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Family Vacation, Part I

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Our pretty huge tent. It served us well!

Brooke and I went with the rest of the Baumann clan to the Dominican Republic earlier in the summer, but we wanted to take a few days to go somewhere as a family with Meg.  As both of us grew up enjoying camping with our respective families, it seemed right that we’d make an attempt to do this with our two-year-old.  Thus, Brooke looked around for options up north, where the weather would be a bit cooler, but also a place near some urban center just in case Meg didn’t take to tent camping as well as we’d hope.  The general Minneapolis area was a logical selection, and Interstate State Park fit the bill for a place “close enough yet far enough,” just in case some of our plans would have to be scrapped.

So we left Edie, Sam and the chickens in St. Louis under the care of Rachel (thanks!) and headed up to Hannibal on Tuesday night to stay with Brooke’s parents.  We got up at 5:00 am (ew…) and started heading north the following day.  Meg did not go back to sleep, so I sat in the back of the Sportage to entertain her.  She was a bit grouchy until we stopped in Cedar Rapids for breakfast a few hours later.  After that, she was in a much better mood…and so was her Dad. :-)

We kept going, having lunch at a rest stop after crossing into Minnesota, then finally made it to our destination around 3:30 pm.  By the time we’d unloaded the car, got the tent set up, and started a fire to make some dinner, the rain was starting to move in.  While there was a 30% chance of rain that night, I don’t think we were anticipating it really starting (or continuing…) that early.

Thankfully, however, we got a pretty large tent with a screened section.

A view from "Meg's room," facing the middle portion of the tent, then Meg and Brooke out in the screened section.

We actually already had a tent (or two), but wanted to get one with two rooms so Meg could go to sleep before the two of us did.  We ended up with a Coleman Weathermaster Screened 6 tent.  I think “6 person” is a bit generous, but it will easily fit us and a few extra kids comfortably.  This particular tent came with the screened portion that was nice to have in a “light rain” situation.  You wouldn’t want to store gear in there, though, as it will definitely get wet.  The tent also came with a “hinged door,” making entry and exit from the tent easy and quiet.

The rain let up for the evening hours, but picked up again overnight.  It actually stormed to a degree, but the wind never got too bad.  We stayed dry, and that’s what was important!

Meg went to sleep around 8:00, which was shockingly easy to accomplish.  We bought a battery powered night light for her room and put out some blankets and a sleeping bag for her and that worked pretty well.  However, Meg woke up around 4:30 am and wouldn’t go back to sleep.  Brooke was able to get a bit more shut-eye, but Meg’s “singing” kept me up.  Yay…

Dutch oven cooking!

The next day, we went on a lengthy hike…but I’ll talk about that in another post.  I wanted to mention the dutch oven first. :-)

When I was in scouts, we had a full stable of cast iron dutch ovens of all sizes.  We used them to make just about everything, so I got a decent amount of experience using them.  Brooke will talk about each meal in separate posts as usual, but I wanted to briefly mention how it worked.  We picked this one up from Amazon for $25, which was pretty reasonable compared with what we saw at Cabela’s and other camping stores.  It holds 4 quarts, which is also a pretty good size for making most things ranging from soups to cobblers to biscuits and gravy. While you can put the oven directly on wood coals, we brought along some charcoal to help manage things a bit.  I got some charcoal going first, then put the dutch oven directly on the coals, and finally moved some of the charcoal onto the lid of the dutch oven, allowing for heat on the bottom and the top.  It worked about as well as expected, effectively heating the different meals.  I kinda wish we’d taken Brooke’s infrared thermometer along so we could get a better idea of just how hot it got in that oven, but believe you me, it got everything toasty warm!

That's Meg, holding a Pepsi bottle cap, transferring rocks from her shovel to her bucket...

The last thing I wanted to mention here was Meg and her rocks.  We brought some toys and books along for her, but we needed something to keep her entertained while we did cooking, cleaning, setting up the site, and so on.  Thankfully, our campsite was next to a gravel pad for parking the car.  First, we gave her a red 16 oz cup and asked her to fill it with rocks.  This entertained her for most of that first night.  The next day, she returned to this activity, but now did it with her sandbox bucket and shovel…and a blue bottle cap from a Pepsi.  She’d transfer rocks from the ground to the shovel to the blue cap to her bucket.

I can’t count all the hours this took up.

Generally speaking, we were able to keep Meg entertained better than we expected.  From books to puzzles to rocks to the aforementioned hiking trip, she actually held up remarkably well, only asking to “go home” on the first day, and only once.  Besides that time, she seemed to take to the “camping experience” quite well!  Her napping was non-existent, but we kinda expected that.  Thursday afternoon, we hung out in the tent for awhile to help her quiet down some and that was the best we could do.  While she didn’t sleep well that first night, she slept very well the second night.

There are a few more posts coming about our camping trip.  The hiking trip will be next, followed by our excursion to Minneapolis for a day!

On Negotiations and Stalling

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Be honest: does this look like the face of a devious individual to you?

I haven’t posted about Meg in awhile, at least, not directly.  She’s not quite two-and-a-half yet, but we’re already dealing with the wheels inside her head turning.

You know, the wheels trying to streamroll you…

Maybe a month ago, give or take, we noticed Meg starting to stall quite a bit.  Stalling before bedtime, stalling to get her clothes on to go to school, stalling to come inside, and so on.  This isn’t just a “ooooo, something shiny!” kind of distraction: this is an intentional, and deliberate attempt to slow down the inevitable.  She knows what’s coming and uses her cuteness to delay just about anything we need to do.  She’s gotten quite good at this as well, working it in so you hardly notice you’re allowing her to stall you into another song, or another story, or another cracker, or another drink of milk.

Furthermore, and more recently, she’s begun “negotiating.”  This one is a bit more rudimentary, I think, where she doesn’t really get the finer points of haggling, but you can tell she’s thinking it through.  Especially before bed, when she asks for “3 books,” specifically, knowing that “3″ is more than “2,” let alone “1,” so if she asks for more, she’s more likely to get what she asks, or at least an extra book beyond the one we usually read her.  The same thing goes for songs, as we sometimes sing to (or with) her before bed.  We’ll say “one more song,” we’ll sing it, and then she’ll ask for another, specific, song.

She’s also been known to ask for “moneys for ma ewefan-t” [elephant], a mechanical bank that makes an elephant noise when you add a coin to it.  ”Three moneys!,” she’ll say.  So yes, I’m already having to bribe my child.  Thankfully, at this point, she doesn’t really know the difference between a penny and a quarter…

When any of these things don’t work, however, she’s begun throwing fits, though now, it’s a little easier to stop them (to a degree…it’s never “easy”…).  Meg doesn’t cry, per se, but she definitely yells.  Loudly.  Now, I end up having to count to five and threaten a time out…and right around “four,” she stops.

So yeah, my nearly 2.5-year-old is “gaming the system.”  I guess I wasn’t expecting such things until she was at least three, if not four.

In some ways, of course, it’s nice to see this in a kid her age.  She’s learning to challenge authority, to question things, to problem solve, to “get around The System.”  At its core, it’s simple adaptation: where you learn you don’t have to simply accept what’s happening in front of you and you can attempt to change it, or at least influence it.

I guess I just didn’t expect it in a nearly 2.5-year-old.

She could teach some adults out there a thing or two about adaptation. :-)

Meet Me At The Muny

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The view of "Aladdin" from our seats.

We lived in St. Louis for 5 years and never actually went to The Muny, an amphitheater at Forest Park known for its stage productions during the summer.  Thus, for Father’s Day this year, “Meg” got us all tickets to go see “Aladdin,” a musical based on the 1992 Disney movie.

Let’s all allow “1992″ to sink in for a moment…

Regardless, this was going to be the first time we’d ever tried keeping Meg up far past her bedtime.  We tested the waters a bit on the 4th of July, getting her to bed around 9:30, and that seemed to be pretty close to the limit.  Muny productions typically start at 8:15 pm (weather permitting), so we knew we wouldn’t be able to finish the whole thing, but we thought it’d be a nice family outing, and something else to test Meg’s reaction to large crowds and big events.  All told, she did a pretty great job.

"More cheese crackers, Mama?"

We ate at a Mexican restaurant before going to Forest Park to walk around a bit.  The stroller ride helped keep Meg entertained (who opted to not take a nap that day, mind you…) while we waited to go into the amphitheater.  By the time 7:45 rolled around, we were heading in, found our seats, and Brooke opened up some snacks for Meg.  The weather started out pretty hot, right around 90 F, but a front moved in north of St. Louis that dropped the temp to 80 F in about 10 min.  By the time the show started, it was surprisingly comfortable!

The show itself was “alright.”  Perhaps it’s my affection for the 1992 movie, but the changes that had to be made to the story in order to make it work on a stage weren’t the ones I’d have gone with.  The primary offender was the replacement of Abu (the monkey) with three “friends” of Aladdin, who served as narrators, to some degree, and also comic relief.  They, and the Genie, had “updated” some jokes for the 21st century, making some of the dialog a bit more topical, but many of them were less amusing for me than they intended.  By the time we left, I felt like we’d hardly even seen the character of Aladdin, and seen far more of the “friends” and of Jasmine (who did a remarkable job, sounding very much like the character from the movie).  The Genie, also, was not Robin Williams, and to me, tried a bit too hard to not differentiate himself from the example set 20 years ago.  He did alright, but again, I’m just used to the Genie I grew up with.

This production also added songs to the show.  Some of these songs, supposedly, were originally intended for the movie, but were then dropped.  A few of them, though, seemed like they didn’t fit all that well (which is maybe why they weren’t in the movie in the first place).  The musical performances were good, overall, but again, there was probably a reason some of those were dropped 20 years ago.  I could have gone with less music, personally.

Meg was getting pretty tired (and louder…), so we left at Intermission.  Appropriately, Intermission was set at the point in the story when the Genie turns Aladdin into a prince, so we got through a good chunk of the story.  Daddy got to carry Meg out, sleeping, on his shoulder, and we had her home and in bed just before 10:00.  She did a good job!

All in all, I think we all had a good time.  It was a good family outing for us, despite the late-ish starting time!

The guy in back was running really, really fast...

July Garden Update

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The midwest is still going through something of a drought, and while the weather has certainly improved since having 10 consecutive days over 100 F, we still haven’t gotten much rain.

That said, the garden and chickens have mostly survived.  With regards to the garden, the peas stopped producing about a month ago.  I think we ended up with more peas than we got in Iowa last year, but not by too much.  We’ve been getting green beans for the past few weeks as well, likely getting somewhere between 10 and 12 pints-worth (Brooke has canned 8 pints thus far).  There are still more coming on, but we can already tell we won’t get anywhere near the (proportional) amount we got last year in Iowa.  Same goes for the tomatoes.  You can see in the picture above that the plants on the left are considerably smaller than those on the right.  The right-hand ones seem to be a “cherry tomato” variety, as they’re pretty small, but still taste pretty decent.  The ones on the left are the romas, the variety Brooke prefers using for canning.  Sadly, while we’ve got some on there, it sure doesn’t seem like we’ll get all that many.

Aside from beans and tomatoes, we’ve still got a good number of green peppers coming on, as well as some squash and cucumbers.  Brooke’s having to water the garden somewhat often just to keep things alive, and we’ve got a good deal of weeding to take care of sometime.  I guess, considering the weather this summer, we’re pleased with the amount of stuff we’ve gotten, but it’s still a difficult shift from last year’s bounty.

The chickens aren’t laying eggs yet, which is quite disappointing, though not terribly surprising.  Last year, the surviving chicken didn’t start laying eggs until right around now, but it’s also worth noting that chickens generally don’t like laying eggs in crazy hot weather.  I’m checking every morning to see if they’ve started laying, as the weather has cooled a little bit, but no dice yet.  Believe you me, I’m ready for some fresh eggs!

They’re nice and fat now, though, and they enjoy running around our yard.  We probably still need to clip their wings again, but aside from one (brief) escape attempt from the large, white chicken, they’ve been pretty content to stay in our yard.  The extreme heat has kept them in shady spots, though, so they tend to stay put.

Regardless, it’s a far cry from last year’s haul, but we’re making do!

A Brief Reflection on Turning 30

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I remember when my Mom turned 30.  Kristen and I were out playing in the back yard and we saw all our aunts, uncles and cousins from the Plochberger side of the family driving up and quietly moving toward the house to surprise her.  Infamously, Kristen, not understanding what was going on, rushed to head inside to tell Mom that everyone had showed up.  I had to stop her before getting inside and, as she was 4 at the time, it wasn’t too hard for me to catch her.  The Plochberger side of the family has traditionally been very good at donning black clothes, putting up signs saying “Over The Hill,” and making a remarkably big deal of family members turning 30, largely under my late Aunt Sara’s guidance.

Now, it’s 23 years later and it’s my turn.  Now that I think about it, we haven’t had a 30th birthday in the family for quite awhile (Mom was the youngest in the family with brothers and sisters far into high school at the time she was born, so we had cousins turning 30 before I was even 10) and, as I live in St. Louis and they all live a few hours away, we won’t be celebrating like that.  Heck, practically no one I know celebrates 30 anymore like that, as people live to be much older now and 30 is almost like any other birthday.  Even 40, to some degree, is a non-issue.

It seems like, in the past 20 years, 30 became the new 50.

Makes me wonder, in another 20 years, if 50 will be the new 70…before I even get there…

In any case, it will be weird to say that I’m in my 30s, but in the end, I don’t see it as a huge shift.  There was obviously a time that I did, but now that I’m here, it doesn’t really mean much.  The only thing that sticks out in my mind is the fact that I’m now 30 and am still, technically, “in training” for my career, though this is commonplace in the field and to be expected.  It’s also a bit different in that I remember my Mom’s 30th birthday (and so does Kristen), but Meg won’t remember mine.  Again, a sign of the times when the average age of getting married and having kids is getting later and later.

Other than that, it’s just another year with two new digits to write, rather than just one.  And that’s fine by me!

It is rather disappointing to have this day fall in the middle of the week, though, as it makes celebrating a bit more difficult.  Brooke, Meg and I will go to the Bottleworks tonight, methinks, which is always a good time, so far as I’m concerned.  This past weekend, my family came to town to help celebrate (that, and Father’s Day, of course), and that was a great time.  In the end, it’s still more fun than last year, as we’re closer to friends and family here in St. Louis, and it’s a birthday that feels at least a little more meaningful than 29.

Regardless, I’m ready to hit this particular milestone.  At the very least, I don’t have to say I’m in my 20s anymore and can try to act like an adult.  ;-)