Where's Nassau Street?

We took our first weekend getaway to a different part of Colorado last week. And where did we go?

Where else?

Mt. Princeton

Edith thought Princeton had changed a fair bit. 

We could have visited Mt. Yale instead, just north of Mt. Princeton in the Collegiate Range...

But Mt. Princeton is home to the natural hot springs bubbling out of a river and the little family resort built around those. We were upgraded to a lovely cabin:

Looking down from the French doors toward one of the pools:

Shortly after we arrived, the snow started falling. Have you ever been swimming outdoors when the lounge chairs looked like this?

The girls brought snowballs into the pool, but Alice didn't quite understand the implications of dunking hers in the water:

The man-made pools were built next to the river and are fed by the springs. There were about 30 little natural pools bubbling up along the edges of the river, in which you also could soak. Because the air temps were in the 40s and the pool were no more than a foot deep, we saw lots of people in them lying as flat as they could, like seals sunning themselves.

Of the manmade pools, there was a hot one that I preferred but the girls couldn't stomach. And there was an adults-only pool (as in quiet, not racy) that Tom and I wanted to try, but we never found an opportunity.

Indeed, while we had a good time, we had to reconcile ourselves to what a vacation with little people means. Despite three bedrooms in the cabin, we all wound up together, because the girls were too scared to sleep by themselves in a strange place. We spent almost all our time swimming, and we spent almost all our swimming time in the man-made pool that was bath temperature, because that was the only activity that didn't prompt whines and tantrums. Having removed the girls from their natural habitat, we found that that was about as much change as they could handle. They wanted to eat exactly what they do at home; they did not want to explore the area; and without their own supply of toys and books, they weren't about to leave us alone for any length of time. It was fine--but it did make me wonder at what stage a vacation will feel like a restful getaway again. (To be fair, it wasn't all the girls: Bringing 12 hours of grading to fit in over the course of a weekend trip doesn't add to the restfulness.)

The one thing that Tom and Edith did work in other than swimming was a horseback ride. They were lucky to have signed up for an unpopular time of day, and so enjoyed a private ride with two great guides.

At the horse ranch

On our last morning, the girls swam themselves to exhaustion and were conked out almost as soon as we got in the car headed home. Tom and I took advantage of the peace, quiet, and uncomplaining riders to extend our drive. We went north a bit to see more of the Middle Range, wending our way through Breckenridge and other la-di-da ski areas we'd never seen. The most amazing part was the change in weather over the course of 2 hours (and about 2,000 feet). We went from sunny, dry high country...

... to snowstorms and 3 or 4 feet of standing snow, feeling like we'd rewound to Christmas season...

...then back again.

Of school, no school, knowledge and ignorance

Guess who climbed the Incline yesterday?!

I think she was the second-youngest climber on the trail. (Right at the start we bumped into our neighbor, who runs up the Incline every Thursday, taking her kids for their first go at it. Her daughter is a month younger than Edith.) Actually, I never planned for us to climb. I just wanted to get out of the house for a brief hike before beginning the day's errands and thought I'd get Edith to try the beginning stretches of the Barr Trail with me. But before we started I proposed just showing her the Incline, which starts several hundred yards from the Barr trailhead. We climbed up there and snapped a picture...and then Edith turned around and started climbing. I thought she'd go just a few yards, but she paused for a rest...then went further...then paused...then went further...and suddenly we were really climbing the Incline. She went much slower than most people on the trail, which meant that I was never out of breath and could tell her a story to keep her entertained. 

And so we made it to the first unofficial "ending" point: the place where the Incline and the Barr Trail come so close together that you can cross over from the one to the other. It comes just as the Incline is getting scary steep (hand-over-hand climbing), right before the false summit that dashes spirits. Plenty of people find it a good place to move over to the Barr Trail and come back down more gradually, for a 2.2 mile loop, 1,100 feet elevation gain.

Edith was pretty pooped by bedtime, but she never once whined along the way. And guess who is hobbling today and who doesn't feel a thing?

***

We've had some other good times over spring break, as Edith continues her streak of non-school days. (She's attended just one full, five-day week of school since Christmas and won't have another until April, since they're off for teacher conferences next week. Grrr.) We did some research into Front Range gardening, opting for help from live people and real gardens when the books were too overwhelming, and have tried to start lupine, spearmint, and sungold tomatoes (our favorite veggie from New Jersey CSA days) from seed in our basement bathroom. It's been so warm, we originally were planning to plant three of the raised beds we inherited out back, but the local nursery guy told us you can't put anything in the ground here until May 1, as April is when we may get our heaviest snows of the season. He also told us that there are virtually no deer-proof plants (though he gave us a list of some that have a better shot of making it than others), and when I asked, he directed us toward drought-friendly species. I've always thought of gardening as an inherently virtuous activity--one in which you can't overindulge, that is always for the moral good. But I wonder if that's the case in a place with 15 inches of rainfall a year, a severe drought, and a 3-4 month growing season. Is it legit to try to make the (mountainside) desert bloom?

Less ambiguously, we spent a happy afternoon in the garage painting a little unfinished bookcase that I bought for toys when Edith was an infant and that I have been intending to paint for nearly 6 years now. Life intervened--but it's much more fun-looking for our having waited until Edith could do the decorating work herself.

***

Today, we made a trip to the downtown public library, where Edith loaded up on Lois Lowry and Mary Pope Osborne books. We read the first Magic Treehouse book over lunch. These days we try to shift some of the reading responsibility to Edith in a way that won't frustrate or discourage her. She still doesn't like to slow down to work at reading when it's story time and will balk if you appear to be asking her too read too much of the page. So we have her read the chapter titles, captions, and anything inset in bold or a different font.

And yesterday we may have stumbled on a new strategy. We got a picture book (Dooby Dooby Moo by Doreen Cronin) from the used bookstore next to SuperCuts, where we were 7th in line, and after I read it once to Edith in the morning, she read it all by herself to Alice in the evening. At first she just started reciting it as she remembered it, but when she found herself forgetting, she started to look at the words, and soon she was trying faithfully to read all of those rather than just recall the story. But recall no doubt helped her with the tougher parts. When Tom came home she again read it to him, enthusiastic to share how funny it was. So we'll have to slip in some other funny, simple picture books that way.

***

Given how much an almost-six year old seems to know, I'm sometimes caught off-guard by what she doesn't know. Yesterday morning she was lying in bed with me while NPR reported the death of Elizabeth Taylor. (Edith loves National Velvet, and the audio clip from that movie caught her attention.) The report went on to mention Taylor's later life, including her eight marriages.

"Did all her husbands except the last one die?" asked Edith incredulously.

I told her no, that I was pretty sure Taylor got divorced from some of them. Edith looked blank.

"Do you know what divorce is?" I asked.

No. No idea. Obviously troubled to hear an explanation, no matter how gentle I tried to make it. You can't make it too gentle (hard to reassure her that it almost never happens, for example.) I was surprised she hadn't run into the concept before.

***

Alice meanwhile has continued in daycare all week (we're paying for it regardless, and her being at school makes it much easier to do interesting things with Edith). Perhaps as a result, she knows everything these days.

"Hey, Edie, guess what? Chicken butt! Asher says that."

We hear a lot about other kids from Alice. She prays for each of her neighborhood friends every night at dinner time. If we ask who she played with at daycare we get a detailed list:

"I play with Marie. Marie was there. Gabby was there. Asher was there. Lexi not there today. Riley went home with her grandma. What they doing? Maybe eating dinner."

Other kids feature in spontaneous accounts of her day:

"Today I say 'Guess what? Chicken butt!' to Asher, but he not hear me."

"Henry knock me down. He fall on me, and Miss Emma say, 'Henry, get off Alice. Say sorry.'"

Whenever we're outside Alice checks in with whichever neighbor kids are out, going over to each one, saying hi, and telling them about her doings--usually to the befuddlement and blank stares of these considerably older children. She doesn't mind. When she saw a flash of jump rope appear repeatedly over the top of the neighbors' fence yesterday, she demanded that I take her over to see what was going on. I did, and she stood transfixed for half an hour as a bunch of kids (and moms) practiced their jumping. She declined the mothers' offers to let her join in, but as soon as we got home, she launched into all the jumping rhymes she'd just heard.

She nearly melted my heart the other morning, when she sat up between me and Tom at 5:45 am, put an arm around each of us, and announced, 

"You my best friends." She then went on to explain: "Riley wants be best friends with Lexi. Henry not have a best friend. I want be best friends with Lexi at school, too." [Ed. note: Lexi is 3 and 1/2  and way cool.] I didn't mind competing with Lexi; I was exclaiming over how sweet Alice was in declaring us her best friends. Then, leaning over me and continuing to smile sweetly, she murmured, "Get up and make breffast, best friend?"

Photographic odds and ends

It looks like ear infections are upon us, along with a staggering load of spring break grading and class prep (G) and make-up shifts and class prep (T). So lest we forget the good moments squeezed in here and there in the last few weeks, a few photos:

1. A Trip Up Pike's Peak

Last Saturday we drove up Pike's Peak, only our second visit to the top since we moved and our first by car. It was a beautiful drive--and so good to get into the national forest and onto the mountain that is at the heart of our view every day. Driving up the spine of the mountain on the far side opposite our house, I feel as though we got a much better sense of the overall geography, which includes the reservoirs, dependent on  snow melt, from which our water comes.

Edith took this picture of me at the summit

As you may know, Katharine Lee Bates wrote "America the Beautiful" after a visit to the top of Pike's Peak. It's easy to see why: There are few places from which the purple mountain majesties and the amber waves of grain (or at least, the amber waves of grazing land) are both so clearly visible

 

2. St. Patty's Day

I've never seen a place so game for St. Patrick's Day. To be sure, there are more genuine Irish folks in other places we've lived (Boston, New York), but they're sandwiched in with a large number of indifferent non-Irish people. Here, I only saw three people all day NOT wearing green: the repairman who came to work on our garage door, Tom in his police garb, and our neighbor down the street, who lived in Ireland for years and doesn't feel the need to prove her credentials.

Pondering what they did to her face at daycare

3. Sisterly fun

The girls have asked recently for bathtub photos of themselves as twin mermaids. They've started to play together more often--and it's a delight for all of us.

 

4. Hiking

Yesterday during Alice's nap, Edith and I made it to the Waldo Canyon Trail, a popular local hike, for the first time. The full loop is 7 miles, and I'd like to do it with Tom when we can find a babysitter willing to come at dawn on a Saturday morning. Meanwhile, Edith and I did about 3 miles, with probably a 500-foot elevation gain. No sweat. I look forward to going back if and when there's a spring flowering/leafing season.

Another photo by Edith

Off up the trail

A good spot for a snack

Wedding pictures

These are the pictures we got at my cousin's wedding in Atlanta two weeks ago. Rather telling (about us, not the wedding).

Note that these were taken before the ceremony. 

We rustled them out of bed a few minutes before they were due for the festivities, and they rallied...

...long enough for pictures, and to walk down the aisle as flower girl and ring maiden. But then they were done with travel and bustle and everything being unfamiliar, and they returned to the room for the rest of the evening, some combination of us watching them throughout the wedding. Edith was on the cusp of the cold that she's still battling, and Alice was doped up for 48 hours between bouts of pink eye.

The wedding itself was lovely, with the adult crowd in full festive spirit. Hopefully we'll get some photos from family to share soon.

Spring is coming...right?

Hanging on by a thread

A Harper's index of our family life in the last few weeks would include

• 4 cold/snow days
• 4 days for Tom & Edith in Delaware, for a family funeral
• 48 hours in Atlanta for all of us, for a family wedding
• 4 sick days for Edith (probably soon to be 5) -- having weathered strep two weeks ago, she's now at 103 degrees with watery eyes and a hacking chest cough
• 3 sick days for Alice, including pink-eye and a perpetually runny nose
• 7 total days of missed school for Edith and counting (not including snow days)
• 29 papers to be graded, several days overdue to my students (not so cool on the block plan)
• 3 days on a required professional retreat, for Tom
• 3 times Tom had to come home from his retreat, over 3 days, for unavoidable professional and family conflicts
• 1 of Gretchen's classes canceled (not so cool on the block plan), because she couldn't figure out how to care for two sick children without a spouse at home, or any family or available friends nearby
• 4-5 hours of class prep per night, starting after the girls go to bed
• 4-5 wake-ups per night per sick child
• 2 wake-ups per night per normal, healthy Alice
• 4-5 hours of fractured adult sleep per night
• 4-5 shifts that Tom is behind in his internship, meaning 40-50 hours he needs to make up somewhere

I know we're blessed in so many ways. And it was good to be with family for important occasions. But right now it's hard to see how we can keep on keeping on at this pace.