Vacationland!

We went to Maine! We picked up Duchess (fresh from three weeks in Sweden) in the airport in Boston and headed north to visit family, experience the heat and humidity and mosquitoes of an East Coast summer, and have some classic Southern Maine adventures.

We spent a week by Sebago Lake, with appropriate amounts of swimming, kayaking, beach-sitting, shuffleboarding, ice cream-eating, LL Bean trips, and tennis. 

We played a round of traditional family Extreme Croquet, which Papa Big Cook won, AS ALWAYS. Antarctic Uncle gave the girls impromptu driving lessons in a stick-shift beater over the grass on his property. We got to take a sail on Casco Bay. We ate fish and chips and lobster rolls and soft-serve ice cream. It was a delight.

And then we spent half a day in Boston, revisiting a few places and recreating some photos from a visit a decade ago. 

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Winding down the school year

 Time has passed! It was relentlessly cold and rainy here for a long time, and then very terribly hot for a week, and now we're back to a normal late spring, and everything is so green and flowering and lovely. A lot of things have happened. 

Duchess is wallowing in intense sentiment as she wraps up her high school experience. She chose a college, had a great time at prom, finished up debate season, ran at a fancy track meet in the fancy Eugene stadium that apparently runners care a lot about, walked the Wildwood Trail in a day, published her last edition of the school newspaper, picked up her graduation gown... all the things. 

Meanwhile, Skipper was busy hating track, playing ultimate frisbee, turning 14, and going on a long-awaited 2-week school trip to Osaka (where she loved the orderliness, the built environment, the rice for breakfast, and the vending machines, and disliked the lack of fresh green produce). True to form, she returned from Japan with piles of candy to share with us, but no photos of herself, so you'll have to settle for a photo that she took in Japan.

Here are miscellaneous photos of my smirky girls.

 

Miscellaneous updates

 It is not snowing. Just rain, and more rain, and we've all reached the end-of-Portland-winter moment when we just want to see some goddamn sun. 

Everything else continues as normal. Both kids started track, which means a lot of running and burpees and squat jumps and whatnot in the rain for now, but presumably will get slightly less tortury over time. I remain puzzled over the fact that both my children have signed up - voluntarily, multiple times - for running sports, something I never would have done and never will do because running sucks and what even is the point of doing a team sport that isn't collaborative? However, I recognize that they are not me, and also I am looking forward to seeing what events they end up doing. I hope Skipper chooses long jump for one of hers.

Duchess experienced her first-ever not-a-drill full school lockdown this week. It turned out to be a false alarm (shots fired a block away from the school during a period when students were going in and out of the school led to a lockdown until police arrived and got a handle on things), but it was pretty harrowing for the kids and staff, all of whom had to consider, while huddling in their darkened, locked classrooms for an hour, the possibility that they might be about to die. And since they were all holding their phones, all their loved ones got to spend an hour considering that possibility, too. It wasn't great. School was actually cancelled the following day, which feels both like an over-reaction and also totally appropriate. 

Duchess also has now been admitted to four colleges. She'll have all the offers/rejections by April 1, and then she'll have a month to decide, but I think she's comfortable that she'll end up in a good place even if all she gets from now on is rejections. 

So the spring is shaping up to include a lot of track meets and difficult decisions for Duchess, and please no more lockdowns. 

Summer

 It's summer. It's a weird one. The day after school ended, Cook and Skipper went to Detroit, realizing a longtime dream of Skipper's. They watched three baseball games at Comerica Park, and of course the Tigers lost every game badly. Fortunately, Cook and Skipper were emotionally prepared for that outcome, and took it in stride. They did some other touristing - they saw the Little Caesars global headquarters, and looked across the lake to Canada. They seem to have had a very good time. They even got to attend a game with one of my excellent cousins, who schlepped up from Champaign for the occasion. He's a White Sox fan, but Cook and Skipper forgive him. While they were gone, Duchess and I ate snacks for dinner. It was delightful.

Once the dust settled from that adventure, Duchess started work (as a camp counselor at the Dungeons-and-Dragons-in-the-wilderness program she used to attend herself), and moved into her boyfriend's family house to dogsit for them while they were in France for 2 weeks. She found this much more taxing than she expected - long days of non-stop child-wrangling followed by dog-wrangling and house-keeping feels like a lot. And then a crow got stuck in the chimney at the house, and died slowly and horribly over three days (in a heatwave) while we slowly figured out a) that something was in the chimney,*b) that it was a crow, c) that it couldn't get out, d) which organizations/companies will remove a live crow from a chimney,** e) that the company that WOULD remove a live crow from a chimney couldn't come onto the property without signed permission from the homeowner, who was asleep in France at the relevant time. It was awful. And then their refrigerator died, and Duchess and Cook spent hours cleaning up the mess. The lesson here is NEVER HOUSESIT.

And then we sent Skipper to Sweden. By herself. For a MONTH. She was very clear-eyed in the planning that it would be challenging and lonely for her, but she wanted to do it. However, as the date approached, she felt increasingly terrified, and so did I. But she set her shoulders and got on that plane, and launched into the unknown. She is spending a couple of weeks couchsurfing with our generous relatives, including a long stint at the family summerhouse, and then attending a 2-week Swedish language camp in Stockholm. (I'm going to Sweden for the last week of her tenure, to see friends and family and do some touristing in Stockholm before retrieving her.) Here she is (photo courtesy of my mom) with another of my excellent cousins. 

And here is that same cousin with me and my brother at the summerhouse a long time ago.

And here she is with my mom (photo courtesy of my excellent cousin).

We miss her terribly, and it's really weird being without her. Duchess is still housesitting, and Cook and I are getting a preview of empty-nesting (except that Duchess comes over for dinner and drops off her dirty laundry, and needs our help with crows and other crises). It is clear that I need something to do with myself in the post-children-in-the-house era; I think I need to invest over the next few years in figuring out some hobbies.

* Please, for everybody's sake, CAP YOUR CHIMNEYS.

** Chimney sweeps, for example, won't remove a live bird.

MORE vacationing close to home

We went to Herron Island for the weekend - a weird private island deep in the crevices of Puget Sound. We did a lot of not very much. We read, we watched movies, we played dumb games on our phones (well, I did, at least), we walked around the island, we admired the probably problematically friendly deer, we messed around at the island's park where they have pickleball stuff (we do not actually know how to play pickleball) and a big field full of deer poop, and we paddled about on a flotilla of paddle-things. It was pretty great.

We went to a regatta.

Crew parents tend to be heavily involved. There are a lot of kids* on Duchess's team, and the regattas involve a lot of events and last all day for multiple days, and everybody needs to be fed and organized, and the parents do a lot of that. And they go to regattas, even the ones in Canada or California. We do not. So this weekend, when Duchess had a regatta locally, we attended one day. A short day. And we left early, and Duchess got a ride back to the boathouse with a friend. But we were there! We ALL got up at 5am, even Skipper, who was fairly pissed off about the whole thing, and schlepped to the lake.


















Duchess had two races back to back,which meant that she had to row out to the start, race 2 kilometers, row back to the beach, wait while four girls got out and four other girls got in, and then row right back out to the start.

A better parent than me was out in a launch, and so we have these photos.

Race #1

Race #2

Race #2, at the end... look at that face.

Actually, look at all their faces. As far as I understand, the ENTIRE POINT of this sport is to fill your WHOLE BODY with lactic acid and then row really hard for five more minutes. The appeal of this is lost on me. I will go the long way round to avoid lactic acid. However, the combination of intense physical effort, teamwork, AND spending the whole day messing around with your teammates is apparently compelling for Duchess. So there are more regattas in our future.



*A hundred? Five hundred? I don't know. They feel like an army of giants.

Duchess has a lot to say after rowing practice.