Beasts of Unburden

Deanna and (especially) I are notorious vacation over packers. This is especially true when we hit the road in our supercool 10-year old Honda Odyssey. Why bring 4 pairs of shoes when you can bring 5 - we're driving, right? Sure the condo we are renting for vacation has a washer and dryer, but what if its broken - better bring the big suitcase. Swimsuits and winter coats - no problem, after all, who really knows what the weather will be.

 

Things only got worse after we bought a car rooftop pod - golf clubs, tennis rackets, balls, bats, baseball gloves, snorkeling equipment, a giant hammock with its surprisingly heavy "portable" collapsible frame - bring it on! Want to bring that surf board we bought on sale at Brookfield Zoo a few summers ago? Why of course we do boys, perhaps this is the year the Lake Michigan surf in Door County peaks above 6 inches! You'll have to sit with it across your laps though, the pod is filled up with sandcastle building equipment, you know, for the times when we are not busy surfing. There have been trips when I have had to actually unpack portions of the interior of the van during rest stops in order to extricate the kids from the third row seats; coolers, and bags spilling out of the side door onto the hot concrete. I have secretly toyed with the idea of buying a small trailer so we can haul even more stuff - why own a van with a trailer hitch if you aren't going to use it! Wouldn't it be awesome to bring all five bikes, I've thought to myself. If we brought them we wouldn't need to rent them, freeing s to actually then take two bike rides instead of one!

 

Things are no better when we fly. We borrow luggage scales and carefully weigh our suitcases, inevitably working our way down by removing luggage items until we are just under the allowed checked bag weights. We stuff oversized "carry" on bags into overhead racks. In fairness to Deanna, I am probably worse than her, as I, left to my own devices, have a penchant for changing clothes for different activities. In that respect I probably would have made a good Downton Abbey resident. The kids seem to have inherited our tendencies, spending their pre-vacation time cooking up elaborate schemes by which to smuggle as many toys and stuffed animals on the trip as they can get by us.

 

Anyway, that all changed last summer when the five of us, accompanied by several Sherpas, boarded a flight to the Pacific Northwest. On board was another family we knew from town, headed, like us, for a week-long trip. Except...not only were they traveling without Sherpas, each member of the family of four was traveling with a single backpack! And not the giant, I'm spending the next six months hiking Europe kind of backpack, but the normal kind of backpack. Confusion, astonishment, disbelief! "How?" we whispered to ourselves after, "were they able to do that?!?" They looked perfectly normal; smelled fine, good even; yet they were travelling with luggage that would barely contain the collection of travel books we were carting on the trip.

 

The sense of awe stuck with us, and during a recent long weekend trip, we aspired to do the same. Three nights in a hotel, five hour Amtrak trip, one backpack per family member, no other bags, no exceptions. And you know what, we pulled it off, despite temptation and the between season weather that was positively screaming for an array of clothing options. And it was, at least for me, freeing, exhilarating even! Showers, minimal sweating, clothing layers, no restaurants demanding much in the way of dressiness from us or the kids (not even the jeans my kids sadly seem to regard as "dress pants"), and we were all set. Turns out I can enjoy a trip even when I haven't brought my own sound machine, cappuccino-maker, monogrammed towels, flat-screen television, badminton set and canoe paddle! Interestingly, I noticed that most of those things were even available in St. Louis, where we visited, had I really decided I needed them.

 

Am I cured? Sadly, the answer is probably no. I'll be fighting the urge to over pack the next trip, and the next twenty after that. I am, however, hiking down the road to recovery, a backpack jauntily slung across my back and my arms swinging free!   

 

 

"Look Mom! No luggage!" Owen, with Hayden, Cooper and Deanna in the background, hits the road luggage-free.

 

Fortunate Sighting

Cooper and His Bowl Full of Cash

For the past couple of years, our family has been keeping track of license plates on cars that we see from the various states as we are out and about. To keep it fun and interesting, we start a new list each month. Over time, some rules have evolved, the main one being that a find must be verified by another family member - no solo plate-sighting counts, even for the adults. Another is that the twins can't verify each others sightings. While they are not fond of this rule, it has been made necessary by the fact that even the most casual drive around the block with them will elicit shouted and insistent claims that they have found the likes of Idaho, North Carolina and Texas. Owen, however, has developed a keen eye and can identify the plates of all 50 states at distances that would make an eagle jealous.

The holy grails of plates have always been Hawaii and Alaska. There was much excitement when we finally found an Alaskan plate on a weather-beaten pick-up truck upon walking out of a roadside diner in Georgia of all places a couple of years ago (Alaska to Georgia is some drive!). Then, on a trip to San Diego last year, we bagged our first two Hawaiian plates in what remains a record-setting trip and month. Sightings of Canadian Province plates and Baja California, Mexico are always exciting as well.

Prior to our recent trip to Hawaii, we were talking as a family about what license plates we might see there. The general assumption seemed to be that they would be exclusively Hawaii license plates, since there is no way to drive in or out. I, however, suspected there would be some others, since transferees and military personnel might, in some cases, be shipping their cars there on freighters. Deanna, quite sure I was wrong, boldly proclaimed at dinner one night that if any of the kids found a Connecticut plate in Hawaii, she would give them $100. I thought that was a foolish bet to make, and in the days leading up to the trip, I gave the boys a choice - either 1) we would give them $100 if they found Connecticut, but if they did not, they would have to each give us $10 of their money; or, option 2) we would give them each $10 if they found Connecticut, but if they did not, they would not owe us anything. After wrapping their little minds around that proposal, they all took the safe bet of $10.

In Hawaii, it was largely as Deanna expected, with pretty much every plate being a Hawaiian one, with the exception of the occasional military or government plate. Then, halfway through the trip, while driving through downtown Honolulu, we saw, amazingly and within the space of 20 seconds, South Carolina, Texas, and, incredibly, Connecticut. There was much chaos and jubilant shouting in the car, as the boys had all, of course, conveniently forgotten that they had opted out of the $100 bet. Reminded, the mood turned ugly, with much arguing and shouts of "that's not fair!" Eventually, they all opted for taking the $10 rather than contacting their attorneys, although they later tried to double up when they saw, astoundingly, another Connecticut plate.

For any of you who think the boys got a raw deal, you should know that they had already been given some money to spend on the trip as a special treat. That money, along with their $10 from the Connecticut bet, was spent only in tiny dribs and drabs with agonizing deliberation over each $2 purchase. A typical transaction for the twins went as follows: they would spy some treasure in a shop - say a small glass jar filled with sand and shells with a cheap sticker on the outside that says "Aloha from Hawaii." A brow would furrow, as the potential purchaser considered the price tag and mulled over the dent this wonderful object would put in their accumulated fortune. The boy would almost always then place the object reluctantly back on the shelf, only to decide 20 minutes later, when we had all long since moved on to other stores or activities, that their little life will forever be empty and incomplete unless THEY OWNED THAT JAR RIGHT NOW. One of us would then make our way back with them, and the boy would then proudly tender the chosen item to an amused store clerk who would bag it up and give it and any change to the smiling and proud new owner.   

As all three boys seem to prefer knowing they have money to spend to actually spending it (not a bad trait to have), their money remained largely intact at the end of the trip. So, the $10 they each received in the Connecticut bet therefore lies unspent along with their other trip money in a running account at our house from which each boy dreams of spending his small boy fortune.

   

Hawaii

Me: "I'm back!"

Valued and Patient CloudEight Reader/Subscriber/Follower: "About time slacker, there hasn't been a dispatch from CloudEight since December; where the Hell have you been?"

Me: "Hawaii! Well, not the whole time, but 10 fantastic days. My in-laws took us to that fancy new Aulani resort owned by Disney, because they are totally awesome (and I am not just saying that because they are Valued and Patient CloudEight subscribers!)."

Valued and Patient CloudEight Subscriber: "Wow, they do sound awesome, got any picture evidence of how great your trip was? Those boys of yours are darn cute, and I have a sudden hankerin to see them in some matching Hawaiian shirts."  

Me: "Wish granted!"

 Here is Hayden during our loooooooong day of travel. Chicago to Dallas-Fort Worth for a 2-hour layover, followed by some more hours of flying before an emergency turn back over the Pacific back to Los Angeles for an exciting emergency landing, a two-hour wait, a new plane, and 6 more hours in the air to Honolulu.

There are those shirts! In order to prepare for the trip, the family watched Elvis' Blue Hawaii, "Aloha Scooby Doo" and the Brady Bunch Hawaii episode so that we would have a totally accurate view of what Hawaii would be like. Although we all oddly enjoyed  Blue Hawaii, Owen here is striking the same "leaning against the tree" pose as a sultry young thing being sung to by Elvis during a beach scene - an unnatural and awkward pose that we couldn't help but mock everytime we ran across a leaning coconut tree during the trip.

 
The RedPlanet Ohana, hanging loose.

 Me and Sunny D.!

 The extended Ohana, including Deanna's brother Rob, his wife Alana, and the afore-mentioned awesome in-laws, Bob and Linda.

 Owen lets loose a mean javelin throw at a luau.

 7:30 a.m. fish feeding in the lagoon - big bone fish would come within a few feet of shore.

 Hayden underwater

 Searching for crabs in tidepools by the shore.

 The twins chilling in the lagoon.

 The atmosphere at the resort changed when Kelly Ripa and her show rolled in for taping during the last few days of our stay. While it was fun to have celebrities hanging around (Carson Kressly by the pool, Jon Cryer in the elevator!), they also brought with them squadrons of frowny-faced, high-heeled NY staff girls, strutting around talking to each other about Kelly this and Kelly that. They also kept taking over parts of the resort for filiming pieces, including our favorite hot tub, causing Owen to declare "that Kelly woman is ruining my vacation." 

 Competitive even on vacation, the boys had to build a sand volcano that was bigger than the other three being constructed by beachgoers nearby. We eventually triumphed. Here Cooper uses water to cause an eruption.

 Here I am paddleboarding, which was fun, but a bit harder than it looks. Owen took a turn and was almost swept out to sea in a current that would have required us to pick him up a couple of days later in Kauai. He was, thankfully, rescued by his Uncle Rob before things got that far.

Hayden at sunset.

Shaved Ice at Matsuamoto's on the North Shore, in the surfing town of Haleiwa.

Lunch at the bar!



Hayden and Grandma Linda in the infinity hot tub, our favorite hangout.



 At the top of Diamond Head after a nice hike up.

The boys hug Deanna farewell as we prepare to enter the world's 2nd largest maze at the Dole pineapple plantation. While I did stage the photo somewhat by telling them they may never see her again, we did have reason to be concerned. Deanna is notoriously bad at mazes - so bad in fact that she once had to be rescued from a maze in Niagara Falls by staff.

Deanna survived the maze, and the family, reunited, enjoys some Dole Whips at the plantation.

Cooper and I at lunch. I deny all responsibility for dressing him on this day.

Me and the boys never cut off our daily pool access bracelets for each day. By the last morning, pictured here, we had quite a collection.

 

              The best place we have ever stayed.



The Month My Warranty Expired

Last month I turned 45 with a minimal amount of fanfare and not much in the way of trepidation. The only changes I really anticipated were a modest increase in gentle ribbing from Deanna based on her being six years younger, and an inability to any longer claim that I was in my "early 40's." Little did I know that immediately upon turning 45 both my luck and the warranty on my body would run out causing me to essentially become elderly overnight.

My actual birthday passed uneventfully. Only a nasty cough that had settled into my lungs a week or two prior gave any indication of trouble ahead. At the time, I assumed it to be merely a nagging leftover of the most recent rounds of kid-inflicted illnesses in the house.

As our planned Spring Break trip to Anaheim and San Diego approached, I thought periodically of visiting a doctor to look into the cough but figured a little sunshine and time away from work would knock it right out. This proved to be a poor assumption, as it never did get better.  Each morning during our 10 day vacation, I would lean over a sink, coughing up bits of my lungs. As we traveled around, my periodic coughing fits spread fear throughout the Southern California natives (I could hear their frightened whispers: "Who let that consumptive into Legoland?? And so pale too. Maybe he's an escapee from a TB ward."). Even now, 5-weeks after its unheralded arrival, the cough remains, although antibiotics currently have it on the ropes at last.

Next, whether it was stuff related to the cough or simply the flight, my head felt full of muck and my left ear never "unpopped" following the flight to California, significantly decreasing hearing already long-impaired by too many rock band rehearsals and concerts in my younger days. This, combined with the kids annoying kid-habit of talking with their heads facing away from you or towards the ground, left me pretty much resorting to asking everyone to repeat anything they said to me during the trip. As the trip went on, my requests were shortened to an old-man like "eh?" each time I realized someone had said something to me.

On the third night of our trip, we were waiting in yet another line at Disney's California Adventure themepark (next door to Disneyland) as darkness fell when sweet 4-year old Cooper looked up at us and asked if we were going to see the fireworks. He was asking, he added, because it was our last night in Disneyland and because "fireworks make my heart happy." Parental hearts sufficiently melted, we bolted across the park, each carrying a 40+ pound kid at what might best be described as a loping, speed-walk, since the fireworks were actually taking place at Disneyland, where we were not. We caught the end of the fireworks, but not without some cost to my lower back - an unpleasant tweak to my lower back and its ruptured disk that periodically acts up. The sore back decided to stick around for the rest of the trip too, thus adding sleeping and walking, along with the previously mentioned breathing and hearing, on the list of activities that carried some level of difficulty and/or unpleasantness in the first month of my 45th year.

The fourth day of the trip, I managed to essentially serrate a fingertip with the five awesome blades of my Gillette Fusion razor. Bled a lot in the bathroom of our fancy hotel.  While this injury did not particularly bother me, it did have an unfortunate one-two punch. One, it was positioned so that a band aid would not stay on for any length of time; and two, seeing it seemed to cause an immediate unpleasant reaction in the squeamish. It was indeed fairly unpleasant to look at. The solution, fairly constant application of band aids.

The fifth day was our first at the beautiful beaches of Coronado Island in San Diego. Feeling decent despite the travails of the first half of the trip, I spied a crab in a tidepool and decided to capture it for the kids. No problem, until I prepared, captured crab in hand, to jump off of the slippery slope of a wet rock onto the safety of the beach. What happened next before a crowd of onlookers was several seconds of slipping, attempting to regain my balance, and a nasty feeling that something bad had just happened to my right hamstring before I fell face-down into the tidepool. When I first got up, I had a bloody left knee and was unable to put any weight whatsoever on my right leg. Two of my charming children, despite our best efforts to teach them empathy, immediately asked where the now-escaped crab was. This injury, since diagnosed by my doctor as a partial hamstring tear, left me limping badly the remainder of the trip and with a scary-amount of bruising - so much blood emptying out of the torn muscle inside the leg that the entire back of my right thigh turned solid purple and during the course of the trip actually migrated down into my calf. Pretty freaky amount of bruising for an injury that involved no direct impact on the leg at all. Anyway, after this one, previously mundane tasks like putting on my right shoe or hoisting myself in and out of car seats became exciting but painful adventures.

A couple of days later, I decided to limp up to the hotel's lovely weight room, figuring that although my leg was shot, I could still do some non-leg-related exercises. Shortly after starting, I was leaning on a machine, trying to adjust the amount of weight (upward of course!). I shifted my weight off the part of the machine I had been leaning on and it sprang back to its resting position, causing a metal cross-bar to spring up into my face and cut a nice gash next to my right eye. The gash commenced to bleeding profusely, and continued to do so every time I optimistically removed the band-aid at any point during the next 24 hours. So not only did I quickly develop a black eye, but I had to wear a big band-aid adjacent to my eye for the next couple of days.

Despite all of the above, we really did have a great time. A quick shout out to Deanna for shouldering the parenting load, figuratively and literally, during vacation as I was fairly useless during certain stretches. She was very patient despite not particularly enjoying having an elderly traveling partner. 

Anyway, if this was the year 1511, I would be pretty excited to be alive at the ripe old age of 45 with nothing but a bad limp, suspect back, consumption, marginal hearing and eye and finger injuries. But it is not 1511. One or more of you may be inclined to say something optimistic to me, like "those injuries sound unpleasant and it is unfortunate they happened on vacation, but they don't sound permanent so you can probably eke out another few decades before permanently assuming the mantle of old man." To you, I simply respond "eh?" Yep, I should've bought that extended warranty when I had the chance.  

Pee At Sea

Recently, when I mentioned that so-and-so enjoys reading my blog, my mother sarcastically responded "that's got to be pretty time consuming." Ouch. Yep, time to get back to posting.

Last month we took a 7-day Disney cruise and spent an additional three nights at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge. I returned relaxed, vaguely tan, and definitely poorer. A couple of weeks later and the tan and relaxed state are long gone, while the poorer part, unfortunately, appears to be sticking. There are the memories though too, and they were worth every one of the hundreds of thousands of pennies that were spent. Predictably, a great time was had by all. While I won't bore you with details of our many trips to the pool, beaches on Caribbean islands, the 90-something degree weather, trips to the spa, awesome workouts, the sumptuous feasts we were treated to each night, my brilliance on the shuffleboard court (skills honed during childhood summers in Door County, WI!), our $2,000 bingo jackpot (whoooo-hoooo!), or the warm milk and cookies delivered gratis to our cabin each night with just a call to room service, there are a few memories that I did want to share:

The RedPlanet Family Singers: Having never tried karaoke before, we attended a "family karaoke night" on the ship one night and gave it a whirl. Unfortunately, we selected "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", foolishly forgetting that not only does the song increase in speed to its final frenetic pace, but that the words are actually sung backwards at one point. Disaster ensued.

Least Disney Moment: One night my father-in-law was trying to secure chairs on the top deck of the cruiseship only to find them being hogged up by various people. Approaching a man who was hoarding a large number of unoccupied chairs, my father-in-law inquired what the man needed all of the chairs for. The man began to explain and then said "I don't know why I am telling you all of that, this is Disney, we do whatever the hell we want." To which my father-in-law replied "OK then, I want your chairs" and proceeded to start taking them before my mother-in-law intervened to stave off a fistfight. Go Bob!

Most Disney Moment: While Disney employees are almost all outstanding, I was particularly impressed when one day while at sea I stopped by the sports bar hoping to watch the Bears game via satellite. As luck would have it, the ship sailed into an area with no satellite signal for the duration of the afternoon. I expressed my disappointment to one of the bar employees. Later that night, I returned to my room to find that she had slid a printout under my door that had not only the score, but all the statistics of the game. Awesome!

Regrets: The Animal Kingdom Lodge offers stunning views of free-ranging African wildlife on a savanna, some wandering as close as 25-feet from your balcony. What you saw at any given time depended on what particular animals had wandered within viewing distance of your balcony. As cool as this was, I quickly become a bit jaded and when Deanna suggested on the third morning that we sit on the balcony and watch for a bit while the kids were still asleep, I replied "why bother, there's nothing out there right now but giraffe and zebra." As I sit in my cold basement a month later, rain spitting against the window for the 7th day in a row, I am wishing I had bothered!

My most enduring memories of the cruiseship, however, will be of the bathrooms. While I bragged back in May about having changed my last diaper, I did not realize that leaving diaper changing behind would result in my hearing innumerable shouts of "Daddy, will you wipe my butt???" The twins are hyper-conscious of their need to use the bathroom, and, like a pair of 22-year old girls out at a club, one cannot possibly go to the bathroom without the other. One dinner on the ship we took both of them three times! As we were rarely in our cabin during the cruise, we were most often patronizing public bathrooms around the ship. While almost every public bathroom in the universe features urinals of varying heights, astonishingly, considering how utterly predictable it is that there would actually be children aboard a Disney cruise, every damn urinal on the ship was designed for use by men 6 feet and over, leaving the stalls as our only option. Since space is tight on a ship, there was almost always only one stall in each public bathroom, and it would, of course, usually be occupied. Hayden's modus operandi upon entering the men's room in this situation was to get down low to get a good look under the stall door and announce to all in a loud voice that "there's a man in there!". He would then alternate between repeating that phrase every 30 seconds, in case it didn't sink in the first five times, and loud speculation as to when the man would be out so he could go. This proved quite effective actually, at causing people to practically flee the stalls to avoid further embarrassment. Then Cooper, Hayden and I would crowd ourselves into the stall for ten minutes of business, chit-chat and butt-wiping (often while a line formed outside), followed by handwashing and, the most exciting time of all, use of the hand dryer (the twins love to talk about whether hand dryers are automatic or push button).

So, as I dry my chapped and cold hands this winter here in Chicago, I can always warm myself up with the memories of that bathroom on Deck 4, aft, on the starboard side. You know, the one with the manly industrial style toilets and sinks, the roomy single stall and only low urinal on the ship, and the nice automatic hand dryer. Ah, sweet vacation memories.

Low-Tech Vacation Fun

As summer winds down, there are many things I never got around to writing about. Probably the biggest oversight was not posting anything about our late June week in Door County, Wisconsin, arguably the best week of the summer for all in the RedPlanet household.

Just two years ago, in fairly different economic times, there was talk about how tourism was way down in Door County, with many involved in their tourism industry wistfully theorizing it was because the times had passed it by. No waterparks, no movie theaters other than the charming old fashioned drive-in, no mega-malls or chain stores or chain restaurants, no rollercoasters or video arcades or any of the other things today's modern quick-cut, low attention-span kids are thought to need to have fun. Instead it is quiet and old-fashioned and full of low-tech fun, with endless cherry orchards, charming shops, friendly people, sunsets, art galleries, Lake Michigan, lighthouses, antiques, boats, fish boils, and boundless natural beauty. Two years later, while tourism is still down, now for economic reasons, its slower pace and throw-back retro-vacation style couldn't seem more perfect.

How can kids be bored when there is an endless supply of rocks to throw into the water? Or at the Fyr-Bal Festival in Ephraim where summer is welcomed by the lighting of bonfires at dusk in a ring around beautiful Eagle Harbor followed by low-tech old-fashioned fireworks. Where there is an endless supply of fried-perch sandwiches, cheese curds and ice cream. Not to mention Al Johnson's Swedish restaurant with its goats grazing on the grass roof, cherry stands with every kind of cherry-themed food you can imagine, the fish boil at the White Gull Inn, where the boil-over sends flames shooting ten feet into the air, the car ferry to the desolate beauty of sparsely-settled Washington Island, the Ephraim town-hall sing-a-long, on and on. We read in hammocks, scrambled down the rocks to watch the waves crash against the rocks at Cave Point, played miniature golf on a course that, though well-kept, looks exactly like the ones we played when we were kids ($4 and a free prize for the kids!), watched "Up" snuggled all together in the van at the Skyway Drive-In, checked out the yachts tied up in the harbors, caught fireflys, and meandered through the Anderson Dock museum.

One of the coolest experiences we had was when we came out of a store to find a crowd of people gathered around a small lake. A Golden-Crested Merganser duck mother had shoved her seven two-day old ducklings out of their nest in a tree 75-feet above the lake and was manically flying in circles and squawking in an effort to get the ducklings to come out of the lake and follow her 100 yards across a lawn, busy street, and parking lot to Lake Michigan. They eventually got the idea and trotted in a little group across the lawn towards the Lake as the onlookers dashed into the street to hold traffic while they passed. They all made it safely to the Lake and swam off behind their mother out farther than we could even see.

Best of all was the time just to be. Drinking wine with our parents after the kids went to bed, playing cards, talking and laughing, golfing, and just reconnecting with myself and as a husband, dad, son, brother, Uncle and son-in-law with Deanna and the boys, my parents, my sister and her family, and my in-laws. Priceless.

You know you have squeezed the most out of a day when, as we approached the door of our house one night and suggested to our usually sleep-adverse boys that the last one to bed would be a rotten egg (a lame motivational tact that has almost never worked), Owen responded "the last one to bed is crazy." Here are a few pictures:

Bonfires dot the perimeter of Eagle Harbor during the Fyr-Bal Festival

Eating outside with my Mom, Dad (obstructed view), Sister Suzanne, Brother-In-Law Bill, and lots of kids

Owen at sunset

Me and the guys.

The twins throw rocks, practicing for their fall-back careers as professional protesters.

Owen, with cousins Kurt, Emma and Kirsten. And a hammock.


Hayden takes his beach going very seriously.

Deanna and her mom on the car ferry to Washington Island.

The guys and their cousins on the playground at the drive-in movie theater.

Ice Cream at Wilson's!

Surfs (not) up!

Mom and two-day old ducklings.

Cooper after shooting the curl.

Dell-Tastic!

We spent the long memorial day weekend at a water park in beautiful Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. In my usual hardcore Vacation Dad way, I had the sleepy kids and sleepy wife loaded in the car and on the road prior to 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. At 10:04 a.m., an excited Owen announced his full transition into vacation-mode by declaring to all of us that he could no longer remember what our house looked like. In a sign that we had chosen our long weekend destination well, at 10:37 a.m., as we rolled past the first tacky and gargantuan water parks on the fringes of the Dells, Owen yelled "We're in Wisconsin Dells baby! I have to scream!"

By 12:30 p.m. we were waterparking it. You might say things went downhill (waterslide pun intended) after that, since by 2 p.m., I had a black eye (Owen's skull met my eye socket as he launched himself up out of the water for no apparent reason), a badly bruised foot (I'm a little fuzzy on the origins of that one) and was gagging into a toilet with motion sickness after Owen and I had a nasty run-in with one of those vortex water slides that sends you spinning around a giant bowl-like room a number of times before sucking you backwards down into the dark and then spitting you out of a tube back into the light. While the spinning portion of the ride that made me nauseous did not seem bad at the time, the drainpipe portion at the end definitely was a bit hairy, as I desperately tried to hold a screaming, low-swimming skills Owen in the raft during the dark backwards descent and our raft then flipped as we shot out into the pool at the bottom. Owen christened the ride "Mt. Death," announced to Deanna that it had "drowned" him. and quickly dialed down his water slide ambitions to a more manageable level.

The twins meanwhile, recovering from nasty colds, were still sporting ugly coughs throughout the weekend. While not an issue in the noise and chaos of the water park itself, it did not endear us in restaurants and shops, as I am sure a number of people subjected to their open mouthed fits were wondering why the boys were out and about with us rather than in a consumptive ward somewhere.

Other than those minor glitches, we had an awesome time. We took an olde-timey picture - formal western gear (including rifles!) in front of a stage coach, realizing a long-held but heretofore unvoiced dream of Deanna's to have an olde-timey family picture taken. We played mini-golf and arcade games. We took in the supremely cheesy Tommie Bartlett Water Show, which appeared to be unchanged from 30 years ago with the bizarre exception of a randomly inserted song by Lady Gaga. The boys played happily in the hot tub of our rented condo one night and ate mini-boxes of bad cereal for breakfast each morning (Cocoa Puffs still suck after 40 years!). We ate at a buffet where Owen fell in love with crab legs, a fine compliment to his long-established passion for shrimp. Swam in an outdoor wave pool. We watched bad TV, including one night when Deanna and I stayed up way too late after getting hooked on a terrible movie called "Head Over Heels" starring Monica Potter and Freddie Prinz, Jr. Feel free to google it - you can watch it free on the internet if you too have the urge to waste two hours of your life!

In one sign that the glorious cheesiness of the Dells may not hold sway over today's kids the way it did over our generation, when we suggested driving to the "Lost Canyon" attraction to take the half-hour horse and buggy tour through it, Owen asked why, if the canyon was really lost, we had a brochure about it and declared the whole thing to be nonsense. This moment of sober reflection was thankfully rare compared to his and the twins boundless enthusiasm at the rest of the trip, including their glee at playing on the ratty old mini-golf course that actually passed off a street light pole planted in the middle of a green as one of many "exciting" obstacles.

All in all, an awesome start to summer.

Here are a several photos of the trip:

Yes, the Dells actually ARE beautiful, despite the cheesiness of the town. This is the view from a river dock at our hotel.

Brothers and best friends.

Money saving vacation tip: While the kids are still young and gullible, you can convince them the oversized bathtub in your hotel room is actually a "waterpark."

How do you know you have crossed the border into Wisconsin? Giant cow statutes every 7 miles.

Apparently concerned about making a claim it could not back up, this business cautiously boasts that "Only in the Dells can you get a Polish Taco in a Caboose." Take your best shot, all you other polish taco stand in caboose owners.

Inside the polish taco caboose, the boys don railroad hats for a family photo snapped by the owner while our polish tacos were cooking. The hat makes Owen in particular look like he stepped out of a picture of Soviet youths circa 1936.

Me giving my usual rousing interpretation of "Bear Snores On," one of our all-time favorite children's books.

Polygamy, Yay-Yay & Poopa and More!

Due to my lengthy absence, I'll briefly summarize some recent events:

We recently spent a long weekend at the beach in Michigan, sharing a rented house with three other couples and a total of 10 kids, of whom Owen, at age 5, was the oldest. The sheer number of small children lent the weekend sort of polygamist commune feel, absent the sex with multiple women part. Actually Owen was more of the polygamist hero, as at one point there were was a scrum of naked little girls duking it out on an air mattress for the right to marry him. On a polygamist commune, he could simply have married them all - problem solved.

Owen is growing up before our eyes. He lost his first tooth and started kindergarten this week. Judging by my perusal of other parenting blogs, I will give birth to an obligatory reflective post on this subject sooner or later, but at the moment, it still appears to be gestating.

The most exciting event has been the fact that the twins have gone from worrisomely nonvocal, like two miniature Silent Bobs, to constant chatter in the space of a month. They are counting, laying down sentences, and, charmingly, referring to themselves as Poopa (Cooper) and Yay-Yay (their variation on Hay-Hay, which is what we most commonly call Hayden), which remind me of the sort of fun names rappers used to give themselves back in the 80's . If we could lure Spinderella out of retirement to round out the group, we might have something going. Maybe record a number called Hip-Hop-Hooyay-yay (featuring DJ Fresh Poopa).

Oddly, they both seem to speak with some sort of heavy working class Boston accent. In addition, Hayden has a rather high-pitched little voice, which has me constantly trying, for my own amusement, to teach him to say "miiiiiiseryyyyy" like Helium in the Strindberg and Helium cartoons. No luck yet but I'll keep you posted. Get it - blog, posted. All right, enough already.

Poopie the Brown: Fearless Viking Warrior, and other Wisconsin tales

Just back from a week of family vacation in beautiful Door County, Wisconsin, the Cape Cod of the Midwest. What is it about a family driving vacation that causes me to go into Dad overdrive? I was up at 4 a.m. the day we left and we had our sleepy charges on the road by 5:20 a.m. in a pounding rainstorm. From there, it was a week of big fun. Some highlights, for those of you who couldn’t make it:

1. MUCH NEEDED SLEEP: Including napping in a hammock with Owen;

2. MUCH NEEDED CHANGE OF SCENERY: This view from our rented house;

3. MUCH NEEDED SLEEP INTERRUPTED: We took advantage of the twin’s general level of exhaustion by plugging them into twin beds for the first time rather than cribs. The house we had rented was high on a bluff away from pretty much anything. Each night the peaceful silence was broken several times by thuds that back home would have been neighbors car doors slamming shut nearby, but here signaled a twin falling out of bed in his sleep once again, followed by a plaintive and confused wail. Apparently bed rails are necessary for our next trip;

4. VACATION WITHIN A VACATION: Owen decided the first day of our arrival that our rented house was a lodge in which Deanna and I were the proprietors and in which he was a guest. Once in full guest mode he played it to the hilt, at one point looking quizzically at his little brothers, then turning to me with a serious little face and asking “What did you say their names were again?”;

5. WIFE REPELLENT: The intensity of the mosquitoes caused me to buy some bug repellent that was so toxic it caused Deanna’s lips to go numb after she kissed me on the neck. When mosquitoes were in the air, romance was not;

6. PIE!!!: We gorged ourselves on all manner of pies in our cherry-orchard laden vacation destination. Peachberry: peaches, cherries, blueberries; Summerberry: raspberry, blackberry, blueberry; Carmel-Apple-Walnut: you figure this one out. Pie for snacks, pie for desert, and best of all, pie for breakfast!

7. BOILED WHITEFISH: Eating boiled Lake Michigan Whitefish drowning in butter after laboriously picking their bones out is not for everyone, it is true. Including Deanna, seen here in front of the pot of boiling fish with Cooper shortly before she bolted to a different nearby restaurant with her Mom for dinner, leaving some of the rest of us to enjoy this Wisconsin delicacy. Mmmmm, mmmm, good!

8. NORTHERN WISCONSIN HUNTING CULTURE TAKES HOLD: Spying a life-size fake sheep on the front lawn of a store, Owen spontaneously yelled “I’m hungry for lamb!” and proceeded to unleash a barrage of imaginary bullets into the sheep from close range with a pretend gun;

9. POOPIE THE BROWN - FEARLESS VIKING WARRIOR: The twins tried on plastic Viking helmets in the store of Al Johnson’s Swedish restaurant. While wearing the helmets, they both suddenly began dancing around, grabbing at their diapers and loudly chanting “I’m poopie!!!” in unison. The stoic Swedish crowd in the shop were unmoved by either the cuteness, or, to their credit, the stench, of what was a fairly amusing, albeit stinky, display.

10. MY MEXICAN BRIDE. Lastly, Owen and his 8-year old cousin Emma, going by their stage names of Aiden and Annika, concocted a 100-act play that included the death of their moms (causes never specified, but some suspect insecticide poisoning!), the subsequent adoption of the twins, now named Leo and Ian (pronounced, amusingly, Ion, as Emma/Annika has apparently only read this name and not heard it said out loud), and their dads subsequent remarriages. While my brother-in-law, I am told, had to search “every church in Illinois” before finding a new bride, I was apparently able to avoid all that pesky church-going by picking mine up in Mexico. One night, when Deanna poked her head into a room where the “play” was taking place, Owen looked at her and said “Mom, what are you doing alive?”

Anyway, as I adjust back to life back here in Illinois, with my new Mexican sweetie and my sons Aiden, Leo and little Ion, I will leave you with a couple of more pictures from our trip. Adios for now.