th, the kids went back to school. Back to lunch rooms and recesses and homework assignments. Back to drop off and pick up and the end of the day discussion of how their days went. So far, the kids both seem to like their classrooms well enough. All the same-grade kids have recess together, so Maya still gets to see and play with her friends during the day.

Every year around August, our local Central Market grocery store celebrates hatch chile season. These delicious chiles are ripe and ready for harvest from Hatch, NM around this time, and Central Market (and many local restaurants) put them in everything. The smell coming from the grocery store grounds at this time of year is divine as they roast chiles and huge open-air drums outside the store. You can choose to buy them hot or mild, fresh or roasted. For me though, the fun is all the hatch-flavored stuff they wind up concocting.

Sean went foraging for goodies this year – he’s our primary grocery shopper. Let’s see if I can remember all the things he came back with (many of which wound up in the freezer): a whole hatch roasted chicken, hatch macaroni and cheese, fresh hatch sausages, hatch marinated salmon, hatch marinated shrimp, hatch crab cakes, hatch marinated chicken thighs, hatch marinated flank steak, hatch burgers, hatch hummus, hatch cheese, hatch tortillas, dried hatch enchilada sauce mix, hatch chocolate chip cookies, hatch creme sandwich cookies, hatch tamales, hatch cheddar biscuits, hatch sourdough crisps, and hatch cheese puffs.

And so far, except for the cheese puffs, everything has been really good! We ate the chicken and macaroni that very evening, still-warm from the store. All four of us really liked salmon and shrimp. And it’s been fun since then taking things slowly out of the freezer week over week and stretching out our hatch chile enjoyment.

On that Sunday, both Sean and Maya started feeling a bit under the weather – sniffly noses, headaches. As a precaution Monday morning (the second whole week of school, for anyone keeping track), we gave Maya a covid test. On the initial 15 minute run, only the control line showed up, but on glancing at the test a little while later, there it was: a faint positive line. I called the school and Maya was dismayed to find out she’d have to stay home for the entire week. She didn’t feel too terrible, so I went ahead and fetched some of her homework from school and that helped occupy her time a little, but for the most part, she was bored and frustrated.

Thankfully, Ian and I managed to avoid infection. I don’t know if it made a difference, but we wore masks around the house during the first few days. We ate our meals separately, and I slept in the living room. (They tested on Thursday evening and once no positive result appeared, even after a full hour of waiting, we chose to ditch our at-home precautions.) But Maya had to miss school for a week already, miss her first swim lesson, and miss her piano lesson for the week, none of which impressed her.

Maya and Ian have played soccer for the past couple seasons. Both of them seemed interested in testing out some other things, so we’ve decided to skip out on soccer this fall. Ian is still taking weekend archery lessons, and they’ve both started swim lessons with an eye toward joining swim team once they qualify. Maya has also again joined her after school choir group. And Ian has decided to try out cub scouts.

Ian’s first pack meeting was toward the end of August, and I’m gonna be honest: all of this is a little overwhelming. I have managed to register him with scouts, buy him a pack t-shirt, and get him to that first meeting. But I’ve not yet bought his uniform or handbook, signed him up for any of the events, nor figured out what’s going on with popcorn selling business. One of his friends from class, who also happens to be in the weekend archery lessons with him, is in scouts as well, so Ian is pretty excited. During their first pack meeting, they made rockets, and Ian’s rocket both held together and flew pretty well. Now his mother just needs to get her crap together.

Every summer, we daydream about living somewhere with a milder climate, but this summer may be the one that finally does it. We’ve floated the idea past the kids a little, just so they know we’re thinking about it. Maya, who is very attached to her friends, is dead-set against moving away from Austin. Even though she wishes she could play outside more, even though she wishes it would snow more, even though she likes the idea of maybe being a little closer to her grandparents, she does not want to leave. We Woodses don’t tend to move quickly, so she probably doesn’t have much to worry about for a while.

I know that’s not a very clever title, but we spent a lot of time on the road in July. We started with our family road trip throughout Arkansas. Then we made a long round trip drive to collect Maya and Ian from Camp LolliPop. And finally, we drove to Caddo Mills and back one weekend so that Maya and I could collect on one of our Christmas 2022 gifts. For two adults who don’t have a commute, July saw quite a few miles added to the odometer.

Sean and I had the whole week after our Arkansas trip to ourselves while the kids were in Alabama with Lolli and Pop. We didn’t have a reason for sending them off other to let them spend more time with their grandparents, so it’s not like we had a lot going on at home. Both of us were in catch-up mode at our jobs, Sean especially. We tried and failed to replace a faucet in the kitchen early in the week, and I think that may have hampered our enthusiasm for household projects.

We did manage to stop by the Celis Brewery to try a few beers and stock up our garage fridge. We also took advantage of Maya’s absence to cook a favorite octopus dish of ours. Despite what happened when she was three, Maya is now steadfastly against the consumption of octopus. In deference to her, we don’t eat it when she’s around, but we were happy to take the opportunity while she was in Alabama. The recipe we made comes from “The Magic of Tinned Fish” by Chris McDade. It features smashed and fried potatoes, fried tinned octopus, and a lovely drizzle of homemade aioli.

Meanwhile, Lolli and Pop made sure the kids’ visit was chock-full of fun. For one, to Maya and Ian’s immense delight, they spent hours at the pool nearly every day. Ian started off his week referring to the Homewood pool as the waterpark, so much did he enjoy the pool’s amenities. Maya came back to us an acorn-brown color on her back and arms.

They went to Okinawa restaurant one day where the kids again discovered they like sushi. At a different restaurant, Ian discovered that he liked bacon and egg omelets. They “discovered” that they like cake and ice cream too!

On Monday, they all went to Chattanooga! One of the things they did was take the Missionary Ridge Local train ride offered by the Tennessee Valley Railroad. I don’t know if it’s still true, but generally speaking, Maya especially is a big fan of pretty much any kind of mass transit, so hopefully she had fun. They also went to the Tennessee Aquarium, which I know they loved. They were both full of stories about a giant pacific octopus who wasn’t just sitting still but actually swimming around.

They went one day to see the Dill Pickers perform; Maya and Ian needed a little humor and bluegrass in their lives. Then they all went and watched a Birmingham Children’s Theatre production of Treasure Island. Another day they went to Chuck E Cheese. I am pleased to tell you that it’s the first time they’ve ever been, and I’m not sure we’ve bothered to let them know that there are some Chuck E Cheeses in Austin too.

We’ve been referring to it as Camp LolliPop. Lolli and Pop kept those kids BUSY. When we Facetimed them in the evenings, Maya and Ian seemed like they had better things to do than talk to us boring bozos.

When their week was over, we met Harry in Jackson, MS to pick the kids up, and they seemed pretty sad to see the end of their visit. We’ve been trying to make the most of our little stopovers though. This time, we had some really solid bbq at a place called The Pig & Pint. It was there that we (mostly Sean) discovered we like a local beer called Colsons. It’s yellow, and Sean is not normally one to suffer yellow beer.

We stayed the night Jackson on Saturday and then drove back to Austin the next day. The drive home was especially long since we had just driven the 8 or 9 hours to get to Jackson the day before, but we managed well enough. Once back home, the kids settled into kind of a mope. Home was so boring compared to their super fun week with Lolli and Pop. Mom and Dad had to do their boring jobs and couldn’t run kids to the pool or the park every day. No fun at all.

Ian did get to go to a bouldering camp the week they were back, which he loved. On the first day, he was pretty nervous about the whole thing, but every day after that, he’d point out that if he got there early, he could play with his friends. Maya had been signed up for a coding camp, but it was canceled due to low enrollment. She did however have a couple of hangouts with friends from school, which seemed to perk her up a little.

We also went one evening to see the new Indiana Jones movie (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) at our local Alamo Drafthouse. Not only do they have $7 movies on Tuesdays, Sean also scored some gift cards from our local Costco that essentially worked out to a 20% discount.

The kids weren’t even home a week before we were in the car again! This time we “only” had to drive to Caddo Mills, TX. This past Christmas, Maya and I had received the chance to take part in the Trainer for a Day program at Window to the Wild. She and I were going to get to help train birds for a couple hours on Saturday morning.

We drove up the night before and stayed in a hotel. This gave us the opportunity to stop by Waco on the way through and pick up another interesting bottle of whiskey from Balcones Distillery. It also let us stop by the Milk Bottle Cookies store for … cookies!

The next morning after a quick hotel breakfast we drove into Caddo Mills to the Window to the Wild location. As we were pulling in, Sean looks at me and says, “Where do you find these places?!” It was maybe a little off the beaten path. The facility was great though. Lindsey and Simon McNeny clearly care for their creatures. They seem to forever be looking at how they can make the environment better for the bird inhabitants.

We started our morning watching a trumpeter hornbill flying about, accepting food. We learned about the some of the fundamentals of training – that it should be reward based, and that you need to ensure you aren’t accidentally rewarding non-preferred behaviors.

Maya spent some time chucking food into an aquarium full of water for a pretty hadada ibis to fly over and collect (it would have been dangerous to try to feed that spike-billed creature directly). She chucked some more food to an Abyssinian Ground Hornbill, who was really good at catching the meat bits, and fed a little (I think) Pied Crow from a small cup full of meat bits.

We spent quite a few cycles trying to get a crow (I think) to take a slightly smashed metal can from our hands and flying it over to a recycling bin. Maya’s body naturally wants to wiggle a bit, so she had a hard time holding still. The bird, understandably, wanted a reliable perch. I was able to get the bird to collect the recycling and place it in the bin. Maya was able to hand the bird the can and he’d take it to the bin.

We met many other birds. Here are some that I’ve listed: East African Crowned Crane, a raven named Blogden who I remember talking to us, though I can’t recall what was said, a Barbary Saker Falcon, and a few others who I may have not gotten written down fast enough.

I wish like crazy I had written down all the animals’ names. These folks have a way with naming things. At one point, Simon grins and says, “This is Papua. He’s our new Guinea.” (Oh yeah, we saw a Guinea too – so speckled and pretty.)

We went over to feed a black vulture who was doing speed drills, running back and forth between his handlers and Maya and I at speed to collect all the meaty treats. Maya said his beak hurt a little but that it was worth it to have him eating out of her hand. We watched Lindsey and Simon handle on of the bald eagles that lived there. When he was still or in flight, he looked as majestic as you might expect. When he walked around on the ground, he looked sort of ungainly, even a bit derpy.

Maya and I got to hold a really lovely little American Kestrel named Falcor. I think Maya loved this one because it was tiny enough not to make her arm tired AND she didn’t have to wear a big leather glove to protect her skin.

Then we got to have a bird fly to us! A red tailed hawk would fly to us, accept its meat treat, and then fly back to its perch for another meat treat. To be proper trainers, we had to keep our perch steady and show that we had a treat worth acquiring. If he didn’t come right away, we took the treat away and waited a moment before offering it again.

It was incredibly cool and maybe a little alarming to have that much bird flying at your face. Maya did a great job and seemed to love the experience, which of course was the whole point.

Still with gloves on, we got to hold a gentle Great Horned Owl named Hermes (Lindsey and Simon are Harry Potter fans). His eyes were gigantic, and it was explained to us that despite the common depiction of an owl as a wise creature, because their eyes occupy so much space, their brains are actually relatively small. Hermes was big enough that he actually started to feel heavy after a while and you could really tell Maya was warring between the desire to hold the owl for as long as possible and the need to rest her weary arm.

We ended the bird part of our visit by checking out the enclosure that held a variety of tropical birds as well as a happy little brood of chickens. Maya was absolutely delighted when Gil the Rose-Breasted Cockatoo actually did what we call the cockatoo dance with her. He also talked to us a bit, which was fun. In that same area we got to see a blue and gold macaw and a Yellow-naped Amazon. Toward the end of our visit, I walked over to the pretty Yellow-naped Amazon and tried to talk to it. It appeared to tolerate me briefly before finally hollering out “Goodbye!” I took it as my hint to leave the bird alone, though Simon told us it was actually a tactic to get us to stay (since he had just opened the door to leave the enclosure.)

Before we left, the kids got to meet the dog, several goats, and a couple of tortoises. They were gifted with some pretty macaw feathers, which now hold pride of place on the shelves in their rooms. And Maya and I got to go see the mother of all garden spiders, and on our way over to check it out, we saw a huge wolf spider, her back covered in babies! Ian would not have been impressed with any of this, so it’s good he stayed with the goats.

All too soon it was time for us to leave. If you have a bird lover in your life, especially if you’re in the Dallas area, this is definitely an experience worth having. Plus Window to the Wild is a nonprofit, so your dollars will directly benefit those creatures. Hooray!

On our way back home, we decided to swing through Dallas for lunch and a liquor store visit. We ate at a delightful place called Rex’s Seafood & Market. Everyone enjoyed their seafood lunch a great deal. Everyone, except Ian. He ordered a cheese flatbread, but instead of being coated in mozzarella like a pizza most likely would be, it had a variety of cheeses on it. He flatly refused to eat it. Instead he ate some fries and some of my fish and some of my broccolini.

After lunch, we let Sean stop in at a fancy-pants liquor store called Pogo’s Wine & Spirits. It sounds like it’s probably in our best interest to be a couple hundred miles away from this place. There are plenty of unique bottles to be had, some at very precious prices.

Thankfully, after an Arkansas road trip, a round trip weekend drive to Jackson, MS and another weekend drive to Caddo Mills and back, we were done with our driving adventures for a bit. We closed out the month mostly hanging around home. The kids had yet another camp that was canceled for low enrollment so they’ve been stuck at home. We took them out for “robot sushi” at a local place called Kura one night, just to break things up a bit. They were in heaven. Plus a robot brought us our drinks, which they loved.

On the last Saturday of the month, Sean took Ian to try out an archery lesson at Archery Country here in Austin. This was one of his Christmas gifts. (We were shooting for replacing some of the stuff we might normally buy with interesting experiences instead.) He seemed to really like it! It’s hard to coordinate all the things you need to when shooting a bow and arrow, and I think that frustrated him some, but he seemed to hit the target reasonably often and by his second lesson in early August, might have been gaining a touch more accuracy. He wants to keep going to lessons, so for now, we’ll keep taking him.

Meanwhile, Texas is cooking. We finally managed to get our sprinklers working again, but not before most of the front yard grass and even the back yard natives were looking pretty crispy. It’s a hundred degrees every day and zero rain to speak of, and since we’re on watering restrictions, everything would have dried out anyway. At the end of July, it still looks like there’s a lot of summer to go, and I don’t think I’ll miss it once it’s gone.

Owing to the ridiculous cost for airfare to any place we thought to check, we decided we’d try a driving trip for summer vacation. The problem is that Texas is really big, so getting to a neighboring state in any particular direction takes at least five or six hours, just to get out of Texas. Our options were limited. We’d already been to New Mexico and Louisiana, so we decided to try out Arkansas.

For whatever reason, Arkansas (and Oklahoma for that matter) haven’t ever really been on my radar. I’m not one of those people who needs to have visited all 50 states or every national park, etc. But we’d seen friends who’d shared camping and hiking photos from there, and they’re always very pretty. We have some Arkansas local friends that travel all over the state and their travels were a motivating factor as well. Plus, the interstate welcome centers in Arkansas are some of the most helpful and encouraging we’ve ever visted. They’re well-organized and staffed by folks who are excited about tourism in their state.

We actually started our journey on the very last day of June, shortly after the kids finished up their Harry Potter acting camp. As is typical of a Woods vacation, we left far later than 25% of us (that would be me) wanted to. It wasn’t till probably 6:30 that evening that we started our five hour drive to Texarkana. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and Sean had been pulling late nights trying to get a special project done at work. Given our mental state, Sean wound up driving the whole way, and I stayed on high alert making conversation and ensuring he didn’t get too drowsy. It was a long drive.

Day 1 – Texarkana, Hot Springs National Park

We woke up the next morning in Texarkana. After a hotel breakfast, we decided to play tourist for a bit before heading the rest of the way into Arkansas. Maya, ever the piano player, has learned a simplified version of “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin. It turns out that Texarkana is where he grew up! We could have taken a whole driving tour, but I’m honestly not sure that would have been entertaining to any of us, so we settled on seeing the big Scott Joplin mural in town. It was Twilight Zone-eerie driving around Texarkana – it seemed like almost no one was out and about that morning. The mural was big and impressive and Maya seemed delighted to pose for a few photos (which is not her norm).

Our next stop was to see the famous post office that straddles the Arkansas / Texas border. The kids had fun playing the “now I’m in Texas,” hop, “now I’m in Arkansas” game. We snagged a few quick photos and then were on our merry way to Hot Springs.

As we rolled into Hot Springs, we joked that all the people we didn’t see in Texarkana must have been in Hot Springs because hooo boy was it crowded! We drove back and forth a bit, struggling to even find paid parking that wasn’t full. We finally cycled through the free parking lot till a space opened up.

Hot Springs National Park is an interesting member of the National Park system. While it does have hiking trails and a campground, it is essentially an urban park. What I perceived as one of the main features – Bathhouse Row – is right in the middle of shops and restaurants and a whole pile of tourist traffic.

Part of the reason for establishing this as a national park was to protect the thermal springs and make them available to everyone. There are public fountains around bathhouse row from which you can draw the 140+ degrees Fahrenheit water. Given my half-dead fingers, I was placed in charge of filling all our water bottles, as no one else could hold their bottle while filling. Even I had to take breaks. We cooled the water before drinking it, and enjoyed the flavor immensely. Interesting fact – this water is over 4000 years old! Water seeped down way back then through cracks and fissures to a depth of 8000 feet. Given its proximity to Earth’s mantle at that depth, the water was heated. The heated water flowed along impermeable rock till it found a thrust fault that allowed it to reach the surface at Hot Springs. I read or heard that a million gallons a day flow at Hot Springs National Park.

Another point of interest. Hot Springs National Park is the only national park with its own brewery. And that brewery uses – you guessed it – thermal spring water in the production of its many delightful beers. This was our destination for lunch that first day. The Superior Bathhouse Brewery is housed in the smallest of the bathhouses. We were worried about how long we’d have to wait to be seated given the very heavy traffic in the area, but they have a wonderful waiting system. They took our names and guided us to the bar where we could order beers for the grown ups and root beers for the kids. Then we were told we could go into the air conditioned upper level and hang out at communal picnic tables and sip our drinks and play games while we waited for a table for lunch. Perfect!

We played Uno together and sipped our drinks until our table was ready, and then we wandered downstairs. The beers we tried – Golden Stout, She Don’t Use Jelly (a saison), Bikini Bottom, and a dunkel – were all wonderful. The place was dog friendly, so Ian happily requested dog petting from as many folks as would allow. The food was solid. I know it sounds weird as heck, but my favorite thing I ate at that lunch were the plantains. The kids and Dad had epic desserts, and we were maybe a little sad when we had to finally leave the air conditioning.

After lunch, we wandered the Fordyce Bathhouse, which acts as the park’s visitor center and museum. Many of the bathhouse rooms have been restored, so you can see what it might have been like to experience the “healing waters” back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Wandering through was interesting enough; intriguing to see what people thought of as medicine back then.

The kids weren’t super interested until they met a friendly park ranger on our way out who completely talked them into becoming junior rangers. I have tried to do this on previous national park visits to absolutely no avail. At her suggestion, we took a walk back to touch the thermal waters coming from the display spring. It was kind of neat to be encouraged to touch the water. Ian was having none of it until I quickly dipped my hand in. Yes, it’s hot. You really can’t linger, but a quick check won’t hurt you. One of the things I found interesting was the shockingly green algae that was growing around the thermal spring. I don’t know if photos will do it justice.

All the old bathhouses are quite pretty and each looks architecturally unique, which makes for an interesting aesthetic when walking down the row. There are still two bathhouses operating, Quapaw and Buckstaff, but the kids were too young to take part.

Finally, we headed away from the Hot Springs mayhem to what we hoped was a peaceful retreat to the house we had rented. The rental property was a little tricky to find, but it was as advertised. The house sits right on Lake Hamilton, and there was plenty of room for us to spread out. After dinner and a supply run, we didn’t have time to swim that first night, but it was fun to watch the geese on the lake and the pretty orange and pink sunset from the porch.

Day 2 – Ron Coleman Mine, Hot Springs part 2

Ian is a rock collector. He willingly reads books, with no goading from us, about gems and minerals. Maya is a treasure hunter (keeping in mind, treasure is in the eye of the beholder). Given this, I was excited to find that there were several quartz mines in Arkansas at which you could dig for your own crystals.

Everyone talks about the Crater of Diamonds state park as a place you must go when visiting Arkansas. And to be fair, I think a diamond or two is found per day, which is pretty incredible. Certainly the payoff would be better if you were one of the lucky one or two who actually found a diamond. But for an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old, and their two middle-aged parents, we thought it would be much more fun to definitely find something of lesser objective value. Plus, Arkansas is known for the quality and quantity of its quartz.

After conferring with our college friend Joe, who is big into minerals and crystals and lives in nearby Little Rock, we decided to visit Ron Coleman mine. They regularly bring up fresh tailings from their commercial mining operation and dump them for visitors to dig through. You pay a fee to access the public digging area – about 4 acres, so there’s room to spread out – and you keep whatever you find. To the kids’ delight, we were finding little pretty sparkling things already in the parking lot!

We had done a little research ahead of time, so we came reasonably well prepared. We had folding step-stools to sit on, a sack full of trowels, little rakes, weeding tools, and screwdrivers, plus gloves for everyone. We had packed a small cooler with drinks and snacks, in case we decided to stay a while. They gave each of us a bag to fill when we paid our dig fee, but we had brought along a couple of empty cat litter buckets as well for hauling home our treasures.

I thought that we might spend an hour, maybe two at the most before the kids wore out on the experience. As it happens though, we kept finding pretty things, and that’s very motivating. I think Sean was pretty disenchanted with the whole affair at first, playing along because Ian especially was so excited about it. And for the first little while, he did a whole lot of digging and not a whole lot of finding. Then I heard him say he thought he had something. After some very careful, meticulous digging, he unearthed the biggest crystal we found that day. Following that, it was all we could do to get him to leave!

Maya as well spent what had to be a half an hour carefully digging around this giant rock she was trying to unearth. Her rationale was sound – that rock was huge and embedded in the dirt; clearly no one had looked beneath it yet. After such a long while, she finally asked for some help. I walked over and thanks to all the work she had done to move earth out of the way, I was able to pick the big rock up and move it aside for her. Sure enough, she then found several large and beautiful quartz crystals in her pile. And being Maya, when it was finally time for us to leave, she showed another family the crystals she had found and pointed them to her “very good digging spot.” She didn’t want it to go to waste.

All told, I think we were there between four and five hours. I don’t want to know how many pounds of rock we wound up hauling back to Texas, but I’d betcha it was in triple digit territory. Even a few weeks later, we still haven’t managed to root through them all and wash the red clay off of them. I will say, for me especially, washing them was like digging for treasure all over again. The shiny stuff is hard to find for all the dirt, so it’s fun to see what you uncover once you rinse the stones and leave them to dry in the sun.

We grabbed a quick takeout lunch and headed back to the rental house to clean up a bit. Then we headed back into Hot Springs so Maya and Ian could acquire the junior ranger badges they had become so enamored with the previous day (the nice park ranger did her level best to get the kids to vow to clean their rooms and do their homework, but our little pirates were having none of it). After that, the parents secured half-growlers of a couple of Superior Bathhouse Brewery’s finest, plus one of root beer for the kids. Then we went up into the Hot Springs Mountain Tower, a 216-foot tall tower with an observation deck, for a bit of history and a good long look at the area around us. It’s pretty there, and it was fun to see Bathhouse Row from up high! We all took the elevator up. The kids and I elected to walk down the outdoor stairs so we could look around outside while we walked. And we arrived at the bottom at about the same time as Sean!

Then we went to a local pizza joint called SQZBX. The decor in this place was amazing. A variety of musical instruments and implements had been repurposed into light fixtures, room dividers, etc. We were tucked into a booth and set up with beers and drinks and an order of garlic knots. Pizza came quickly thereafter. Solid beer, solid food, wonderful surroundings and service. The kids were pretty bouncy and chatty, like always, and the nice lady taking care of us at one point grinned and exclaimed, “Your kids are so expressive!” I’ve never heard anyone call our kids loud and maybe even obnoxious in such a nice way!

And finally, at long last, we had an evening swim in the lake. We discovered there was no ladder off the dock. Not such a problem when getting in; a little trickier when climbing out. We hung out in the water with the geese and watched the sun sink down and the sky again turn orangey pink. After our swim, the kids tried to clean some of their fancy rocks, but that chore lost its luster pretty quickly.

Day 3 – Kayaking and Garvan Gardens

When we were looking at houses on the lake way back in the spring, there were lots of options right on the water, and several people had kayaks and paddle boats and those sorts of things at their property for the renters to use. By the time we got around to finding a place and booking it, there were none of those left and even for the place we wound up staying, we paid more than we would have had we secured a place earlier. Alas.

That’s how we found ourselves at Young’s Yaks, renting a couple of double kayaks so we could paddle around Lake Hamilton for a couple hours. We had zero problems renting from them. A nice lady was there to meet us at the designated time. The kayaks were all lined up and ready for action. There were life vests all ready for us.

Maya and I loaded into one kayak, and Sean and Ian into another. Maya couldn’t settle down and just wanted to paddle, paddle, paddle. Ian didn’t understand why we had to be in the boat instead of in the water. He tried to paddle one, decided that was for the birds, and mostly either rested or complained the rest of the time. Kids aside, paddling around in the big lake was peaceful. We did eventually find a little pebbly pocket beach were we could park our kayaks and mess around in the water and cool off a bit. That seemed to perk them up some. We also swapped kids after that, just for the variety.

That afternoon, we went to Garvan Woodland Gardens. What’s interesting about this place is that on its surface, it’s a botanical garden, but what drew me here were the interesting structures on site. The Evans Tree House was the big draw for the kids. They could climb around freely in its multi-storied structure, climbing nets and peeping out windows.

The Anthony Chapel was another must-see for us while at Garvan. It’s a glass-walled chapel, not unlike the Wayfarer’s Chapel we had seen in California in the spring. The structure was gorgeous and the diminished division between inside and outside spaces was decidedly serene.

The Garvan Pavilion was another highlight of the visit. The open air pavilion had an interesting glass and steel faceted skylight roof, almost like a surprise. Normal enough looking pavilion from the outside. Walk in and look up and there it is!

Maya and Ian delighted in streams filled with colorful beachballs. They saw little fairy houses (including a replica of the Anthony Chapel) and a miniature railway. They got to see a gorgeous peacock doing his best to pretend people didn’t exist. (Probably the heat was getting to me, but that peacock’s random desperate yelps started to occupy the same highly-amused space in my brain as the screaming goats in “Thor: Love and Thunder.”) They saw squirrels and dragonflies, climbed rocks, and ate ice cream. All in all, a good visit.

We did a hasty stopover in Hot Springs to get Maya a souvenir she’d been craving (a stuffed pileated woodpecker that’s she’s since named Strawberry – we saw one of these in real life at Garvan), refilled the kids’ half-growler with root beer, and loaded up on allllllllll the taffy from Colonial Candy Corner. We went back to our rental house to unwind a bit and maybe have a swim before dinner.

It had been thundering off and on and threatening to rain while we were at Garvan earlier. Not but a few minutes passed after we got back to the rental house before the winds picked up and the skies opened. I went ahead and brought in all our swim clothes from the balcony, where I’d left them to dry the day before. When the wind kept increasing in intensity, I thought maybe I’d bring the flip flops and water shoes in, just in case. Not long after, I saw Maya’s dragon floaty pushing a metal chair across the deck, and so I wrestled that giant wet dragon float through the door too! The storm was so fierce, it actually ripped soffit out from the ceiling above the porch. It was crazy!

While all this was going on, the kids were availing themselves of the jetted bathtubs at the house, or trying to at any rate. There was one upstairs, where the kids slept and one downstairs on the same floor as the main bedroom and the kitchen. The upstairs jets were … vigorous. They were so vigorous, in fact, that they shot clean out of the tub and walloped unsuspecting artwork on the walls. So only Maya got to have her whirlpool bath that evening.

With the kids duly bathed, we drove into town to meet one of my coworkers and his wife – Mike and Kelly – for dinner at The Purple Cow. Can you believe they agreed to hang out with us? I tried to warn them.

This grape-purple diner-esque establishment delivered. Dinner was delicious – burgers, shakes, patty melts. I had a rueben. The kids enjoyed their milkshakes and the company was top notch. We did, however, start the unfortunate trend on this vacation of forgetting to snap photos with the friends we saw on this trip. Bad introverts!

Day 4 – Bill Clinton Library, Little Rock Fireworks

The next day, 4th of July, we were heading to Little Rock. We spent the morning packing, including all those many pounds of rocks, and said goodbye to our underused house on the lake. Since Ian’s jetted tub had misbehaved the night before, we did let him have a turn in the downstairs one before we left.

Little Rock is only about an hour away from Hot Springs, so even with our leisurely departure, we arrived at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum fairly early in the day. The kids were supremely underwhelmed … until we all made the happy discovery that there was a “Dinosaur Explorer” exhibit there for the summer. It features a bunch of animatronic dinosaurs and a few little activities to (try to) keep the kids engaged.

We more or less started and ended our museum visit with dinosaurs. We started out right away wandering through an area featuring some of the animatronic dinosaurs. Within this part of the museum was a neat little area where the kids could grab a coloring sheet and decorate their own dinosaurs. Then they scanned the sheet in and their very own dinosaurs, sometimes multiple copies, would be digitally rendered and could join the other dinosaurs already living their best lives on the room’s giant TV screen.

After the fun dinosaurs, it was snoozeville all the way as we walked through exhibits showing Clinton’s early years, things he accomplished, and displays showing what life as president was like. One of the docents had told the kids there were records of his daily schedules while in office, and that they should go try to find out what the president was up to on their birthdays. I didn’t think to look, but Sean and the kids thumbed through some of those schedules. Sean told me it was crazy. The president’s time was fully scheduled, morning to night, sometimes in 10- and 15-minute chunks.

We visited a full-scale replica of the White House cabinet room where we tried to explain a bit how the cabinet members work with the president. We had our photos taken in a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it was during Clinton’s presidency. The kids both confirmed that they have zero interest in being president.

Maya and Ian wanted to know if Clinton was good or bad. Their world is still pretty black and white like that. We tried very hard to explain that it’s hard to categorize him in that way. Better to look at the things he tried to accomplish and the decisions that he made – good or bad – and decide on balance if he did a good job. It didn’t really look like it landed, but at least we’re planting seeds.

The Little Rock Nine are prominently featured at the museum. These are the kids who, following a 1954 US Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools were illegal, in 1957 finally became the first black students to go to Little Rock Central High School. It didn’t happen overnight and they had to face the state’s National Guard, a whole mob of angry townsfolk, and eventually had to be escorted by soldiers from both the National Guard and the US Army in order to attend classes. High school students! I can’t even imagine.

I’m not sure how much the concept of racism has been discussed with the kids at school, but they seemed completely baffled by the notion that just because one kid had darker skin than another, they’d be forced to go to a different school. Maya pronounced it “stupid.” When we tried to explain that racism still exists today, she just couldn’t believe it.

Afterward at Ian’s request, we took a stroll partway across the Clinton Presidential Park Bridge. From there we got a good view of the interesting architecture of the Clinton Library. It’s a giant, cantilevered, naturally lit space, and it seems weirdly at home nestled into its nook along the Arkansas River.

Eventually hunger won, and we left the museum to eat at Flying Fish. They had a huge wall of fake fish that appear to have been decorated and donated over the years. Were they all Big Mouth Billy Bass? I’ll never know. The fried seafood and cajun dishes were solid. I think Ian was less thrilled with his chicken fingers, but sometimes chicken fingers are like that.

Loaded to the gills (ha!), we made our way to our Little Rock hotel and relaxed a bit. I took the kids to the hotel pool for a while and let them run out some of their energy.

We enjoyed a superb dinner at Lost Forty Brewing, which was within walking distance of our hotel. I think I’m the only one who had a beer – something called Tropical Confusion, which was divine. The kids shared a cheese pizza, and Sean and I split a Firestarter, which featured Italian sausage, pickled Calabrian chiles, and a light, tomatoey drizzle. It was even good cold the next day!

That evening, we made the short trek across the river to the North Shore Riverwalk Park in North Little Rock. This was an excellent location (thanks for the advice, Joe)! We started out sitting up on the hillside, but as fireworks time drew closer, we sidled down to the riverside fence to have an unobstructed view of the festivities.

The kids enjoyed the spectacle, though Maya struggled some with the fireworks smell. After it was all said and done, we had an easy walk back to the car, but thanks to random road closures and heavy traffic a nearly hour-long drive back to our hotel!

Day 5 – Driving to Branson, Dolly’s Stampede

Since we had been up so late the night before, we all slept in a bit. By the time we were done packing and showering, we decided to just drive straight on to our hotel in Branson rather than stopping by any of the places I’d halfway considered visiting en route (Mount Magazine, Eureka Springs, Table Rock Lake).

We stayed at Lodge of the Ozarks. The kids ooed and aahed over the big open entry area, and the room we stayed in was large and comfortable for our family of four. Our hotel was on the main drag through tourist Branson, and it’s absolutely bonkers. It reminded me in a jarring, not particularly pleasant way of Gatlinburg. Tourist attraction after tourist attraction lined the strip, each competing for most visual zing. Maya and Ian, being 10 and 8 respectively, were in love and excitedly chattered about all the the things they might cajole us into doing.

Our next day would promise to be very busy and tiring though, so we rested a while before that evening’s fun – Dolly’s Stampede! We went early so that we could check out the Horse Walk. The performing horses are all lined up in their stables for folks to walk along and visit. Ian was very excited about the horses and studiously photographed each one.

The show itself was pleasant enough. The food was really good and there was an insane amount – soup, corn on the cob, a whole (small) chicken, some pork. The show was about what you’d expect. Horses and riders doing tricks, some folks in spangles and sequins, some folks in 1800s period garb. They fashioned it as a competition between the North and the South (like the Civil War?!?), each side rooting for its set of competitors.

We saw pig races and a buffalo stampede. A comedy magic act broke up things in the middle of the show. There was a lot going on and the kids seemed to really enjoy themselves.

Day 6 – Silver Dollar City

The next day’s event was our reason for driving all the way to north Arkansas and edging up into southern Missouri: Silver Dollar City! After cooking in 100 degree heat all June and continuing to cook a bit so far during our Arkansas trip, we were delighted that the highs this day would only be in the 80s. Hooray! We started our morning with a delightful buffet breakfast at Molly’s Mill Restaurant. They set me up with good strong coffee and the kids got to eat all the bacon a kid could ever hope for (we made them eat other stuff too).

Our first ride of the day was Powder Keg. This coaster features a compressed air launch – a first for us! I just looked it up, that ride goes from 0 to 53 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds. The feeling was definitely different from a linear induction type launch. If felt so fast, literally breathtaking. Now, you’d think that we’d have learned not to go hardcore thriller as our first ride of the day, though obviously we haven’t. Ian may have been a little rattled when he got off the ride, but he claimed it was fun.

We next visited Fire in the Hole. This ride, originally opened in 1972, is going to be shut down after this season. Maya, who feels a sense of loss at just about everything that ends, quizzed one of the park hosts mercilessly about why the ride was closing (old and costly to maintain, waning in popularity). The story is that you’re part of the volunteer fire brigade that has to deal with fires the Bald Knobbers had set. One of the characters you meet on the ride is Red Flanders, hanging out in his red long johns. Maya left with a T-shirt that says on one side, “Red Flanders, you come back in here and put on your pants!” and on the other side says, “Well Sadie, I ain’t got no pants no more. The dang bald knobbers stole ’em!”

We rode a coaster called Wildfire and a log flume ride called American Plunge, wherein the adults got thoroughly soaked. Next was a ride we were all looking forward to – Time Traveler. The unique thing about this one – beyond its cool steam punk aesthetic – is that the ride vehicle spins with the loops and curves of the coaster. It makes for some pretty weird ride dynamics. Sometimes you’re facing up, sometimes down, sometimes spinning a bit, sometimes still. We all loved it; however, each ride is different, and while the first run through didn’t bother Sean with his occasional vertigo issues, the second run did.

Sean and the kids rode a coaster called Thunderation. Owing to my screwed up spine, these days, I try to avoid the rougher rides and Sean had read that this one was maybe a bit abusive to its riders. (As he’s explained it to me – it has a tubular steel track, but Arrow, the company who designed it, didn’t use computers to aid in design, so the curve transitions are really rough.) Ian seemed genuinely bothered that I wouldn’t be riding with them, but I gave him a job – assess the ride and let me know if I can ride along if they want to go a second time. With that task in mind, he seemed less upset. Afterward both kids assured me that it was good that I had avoided it. I think even Maya wished she’d skipped it.

We rode rides and ate food and did very little watching of musical acts and experiencing the talents of the various 1800s-themed craft demonstrations. The park was pleasant to experience though. Operators were all friendly and it was clean. The theming was fun and consistent throughout the park. We enjoyed milk shakes and ice cream at Hannah’s later in the day when we needed to sit and cool off.

Here’s a fun, you’re-not-so-young-any-more discovery. Toward the end of our day, the kids wanted to “marathon” a couple of the coasters. Which is to say, they wanted to get in line, ride the ride, and then get in line and immediately ride it again. The lines were short enough that there wasn’t a lot of down time in between those iterations. I and I think to a lesser degree Sean, both experienced a little bit of … i don’t know … head spinning wobbliness after doing that a few times. The kids seemed unbothered. I decided to sit a couple of the rides out for that reason. We love roller coasters and thrill rides, and it’s so fun getting to do these things with the kids. Hopefully this isn’t the beginning of the end of that.

The park closes pretty early, so we had time that evening to hang out at the hotel pool. It was every bit the madhouse you’d expect in a place like Branson, but the kids had fun and it was a nice way to cool off after a busy day.

Day 7 – Snake World, Turpentine Creek, and Crystal Bridges

We tried something different on this vacation. We let the kids dig through Arkansas tourism information and choose some things they specifically would like to do. Ian chose a place called Snake World because we thought he’d probably get to actually hold snakes there. And Maya went with the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge – a big cat rescue facility. We were in north Arkansas, so I personally wanted to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. And we would do all these things before driving back down to Little Rock for the night!

After packing and a quick hotel breakfast, we high-tailed it down to Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge. We needed to make it there in time for their first tour of the day at 9:00, and we did it! We spent the first hour riding around the grounds in an open air tram, learning about the various animals they cared for and where they came from. Lions, tigers, bobcats, servals, and cougars are cared for there, as well as some bears and a whole slew of hybrids. They had ligers (cross between a lion and a tiger, of course); and here I thought Napoleon Dynamite was making them up! Sometimes you could see the creatures well, and other times not so much.

Maya and Ian seemed to enjoy the visit, though Maya was saddened by some of the stories about the animals’ condition when they were surrendered to the wildlife refuge. Ian happily snapped photos during the trip, so he was well occupied. We were delighted by a white tiger enjoying a bath in his giant trough and by a tiger cub who was merrily dismantling a big box they’d given him to play with. It sounded like the animals were well cared for, and we were told all our admission fee went back into the refuge, so it suited Maya’s sensibilities on multiple levels.

After wandering around the grounds a bit on our own, hoping to spot a few of the creatures we had missed, we all hopped in the car and drove as quickly as we dared to visit Snake World, which opened at 11. The road was very, very curvy, and while we know to give Maya Dramamine since she definitely gets car sick, the curves on this one even made Ian sick. Whoops. Now we know.

Snake World can best be described as a roadside attraction. When we rolled up on it, we were a little unsure of what we had gotten ourselves into. The building and grounds seemed a bit careworn and haphazard. Plus, it was closed, and despite knocking and calling both numbers on the sign on the door, I had roused no one to come talk to us. (This was after I had gotten ahold of them the previous week to ensure I knew how tours worked and were scheduled and that sort of thing.) We decided to go back into town and eat lunch and mull it over. Eventually I got a text from them that said they’d had a doctor’s appointment and would be back at 1.

While we ate, I fussed about whether we should go back or just skip it and move on. Ian was absolutely distraught. He was so upset about possibly missing it that he nearly came to tears. And so it was that we made our way back. As promised, Melina was there to meet us and show us her creatures. The poor lady had had something bad happen to her knee, so she was hobbling around trying to show us snakes with one arm on a walking stick, but she was as pleasant and informative as a person could have wanted.

She showed the kids how the same kind of snake could be colored very differently if they were from different parts of the country due to adaptation to their environment. She showed them the ocular ridges on vipers. She let them hold so many different nonvenomous snakes and a couple of different bearded dragons. Ian was in heaven. Except – there were spiders. There were some rubber ones here and there, ha ha, but there were also webs constructed in quiet corners and Ian was not impressed.

We also saw a bunch of venomous snakes hanging out in well locked and labeled enclosures. We were never in any danger, and it was interesting getting such an up close view of live specimens of snakes we’d otherwise avoid. I bet we were there well over an hour listening to her talk about her various creatures, and it was time well spent, especially for our budding herpetologist.

We then made the trek over to Bentonville so we could visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The place is absolutely gorgeous, and general admission is free! Funded largely by the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame), this sprawling complex occupies about 120 acres.

We saw untold quantities of paintings, sculptures, and mixed media installations from artists spanning multiple decades. Like many of the places we’ve been, they have no issue with confronting our not-too-distant racist past … and maybe some of our racist present too. But they also celebrate form and light, conflict and resolution. There’s a lot to take in. We saw Chihuly glass, toured a restored and relocated Frank Lloyd Wright house, examined strange and interesting outdoor sculptures. We even got to see another of Yayoi Kusama’s Infiniti Rooms – this one titled, “My Heart is Dancing Into the Universe.” It was a good visit.

Days 8 and 9 – Kid Transfer, Dinner with Friends, Back to TX

In the morning, it was all about packing up the kids’ suitcases and backpacks and leaving all our grown up stuff sit. This summer, we were again trying something new. Maya and Ian would be spending the next week at Lolli and Pop’s house in Alabama! (We had planned to do this with the Missouri grandparents as well, but needed to cancel for some medical issues.)

And so it was that we drove to Memphis, kids packed for handoff to their grandparents. It felt weird. We really don’t spend a lot of time away from the kids, and we’ve never been apart for an entire week. I worried about how well the kids would behave, whether we were burdening their grandparents and they were just too nice to say so, and how much the kids might miss us (spoiler: not even a little bit).

We had lunch with the Maya and Ian in Memphis at a place called A&R Bar-B-Que, and it was glorious. Sean read that the thing to order was a rib tip sandwich, and so we each got that, plus slaw of course. Let me tell you a secret – this was effing delicious but impossible to eat. Were we to find ourselves in Memphis again ordering from A&R, we’d either get a plate of ribs or a pulled pork sandwich instead. Maya and Ian had chicken fingers – I can’t even.

We had a delightful cookie treat at Makeda’s afterward. Then we met Lolli and Pop in a strip-mall parking lot and handed off the kids and their luggage. Lolli and Pop handed us a mysterious large box. More on that later. After lots of hugs and maybe a little fussing from me, we relinquished our children and made the quiet drive back to Little Rock.

That evening, we met our college friend Joe and his partner Keith for dinner and drinks at Big Orange Burger. The cocktails were delicious, the burgers hit the spot (mine had pimento cheese), and the company was fantastic! It was so nice to be able to catch up with an old friend on the preceding twenty-some years. Keith is an Arkansas native, and Joe has lived in the area for quite a long while. They gave us excellent advice on what to do and see and where to eat before and during our trip. And we again captured no photos with our friends. Sigh.

For example, at their repeated insistence, we stopped by Blackberry Market for breakfast the next day. Sean and I had buttery, crumbly scones and I had the honey lavender latte. Given my love of coffee, I rarely order anything as diluted as a latte, but the gentle honey and lavender flavors would have been lost to the coffee in anything less milky. A solid recommendation!

The drive home was long. There were heavy rains on the way out of Arkansas, somewhere near Fate, TX we were held up by some kind of police action – we saw guns drawn, and heading into Austin traffic was as sluggish as always. But eventually we made it to our 100 degree heat, our crispy, half-dead yard, and our quiet kidless house.

And what was in that large, mysterious box Sean had received from Lolli and Pop? It was his first saxaphone. They had it fashioned into a sort of amplifier for an iphone. Neat!

We rolled back into Austin from Missouri to find a wall of intense heat and crisped greenery. Evidently the daytime high temperatures experienced a 10-degree step up while we were gone. It’s been in the neighborhood of 100 degrees pretty much every day since. At one point during the month Maya said, while applying sunscreen, “The sun has murder in its eyes.” She is not wrong.

We all felt a bit of relief at not having every evening scheduled with some kid activity (though we have continued Maya and Ian’s music lessons through the summer). We did manage to find a new piano teacher for Maya. His name is Ben, and his structure is a little more laid back, which Maya loves, but that I’m not yet certain about. He answers her numerous theory questions with enthusiasm and patience, and when explaining something new, he provides her with lots of examples. I’m hoping we’ll find our groove on structure. I’m personally not yet ready to abandon her Suzuki curriculum – the songs are interesting and challenging and there’s an emphasis on refining technique, which I’ve not yet seen otherwise. She’s very happy though and clearly deeply interested in music, so either way, I think we’ll come out ok.

Our favorite local theater, the Alamo Drafthouse, started showing movies for $7 on Tuesdays a while back. Given that, we’ve done dinner and a movie a couple times with the kids on Tuesdays. So far we’ve seen Elemental and the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. We have intentions to take them to see the new Indiana Jones movie in July, and who knows what else.

Maya and Ian, after a week with nothing to do, got to go to a half-day art camp at their elementary school. They made some neat stuff and it broke up their day a little. Maya was sad to note that none of her friends were in the class with her. This year more than any year previous, poor Maya is really missing her friends. We’ve tried a playdate here or there, but it’s nothing like seeing kids every day at school.

For Father’s Day, we took Sean out Saturday evening for drinks and endless slices of pizza at Delucca Gaucho Pizza & Wine. It works a little bit like a Brazilian steakhouse. Servers roam the tables with different varieties of pizza, offering them to you as they pass. For their fixed price menu, they start you with some lobster bisque, a small arugula salad, and some meatballs. Then the pizza starts coming. And their pizzas are really good. For one, they have a very flavorful crust. For another, they have a lot of variety. Garlic Picanha was a favorite. The grown ups were very fond of the Mexican Elote pizza. Ian especially was delighted with the Nutella dessert pizza, while I REALLY enjoyed the Guava Marmalade one.

Then on Sunday, because the kids just knew how much Sean would like it, we went to the water park at Typhoon Texas. We didn’t get too many photos, but we had a lot of fun. Especially when we first got there, it wasn’t too miserably hot and the lines were shorter. The only real downer (ha ha) is that they never opened their big drop slides. The kids kept a careful eye on them to see if they’d ever open up, but no joy.

Ian went to Pokemon camp at Dragon’s Lair, one of our local comic book stores. We weren’t sure how he’d fare without his sister along for support, but he LOVED it. He received a lot of new Pokemon gear and got to play the game and trade cards with kids his age all week long. Maya started the week being happy that she finally had some alone time, but I think by the end of the week, she was missing her brother a little bit.

One of Maya’s (and my) favorite parts of picking Ian up from camp was seeing if we could find any of the “lair beasts” roaming around the store. They currently have two cats, Brigid and Diana, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the store (read: napping and getting petted), and it was fun trying to spot them every day.

We often have interesting creatures come to our backyard, but I’ve been a little lax on keeping the various feeders and birdbaths filled in this stupid heat, so traffic has been light. We did, however, see a crazy white caterpillar merrily chomping away at one of my shiso plants. Turns out, it was a Virginian Tiger Moth caterpillar. There were lots of grackles perching here and there in our back yard that day as well, so it may have become a grackle snack.

A while back, we bought tickets for an outdoor concert. In Austin. In June. Even at the time, we had misgivings, but the show was in the evening and who knew when the Pixies might come to town again, so we bought tickets for us and the kids and hoped for the best. Plus, the McKee-Starling clan were going too – it would be a social gathering! Fast-forward to concert day. It’s over a hundred degrees outside and has been for a while. We’d be sitting in the full baking sun for quite a while before it actually got dark. And around here even after it gets dark, the heat persists. It’s usually above 90 well into the night.

At Holly’s suggestion, we purchased little personal fans for the kids. I’m not sure they really did much good, but at a minimum, they had fun playing with them. We bought snacks and t-shirts and at one point Sean wandered off to get drinks. He came back grinning, explaining to me that even without asking, he knew he should get three sodas and a beer (the latter being for me).

Bully opened, followed by Franz Ferdinand. Both did great, but I was mostly there to see the Pixies perform. I had done a good job of having the kids listen to a couple different albums whenever they were in the car with me, so they had songs they were wanting to hear. They were both looking forward to Monkey Gone to Heaven, and Maya was especially looking forward to Where is My Mind?, to the point that as the Pixies started each of their songs, she’d glance at me to confirm or deny whether her song had started. They played a good set, and despite all the sweat, I am happy we went.

The kids finished out their month by attending a Harry Potter acting camp at Zach Theatre downtown. They drive to take them there in the morning and fetch them in the evening was a bit arduous, but they seemed to have a lot of fun hanging out with like-minded Harry Potter lovers. Maya even made new friends, and so she had an extra wave of sadness when camp was over. On the final day, the parents got to come watch a handful of skits that the kids wrote themselves. The subject matter was pretty wide-ranging, but the kids were all definitely into it.

This sounds like a lot, and I guess it was, but it’s still nothing compared to our normal school year schedule. The kids have had a week here and there where they’ve just been left to their own devices while we work. I know Maya misses her school friends a lot, and I know Ian gets bored easily, but learning to deal with those things is part of life too.

I don’t even remember May any more. All the teachers at school tried to squeeze in last minute fun. We did all the teacher appreciation things. There were soccer games, some canceled, some not. And we had to find a new piano teacher. We traveled for a concert, and we traveled to visit grandparents. We celebrated a 50th wedding anniversary and a 23rd wedding anniversary and we caught toads in a pond. This much I know: it all happened. I just need to remember it well enough to write it down.

At the beginning of the month, with Maya’s last piano lesson looming, we decided we needed to make a parting gift to show our appreciation. We decided that Maya would build and paint a birdhouse, since Ms. Hannah shares Maya’s love of avian life. Maya got to learn to use a hammer (which she was a little nervous about), and she learned about dry-fitting things before applying wood glue. And she’s always loved to make things and to give gifts, so it was a fun project. Plus the birdhouse was well-received!

We wind up doing a lot of things to encourage Maya’s love of birds. It’s not even all that hard – they’re everywhere and often very visible. Ian’s reptile and amphibian fascination can be harder to accommodate. When we heard that someone called Wildman Phil would be doing a show at a nearby nursery, we decided to take Ian to check it out.

By all accounts, he loved it. Here are the creatures I noted having seen: a tarantula who’s known as a bird-eating spider (even though it doesn’t generally eat birds), a soft-shelled turtle, a uromastyx who is a kind of spiny-tailed lizard, a gila monster, a legless lizard, a king snake, a corn snake, and a reticulated python. Ian seemed very interested in all that was shown, though he maybe could have done without the spider.

Wildman Phil asked if anyone wanted to come onstage and hold the python. This python was pretty huge (about 12 feet long), and Phil was clearly looking for a bigger kid to hold it, so it wasn’t a big surprise when he locked in on Maya as his volunteer. To her credit, I think she tried to get Ian up onstage too, but ultimately, it was just Maya, a not particularly cooperative python, and Wildman Phil doing his best to keep the python from slithering away from the kid. Maya did well, and she clearly loved it. Ian took it all in stride and was delighted to be able to touch the bubbly scales of a well-contained gila monster after the show.

How does one tell a legless lizard from a snake? They have ears (snakes don’t). They can blink (snakes don’t have eyelids). And they have a tail that can break off and grow back. Also, the way a snake moves is much more refined than the way the legless lizard moves. It was interesting to see the comparison.

For two days in a row at school, Ian came home reporting a lost tooth. He’s been a slow teeth-loser, so I think he was pretty excited about the whole deal, plus he’s sporting that toothless smile that makes for such cute and funny photos.

Maya took an after school coding class in the spring, and one day after school we got to go watch her code demo. Like her mother, she seemed shy about presenting her work in front of everyone, but it was a fun little game. As she describes it, a cat-person is being chased by a bowl of cheese puffs with legs. The object is to keep away from the bowl of cheese puffs. Cute first effort, and we heard one of the other parents say something like, “I would totally play that game.”

Maya’s last piano group class was the day before Mother’s Day. Kids showed up and hung out and did music games and performed pieces just like always, but it was kind of a subdued affair. We didn’t really want to say goodbye, and Maya struggled a little.

Because of the May pandemonium, we really didn’t have much time for Mother’s Day. The kids made me cards and presented me with gifts, and that was about the end of it. There really wasn’t even time to “take the day off.” Maybe next year.

We saw a cool caterpillar in the yard. After a bit of looking, seems to be an American Lady Caterpillar. I like all our cool lizards and caterpillars and weird beetles, and of course the birds, squirrels, raccoons, and foxes. It’s fun to try to identify all of them. Probably I should have been a biologist or something instead of an engineer.

We snuck in a quick visit to school to watch Ian perform in the school’s MARE week finale. Their elementary school has an ocean week, and they use MARE (Marine Activies, Resources, and Education) curriculum to, as they say, create ocean-literate kids who are excited about science. It must be working because the kids are always pretty wound up about it.

That weekend, we tried a new thing. Sean and I had gone to the Cruel World festival last year. Sean’s dad, Harry (who the kids know as Pop) came and hung out with them while we jetted off to California for the day-long festival. It worked out pretty well and we had a lot of fun. This year, we thought we’d try to take the kids along. It’s held at the Rose Bowl, so there’s a big outdoor space and food trucks. Our college friend (and the officiant at our wedding) Matt came along as well – he’s really good with kids.

We got in late and our AirBNB was a little confusing to enter, but all in all, things went fairly smoothly. The house we rented was comfortable and we could all spread out, which was nice. The next day, after doughnuts from Monarch Doughnuts and lunch from Menya Hanabi, we walked to the metro station to get ourselves over to the Rose Bowl. We arrived in time to see Berlin (who we had missed last year thanks to that stupid merch line). They were only there because the Motels had to bow out. (Also, right before concert date, Adam Ant wound up not making it and was replaced by Squeeze.)

The kids spread out on a beach towel and colored pictures and watched the little lady onstage sing. They seemed semi-into it – Ian even asked to be placed on Sean’s shoulders briefly so he could see better. Then – ahem – aromatic vapors and smokes were really bothering Maya. Luckily a nice lady near us noticed and offered her a mask. She wore that thing pretty much the whole day, and it seemed to help. And now we know we need to bring Maya a mask to future shows.

It wasn’t long before the kids were kind of used to the remove earplugs, pack up, relocate to new stage to see different band, reinstall earplugs routine. They seemed to particularly enjoy the Vapors set. Maya and Ian were both dancing along, doing the dance we now refer to as The Cockatoo. In deference to the kids, we didn’t really try to push too close to the stage for the most part. We would lounge in a higher ground spot (if we could find it) a ways back from the stage and watch from there. The music is plenty loud and thanks to the big screens, you could sort of match what was happening to the teeny figures on stage.

Let’s see if I can get them all: Berlin, The Vapors, Gang of Four (who beat the shit out of a microwave on stage!), Gary Numan (who Ian was particularly entranced by), Echo and the Bunnymen (hooray, Sean got to take the kids to see his favorite band of ALL TIME), Love and Rockets, we listened to Billy Idol for a bit more than saw him. The dudes walked me over to the Iggy Pop stage. There was a nice open area for us to spread out and Cushman shared his funnel cake with the kids. Then he and Sean walked over to watch The Human League a bit while the kids and I hung out and watched Iggy take his shirt off.

And then The Bad Thing happened. They abruptly shut absolutely everything down because 30 miles away there was lightning and all indications were that the storm was headed our way. Presumably because evacuating 75,000 people is hard, they wanted to give us a head start. The cynic in me kept thinking, “if you’re going to get struck by lightning, please kindly do so off property.” So, we wouldn’t be seeing the rest of Iggy Pop’s set and we would not be seeing Siouxsie. These were the two acts I was most interested in, so it was a bit of a heartbreaker. Still and all, the behavior some of the grownups around us displayed was pretty shitty. I hope like crazy we showed the kids how disappointment should be managed … and those other folks showed them how it shouldn’t.

Maya was flipping out a little because there was a thunderstorm coming, and she’s a little apprehensive about those. But I explained repeatedly that Dad and Matt *did* know where were were, but that I *didn’t* know where they were, so the smart thing to do is to stay right where we were. Networks were jammed up, so we couldn’t really communicate either. But eventually find us they did and a sad Cushman, two sad Woodses, and two Woodses who were all-concerted-out-by-this-point-anyway made their way to the shuttle buses back to the metro station.

We eventually found out that Siouxsie, Iggy Pop, and Gary Numan would be coming back the next evening to do their sets, but there was no way we could rearrange our schedule to stay an extra day, so we missed out. Still, I like to think it was a good first concert for the kiddos, and we did enjoy the acts we actually got to see.

We came back to the kids’ last week of school. We had our back fence rebuilt (it had been beaten up by a fallen tree from the ice storm), got Maya to her end-of-year soccer party, and hastily prepped for our grandparent trip.

Right away after school let out on the 25th, we started our drive toward Alabama. We wanted to arrive in time for a dinner with the out-of-towners on Friday evening, and we thought it best to have a 6-hour drive before that rather than a 12-hour drive. The kids still find it novel to stay in a hotel, so this plan didn’t bother them at all.

We arrived in Alabama the next afternoon with enough time to unpack and unwind a little bit before social hour began. Dinner that night was at Okinawa. Even though they do hibachi there, Maya and Ian both opted for sushi! And they ate it! Ian and Sean’s nephew Steele, who are only a few months apart in age, hit it off something fierce. I think if we lived closer to Darci and Will, those two boys would be a force to be reckoned with.

We talked 75% of the Jester clan into making a side trip over to the local Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream shop. The limited time only creation at the time was an Everything Bagel ice cream. This stuff is amazing! It truly captures the essence of an everything bagel in a rich, sweet ice cream. It is so weird in the best possible way.

The big 50th wedding anniversary celebration was the next day. Harry and Helen were married in 1973, and so their anniversary dance party was 70s themed. The four of us all dressed up, each person choosing their own outfits. Maya became enamored with this pair of white go go boots. Sean became obsessed with this insane pair of yellow pants. Ian and I did the best we could to keep up. We tried to learn a few dances too before the big day, so we could participate … well, except Sean who decided he was “the photographer.”

Harry and Helen also sprung for hula hoop instructors to help keep the kids entertained. The hula hoops were EXTREMELY popular amongst kids and adults alike. Good food was had, dances were struggled through, Ian and Steele got ahold of the Polaroid camera and had fun with that. Maya and Sean even managed to win the 70s costume contest – hooray!

After all that fun, we loaded up a few things in the car and headed back to the house. And get this – Harry and Helen and probably most of their line dance friends STAYED AND DANCED FOR SEVERAL MORE HOURS! These people are crazy.

The next day was our anniversary (only the 23rd – not nearly as impressive), so we went with Lolli and Pop and the kids to have lunch at Seasons 52. The food there is pretty delicious and LolliPop could find things there that would fit their specialized diet. I wish I could replicate their vegan pasta dish because I think Ian ate as much of it as Lolli did. That guy needs vegetables in his life. For my part, I had some glazed carrots flavored with gochujang that I’m well on my way to figuring out how to make.

The kids got to go to the pool with LolliPop the next day while Sean and I worked on laundry and packing. We hear it went well and they stayed long enough for Ian to finally be ready to leave (though maybe Maya wasn’t so ready). That evening, Maya managed to pull out a loose molar. Poor kid; she was in a fair amount of pain before that tooth came out. Maya manages pain entirely too well, so it’s a big deal when she’s actually complaining that something hurts.

And then, after some bright and cheerful doughnuts from Hero Doughnuts, it was time to drive to Missouri. The drive was kinda strange because our navigation system routed us differently from normal – some business about a dam in or near Memphis potentially breaking. What?!? Normally we would take a direct diagonal route on I-22 between Homewood and Memphis and then I-55 north from there. Instead, we took a slightly longer but very pretty drive that routed us north through Huntsville and Nashville and then over through Kentucky to Cape Girardeau, and that’s where we finally found I-55.

We arrived in Missouri not too much later than planned and the kids got to unwind a bit with toys and outside time. We even made time to ride out to the pond and feed the fish – some of those fish are getting pretty big!

The next day, Grammy and Grandpa had The Most Fun Thing Ever planned for the kids – the water park. The Cape Splash Family Aquatic Center was just about perfect for the kids. They’d been to a local Texas water park in the past, Typhoon Texas, but they had been so young at the time, they mostly stuck to the splash pad and kiddie slide area.

Now they were primed to experience EVERYTHING. Plus, the park was contained enough that we could mostly just let them roam free, slide as much as they wanted, and feed them whenever they showed up feeling hungry. Also, since it was midweek and we got there when most folks are at work, it wasn’t all that crowded and the kids could slide and lazy river as much as they wanted without just a whole lot of waiting.

We showed up around midday and essentially stayed till the place closed, and it’s all the kids could talk about. They loved it! When the time came, they didn’t really want to leave.

The next day was mostly a recovery day. The kids had played really hard at the water park the day before, so on this day, we relaxed. Always at Grammy and Grandpa’s there are art projects. The yard is huge, and and there are lots of little toads and frogs to catch around the pond. And … there are cousins! Maya and Lily, who are only about 6 months apart in age (despite the BIG height difference), really played well together this time. And evidently both of them are skilled frog catchers!

We learned on this trip about Gus the Goose. Gus is a white goose who apparently has worked himself into a flock of “regular” geese (Canada Geese, maybe). Well, we managed to find a couple of very nice Gus feathers around the pond while we were walking – one for Maya and one for Lily! And while I never got to see the infamous goose, the kids did.

And finally, it was creek day! Every summer when we visit Grammy and Grandpa, the kids spend time at the creek. This time, there was the added fun of cute little ring floats. Ian, Maya, and eventually Lily as well got to float around in a unicorn, a duck, or a flamingo, as the mood struck them.

And there were SO MANY critters to catch. We saw a snake slither off into the brush when we first pulled up (didn’t get a good enough look at it to ID). The kids caught a bunch of toads. They caught little fish and a few random crawdads as well. I tried to show Maya that if you just let the crawdad walk on your hand, it probably wouldn’t pinch you. There were no guarantees of course, so there were no takers.

That last evening, Grammy and Grandpa took us to the Circle U so the kids could play video games. It’s a small thing, but they now fully associate a stop by Circle U with a visit to Grammy and Grandpa’s house. The food is good and they don’t mind rambunctious kids, so I’m content. We were surprised to find that as the evening progressed a live DJ with a karaoke machine set up shop. They kept asking for requests, and the kids all wanted to put theirs in. No one else was really taking them up on it, so that’s how the fine patrons of Circle U found themselves treated to Ian’s request, Thunderstruck by AC/DC. Maya wanted to hear Octopus’s Garden by the Beatles. I don’t remember what she chose, but Lily got to hear her request as well.

And the next day it was time for the very, very long drive back to Austin. This time we tried a different thing to help break up the drive. Sean borrowed an audiobook from the library – “The Magic Misfits” by Neil Patrick Harris. The books as read by Mr. Harris himself was about four hours long. We’d listen to the book in hour-long chunks split up by regular old screen time. It worked like a charm. The kids (and even the adults) were fully engaged in the story and the segmenting of our time a little did make the long trip more tolerable. And now, with school and soccer and travel buttoned up, maybe June would be a little more relaxed!

April was less busy than March, but only because we didn’t travel anywhere. We still had every bit of the kid activities and things that we had the previous month.

Easter was a little more laid back though than it has been in years past because we bought tickets to see the “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” as a family party at the Alamo Drafthouse for mid-morning on Easter.

We tried a new to us egg dyeing technique this year – silk dyeing! Our bubble family friends did this last year and it turned out so well, we thought we’d give it a go. I overpaid for some brightly patterned silk scraps from Etsy, and there really wasn’t much else we needed other than some nice white-shelled eggs. We wrapped the raw eggs in silk scraps, and secured them with a rubber band. Then we wrapped in something (in our case, pieces of old flour sack dish towel) to ensure the silk maintained good and steady contact with the egg.

We then boiled the whole mess in some water mixed with a bit of white vinegar for 20 minutes. Once the boiling time was over, I used tongs to move the eggs to a drying rack to cool completely. Then and only then did we remove the wrapping for our first look at how well the patterns and colors transferred. We were pleased with how ours turned out – definitely a fun change of pace from the normal PAAS color tablet egg dyeing we usually do. Note: do not eat silk-dyed eggs – clothing dye is not food safe. We had no intention of eating them, so we actually left them out on the counter to be admired until they got gross (maybe 10 days or so).

Because we were going to our movie, we negotiated with the Maya and Ian to let the Easter Bunny know we couldn’t do an egg hunt this year. Thankfully the Easter Bunny worked with us and left the kids nice baskets full of candy and fun things like games and Lego.The kids seemed to enjoy their baskets, but I think especially Maya was sad there was no egg hunting.

Our movie party was fun. There were cute props for the family (visors and mustaches and little white gloves, etc), and the kids got to make a game block as the pre-movie craft, which they both seemed happy with. The movie was silly and visually arresting as you’d expect from a movie based on the various Mario Bros. video games, and the kids seemed to love it.

Then we had to hustle home and get Maya to complete her Star Student poster. She was the Star Student in her fourth grade classroom the following week, and it kicked off with her presenting a poster all about herself. We printed a bunch of photos and she stuck stickers and even added a few actual written details about herself, albeit begrudgingly. By all accounts, her presentation went well and now we have a new sacred thing cluttering up her bedroom. Hurray!

The following weekend, we got to see Ian perform in a guitar recital, which was a lot of fun. He performed both solo and as part of a group, which was neat to see and hear.

During the next week, Maya received some very sad news. Her long-time piano teacher (something like four years now) would be closing her studio in mid-May. Maya loves Hannah. They share a common interest in birds, and Hannah answers all of Maya’s (often very tangential) music-related questions as patiently as anyone could. Maya doesn’t say much about it, but you can tell she’s been upset. They used to have a game where they’d turn happy songs into sad songs by changing from a major key to a minor key. Maya LOVES this game. Sad Twinkle (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star) and Sad Mary (Mary Had a Little Lamb) were early favorites. I think all the songs have been in minor keys in Maya’s mind lately as she processes her situation.

The next weekend, at Maya’s soccer game on Sunday, Ian the reptile and amphibian lover was happy to see a Checkered Garter Snake hanging out on the sidelines near us. He rarely gets to see snakes, especially in the wild, so it was pretty exciting. (Maya’s team won their game also!)

That whole following week was a blur. In and amongst the normal soccer practices and music lessons, we started the search for a new piano teacher. Also, Ian’s after school music group performed a play for us. It was called, “Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring.” The kids started the play in the dead of winter and were outfitted in black sweatshirts and jackets. Then as spring sprung, the jackets were removed, revealing that the kids were dressed in bright colored t-shirts and were arranged to form a rainbow. It was pretty and Ian seemed to have fun performing.

The last weekend of the month, since the kids both had soccer games scheduled, Sean decided to rent a fancy lens for his camera so he could try to capture some action shots during their games. Alas their games were rained out! The storm was pretty intense, in fact, and the sky was wild looking. Mammatus clouds loomed large in the sky and the light was an orangey-pink. It made for some excellent photography, should a certain Dad be equipped with a fancy lens he’d no longer get to use for soccer games.

On Saturday, Maya’s music memory group competed. She had been meeting one afternoon a week after school for a couple months to listen to pieces by various composers and musicians. She’d been spending time listening at home as well. And then on competition day, we went to the AISD Performing Arts Center. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small town where plays and whatnot were held in the local church’s hall, but that place was impressive. I just looked it up – the main auditorium seats 1200.

Maya was seated with her music teachers and participating classmates along with other AISD schools and their teachers and participants. A live orchestra performed small segments of the pieces they’d been listening to, and the kids had to guess which was which. Some of the pieces were on atypical instruments. For one piece, they had to try to guess from just a 5-second snippet. They had test forms open on Chromebooks so the results could be tabulated immediately. There had been a composer to composition matching component of the test as well. All told Maya did pretty well, and either way, it exposed her to some great and varied music and the experience itself was pretty neat. She’s already planning to participate again next year.

That Sunday, since it was nice outside and Sean had rented that fancy lens, we had the kids get suited up in their soccer uniforms and head to the park to kick the ball around so Sean could at least play with his lens a bit before returning it. There were lots of Texas Spotted Whiptail lizards running around on the sidewalk and field too! Very pretty, but also fast and hard to photograph. The kids were only slightly more cooperative.

And boom. April was over. I have a hard time not saying “yes” when the kids want to sign up for all the extracurricular things. But I don’t love how full our schedules are. It makes it nigh on impossible to actually slow down and take things in. Maybe a good summer break will erase our memories a little and we’ll find ourselves saying “yes” all over again next school year.