July has been a busy month – at least by our standards. And it’s been horribly hot and dry, even by Texas standards. It has been 100+ nearly every day this month and with no real rain to speak of. We had the tiniest spit of rain late last week, but I swear it was like the sky sneezed. It was over in moments, and any evidence evaporated almost immediately.

We were pleased to escape to more verdant surroundings for the first week of July. It started with a 12 hour drive to Missouri to see my family. I was worried since we were driving the Saturday of a holiday weekend that traffic would be wretched, but nope – it was smooth sailing pretty much the whole way.

Dad and Carol always gather up their children and grandchildren (when they can) for Fourth of July celebrations. This year, the logical date for this to occur was actually on Sunday, July 3rd. Carol cooked an absolute mountain of food, and we spent the day eating, drinking, playing in the water, and messing with fireworks. And of course the cousins spent some quality time together.

There were bullfrogs to catch down at the pond. Both Maya and Ian seem to get a big kick out of them. A variety of daytime fireworks were available for the kids to practice lighting, with varying degrees of help from the bigger kids and grown ups. Ian was all in. He really liked the fact that he could do it on his own. Maya was 100% not all it. Fireworks do not smell good, and so she largely kept her distance. At one point, she put a covid mask on to try to reduce the gunpowdery aroma.

Later that evening, they put on a big fireworks show. I was worried that Maya wouldn’t want to participate at all, but she and I settled on sitting up on the screened porch, far away from the fireworks launch point. No debris fell on us there, and she was far enough away that the smell was diminished. The noise was still a little bit of a bother for her, but she handled it pretty well and seemed to genuinely enjoy the show. Her favorite part, I think, was some of the funny names that were given to the fireworks. I wish like crazy I had been smart enough to write some of those down.

The next day – actual July 4th – was more laid back. The kids puttered around in the giant yard, playing with water balloons and catching frogs at the pond. Maya wound up having a bad headache, so we spent a fair amount of time resting (which was probably good after their late night on the third). Finally in the afternoon, she felt well enough that they could go play at the creek, and to stop and feed the fish on the way back. There are now several generations of catfish in that pond, and they’re all hungry. There are turtles and bluegill in there too, as well as some really fat bullfrogs. When we drove up, the big frogs were all lined up, gazing into the sun. Once Ian walked down to see them, they launched in rapid succession into the water with a big YERRRP to announce their departure.

Grammy was off to a concert the next day. It was at Busch Stadium, so they’d be outdoors, and it started in the afternoon, so they’d be in the hot sun during one of the hottest days of the year. The kids spent some time with Grandpa cleaning up the mess leftover by the water balloon debauchery the day before, and then we all rode the side-by-side up to the Circle U Bar and Grill in Sedgewickville. We ordered food, and then the kids went to play some video games in the little arcade area. Since they’d been good helpers in the morning, Grandpa loaded them up with quarters for the games. Lunch was good, and the kids had ice creams the size of their heads for dessert.

After lounging around for the afternoon, doing some laundry and making some hotel reservations for our big August trip, we again hopped in the side-by-side and headed to West End Tavern for dinner. The kids were delighted by the Christmas tree hanging from the ceiling, and they seemed to enjoy their chicken and fries and root beers. It was a much cooler ride back home, since the sun was setting.

The kids wound up watching an episode of X-Files and really liking it! It was about a sea monster or something, so I can see the appeal. They may be less interested in some of the other unexplained phenomena, and even less interested in government conspiracies. But who knows, maybe we can have family X-Files nights. Sean would be thrilled.

The next day was all about packing up and getting ready for the next leg of our Grandparent Triangle. Sean and I loaded up the car, and we hung out long enough to see Grammy for a little while before we left town. Then it was off for a roughly seven hour trip to Homewood, AL to see Sean’s parents.

We hadn’t been to their house since probably Christmas of 2018. We had warned the kids ahead of time that the house with all the kitties was now the house with only two very old cats, and that they would have to be very kind and careful with at least one of those old cats. Poor Hubert, old man that he is, is on his last legs. Luckily, he seemed to enjoy all the attention the kids lavished on him. They colored pictures of him and petted him endlessly, loving the fact that he’d walk around on them from time to time.

They also met the outdoor cat. Their cousins AP and Steele had been to the house just before our visit, and had dubbed the outdoor cat Gumball. This may be because he is <ahem> an un-neutered male kitty. Anyhow, Gumball was extremely sweet and seemed to genuinely love kids. It seemed that he timed his visits for when Maya and Ian were outside to pet him. If Sean and I went out by ourselves, he was less likely to make an appearance. The kids have so many photos and videos of Gumball walking, talking, flopping, eating, and generally being a cat. It’s also important to note that despite the fact that Lolli and Pop have decided to leave food and water out for Gumball, he is not their cat. They aren’t sure whose cat he is – does he belong to someone, or should they seek a means to get him adopted?

The kids did a pretty good job of entertaining themselves while they were at Lolli and Pop’s house. It didn’t hurt anything that they were completely in love with Gumball and spent lots of time with him. We did walk to their creek one day to see if we could spot any snakes. We didn’t, but we did see a bluejay and what may have been a blue grosbeak (unconfirmed).

Lolli and Pop took the kids to the Patriot Park pool for a little while in the afternoon. Sean and I worked on boring grown up things while the kids played with their grandparents. We hear that they loved the slide at the pool but hated the courtesy breaks.

We had pizza at a place called Slice that evening, and it was really good. The kids enjoyed their “beers” (root beers), and their plain boring pizza. Harry and Helen had vegan pizza, and Sean and I had something with Calabrian chiles on it, which was divine.

The next day we headed south just past Montgomery and went to the Alabama Safari Park. This is the sort of deal where you buy buckets of feed and drive around a park full of exotic creatures, letting them eat from your bucket as you go.

But before any of that, we got to visit the sloths. You can purchase a special sloth encounter, and Lolli and Pop did just that. At our specified time, we got to enter a room with Flash and Lima, a pair of Linnaeus Two-Toed Sloths. We got to spend quite a while with them, feeding them carrots, zucchini, and summer squash. They can’t see well, so you have to hold the food where they can smell it, and then, in slow motion, they creep their lethal looking clawed arm up to steady the morsel while they munch. Fun fact (or at least our kids thought it was fun): those sloths only poop once a week. I feel for the poor caretaker that has to work on pooping day.

It was interesting and weirdly relaxing to watch our perma-smile sloth friends lying idly about or climbing amongst the rafters with the slow clink, clink, clink of huge claws on metal. They seemed to enjoy back scratches, though I’m not sure they’re capable of frowning, so how would you know, really.

After our time with the sloths was over, we headed over to the bird enclosure to feed the budgies (which I recently learned is short for budgerigars). They weren’t really in an eating mood, so only one or two visited the kids for nibbles of what looked like millet on a stick. Maya, bird girl that she is, was completely in love.

After taking a few minutes feeding the giraffes some Romaine leaves, we wandered through the rest of the on-foot part of the park, getting sweatier by the minute. Before the drive and feeding part of our adventure, we decided to have some snacks and sodas (and to cool off in the gift shop’s air conditioning for a moment). While there, we kept seeing T-shirts talking about the Llama Mafia. “Ha ha – what’s that all about,” we might have wondered. We would find out soon enough.

We purchased a couple buckets of food for the kids and a couple more for us and headed on our merry way, Lolli, Pop, and the kids in the first car, and us following behind. The llamas saw us coming. They parked themselves right in the roadway till we had no choice but to stop. Then they sauntered up to the car window and without a moment’s hesitation stuck their heads inside the car. As we proceeded, they would cheerfully shoulder smaller creatures out of the way to get to you. Especially toward the beginning, it seemed they were the only creatures we’d get to feed.

Before too long, zebras and gazelles and little fallow deer visited the car for nibbles directly from the bucket or to silently request that we chuck some food their way. We had a few emu come to the car for a nibble, but the ostriches we had seen were tucked back in the shade.

The camels were funny. They are huge and have absolutely no compunction about stealing your entire bucket of food. Harry and Helen and the kids were in the car in front of us, and we watched not one but two buckets deftly wrested from hands and greedily upturned before being discarded. When we drove up to the camels, I was so busy trying to photograph them that I nearly failed to notice them leaning into the car for our food bucket as well.

The most fun animal to watch eat though may have been the ostrich. Finally toward the end of our journey, we encountered one who seemed willing to come out and eat. By this point, I think Sean and I had donated both our buckets of food to the kids, but we thoroughly enjoyed watching the jackhammer pecking as the ostrich ate relentlessly from Harry’s bucket.

Later that evening, the kids hung out with Lolli and Pop while Sean and I met up with his long-time friend Jeffery. Thanks to COVID, it’s been a really long time since we’ve seen him too, and there was a lot of catching up to do.

On our last full day in Alabama, the kids got to go to Homewood pool with Lolli and Pop. We got to eat a vegan feast for dinner (well, the kids had some chicken fingers), and we all went to see the new Minions movie at the theater that evening. I heard lots of kid and grown up giggles throughout, so it was a nice enough way to spend some time.

The drive back to home felt so long, but we eventually made it. With a roomier car, unlimited iPad time, and kids who are older and more in control of their bodies, these long road trips aren’t as rough as they used to be. Jury’s out as to whether we’ll take more of them.

We got back to Texas and the kids had a week with last summer’s babysitter, Oriana. After some difficulties with the summer program we had originally signed the kids up for, we decided not to send them back and had to scramble at the last minute for coverage. They love Oriana. She’s very patient with them and is really good at art projects, so they were excited to see her.

That very next weekend, Holly and family offered to meet us at Cidercade. Cidercade is the antidote to the pain of a “normal” arcade, in my opinion. The kids love arcades, but when we take them, it’s always kinda painful. They have their tokens or game card or whatever, but they’re hesitant to spend their money because they don’t know if they’ll like a game. Then, probably because it’s a known quantity, they become overly obsessed with claw machine games, and then with getting enough tickets for the acquisition of cheap shit from the prize counter. They’re disappointed constantly. I truly want them to have fun, but I’m not sure those situations are it.

Enter Cidercade. For a $10 flat fee, you can play as many games as you want, and they have something like 150 of them. For an additional $4, you can outfit a kid with a soda cup that they can refill as often as they like. We joked that Maya’s favorite game at the arcade may have been the soda machine. No bullshit claw machines. No prize counters. Just game-playing fun. Ian could play a game as often as he liked to learn the rules. Maya could continue her Batman adventure over and over again, till her mission was complete. No crying about needing more quarters. No sadness that they got nothing from the claw machine. And as if all that weren’t enough, their pizza is pretty good, and they have hard cider on tap. This place is a solid 10/10 for kid entertainment in my mind.

The next week, the kids had their Encanto camp. It was a week-long all-day camp during which they and 20-ish other students and two teachers worked to put together a modified version of the Encanto musical. When I picked them up after the first day, Ian was nearly in tears because he didn’t get one of the solo singing roles. Then when we went through the scripts and he realized how many lines he had to memorize vs how many lines those characters had to memorize, he seemed to feel much better.

Ian was assigned the role of Chispi, the capybara that lived in Antonio’s amazing room after he received his give. Maya specifically requested the role of Pico, the toucan who accompanied Mirabel into Bruno’s cave. They both (along with a couple other animal characters) served as narrators for the story.

We got to attend their production at the end of the week, and it was GREAT! All the kids did a wonderful job. Maya and Ian both did a great job of delivering their lines clearly and loudly enough to be heard. They didn’t let their stage fright get to them (though you could tell they were both feeling it a bit Friday morning). And they’ve both told us they’d like to do something like that again.

Our friend Missy was in town for a couple weeks for some teacher training. Several times during her visit, we hung out, ate together, plied her with cocktails. It was such a good visit! We had a weekend where Holly, Chris, Ruby, and Herbie came over and hung out. And just for fun, Anna came over too! I regret that none of us thought to photo the five college friends together, but we did have fun eating barbecue, drinking, and talking.

The next week, Sean had again secured a reservation at Tiki Tatsu-ya, so we could take Missy to this wackadoo Tiki bar (where Sean desperately wishes he could be a regular). So that we could get responsibly knackered, we decided to book a Lyft to take us down and bring us home again. The adventure began already with our Lyft driver. Since there were three of us, we had half-jokingly pointed Missy to the front seat, since she’s such an extrovert, and Sean and I, well, we aren’t.

Dude had a dashboard full of rocks and minerals, which Missy commented on. I, perhaps unhelpfully, pointed out the Missy loves rocks! I’m going to guess that our driver didn’t need much encouragement from me, but I still regret my participation. Right out the gate, he wanted to know why the scientific community was so bent against acknowledging and studying the healing properties of crystals. Yes, really. And it just went on from there. Another highlight for me – why won’t the US put more kids into ketamine-induced “death” in order to reboot their brains and cure them of childhood disease? WHYYYYYYY??!!

I gotta say, I’d have been a deer in headlights; sputtering speechless. Missy handled it all brilliantly. She responded as carefully as she could to his questions, demonstrating an open mind while still trying to quell his more outrageous theories. And as we crossed the river, I thought we were home free, and then Missy volunteered that she’s also a physics teacher. Fresh lines of inquiry were now available! Now our dude wanted to discuss black holes, but the way he said it was, “What do you think about black holes?” Errrr – that’s pretty open-ended. Luckily by then we were at our restaurant, and could exit the vehicle before Missy was grilled further.

Tiki Tatsu-ya was all you could hope for, as usual. This time we got to try some of the food, which was incredible. We also got to try one of the large-format drinks – a rum barrel. It was quite good, and the fiery theatrics were top-notch. If I’m being honest though, I enjoyed our individual drinks more. Thankfully our Lyft ride back home was a quiet one.

Missy was around a couple more days. We had dinner together. She let the kids play in her hotel pool. It was too hot to be very active. We later learned that it was central Texas’s hottest July on record. Good timing, Seattle lady!

On the last few days of the month, Sean went back to Alabama to attend his 30th high school reunion. The kids and I held down the fort, trying to keep the house un-wrecked while also taking care of things for back to school, home maintenance, and our upcoming vacation. We were pretty successful, and thanks to a surprise flight cancelation, Sean made it back home Sunday night earlier than expected. Now to decompress for five minutes before what promises to be a hectic August as well.