Day Two

Hello from Dale, Indiana! Today was our longest day of driving for the entire trip. We managed ten hours of actual driving which translated to a roughly 12-hour day after factoring in all the rest stops required with three little kids. After noting that there were at least six affordable hotel options at every exit we pulled in to the town we wanted to stop in and found . . . two. Eric and I are not hardcore fitness enthusiasts but when we've spent all day in the car we really, really like to get in a swim and a run, respectively. The obviously-more-affordable place offered us nothing along these lines so we tentatively went across the street and found that the rooms were about half price. Amazing! It is very nice to stay in a comfortable place with a chance to work out all the muscle stiffness from a day in the car.

A few observations from our travels today . . . Northern West Virginia is prettier than Southern West Virginia. The ride was pretty today but nothing like we'd seen on previous trips west.

Kentucky is gorgeous. I've been to almost every state that borders Kentucky but never even passed through a corner of the state. We loved driving through the rolling hills and horse farms. We passed an exit for the distillery that makes our favorite bourbon and we were so tempted to stop. But we didn't. I doubt there'd be much for kids at a distillery.

And almost immediately after passing into Indiana we saw a sign for a winery. Oddly enough, we weren't at all tempted to stop and sample Indiana wine.

I know I'm a dork for taking pictures of the state welcome signs but it is hard! I don't know why a sign looming so large in front of me turns out so tiny in the pictures.

My friend Sarah asked how we keep the kids busy in the car. We are far from experts on this. This is the third year in a row we've done a multi-day road trip like this and this year's is much more involved. We are good enough at maintaining sanity all around that we do this every year but there are definitely tense moments. The biggest thing is that we have drastically different parenting standards in the car. I all but ban noisy, battery-operated toys at home but they don't bother me in the car. We pack lots and lots of snacks trying to strike a balance between novelty and healthfulness. I bag them into serving sizes before the trip and the kids can have pretty much as many as they want. I save new books or magazines for the road. I hit up the dollar store for novel and highly entertaining trinkets. We sing, we dance, I act like a total goof ball to keep the kids laughing. William is generally happy if everyone else is happy. Joseph is fantastic at entertaining himself with the slightest occupation (he can draw for hours with a white board, for example) and Margaret requires pretty much full-time attention.

One thing we've found really helpful is to preserve our routine as much as possible. We do family prayer at the same time but in the car. I brought a few school books and we do a short school time in the car. The after lunch stretch is rest time. At the hotel we read the same chapter book we've been using for bedtime at home.

It all works pretty well for us. We'd much rather drive and be on our own schedule and actually see the country than fly and deal with luggage and juggling car seats and getting a wheelchair on a plane. And Eric and I always pack a nice beer to drink after the kids are in bed. So with that I'm off to enjoy a Belgian Ale before trying to finally get caught up on sleep.

Day One

The epic 2010 Summer Road Trip begins. Today's progress was somewhat unimpressive:

And:

We had originally planned to leave yesterday morning but Eric discovered a fantastic academic conference "on the way" that he had to go to. Sounds a little nuts, perhaps--hitting a conference at the outset of a long road trip--but I agreed that he should go after hearing the roster of speakers. So we left this morning instead and drove a mere five hours to Emmittsburg, MD. Eric actually interviewed for a job at the seminary here so we are familiar with the area. The town is also home of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton shrine. Mother Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized. The school where Eric currently teaches was founded by her nephew who named it after her so we definitely feel a connection. While Eric went to his conference the kids and I played outside at the Shrine which was, of course closed. We've been to the Shrine about six times and found it closed four of those times. The schedule is posted, we just never check it.

Emmittsburg is just a few minutes south of Gettysburg so we drove around there for awhile as well looking for cannons. Then we spent some downtime at our hotel in Thurmont which you have probably never heard of even though it is the home of Camp David. Our hotel really plays that up and we are in the "Associated Press" room though from the looks of it the Reagan Room would have been more comfortable. We haven't had any presidential sightings.

Despite my record two blog posts in one night I don't promise a daily log of our wanderings but it should be an interesting trip: Colorado to Minnesota and back to New Jersey. We are driving 4300 miles over nine days for a total trip of almost one month. We'll be hitting five states I've never been to and I hope we'll do enough sight seeing to warrant at least a few more installments here.

Road trip prep AKA Mother's Day

Mother's Day began quietly this year and without any specific plans. We got to Mass early and then decided to just go for a drive. We've been having fun exploring New Jersey. Prior to living here my entire experience of the state had pretty much been confined to cursing holiday traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. We've found that we actually live in a pretty neat place. In April we spent one misty, foggy day driving through the small mountains in northwest Jersey. So beautiful. So for Mother's Day we headed south towards the "Pine Barrens."

This area of the state is pretty undeveloped and we were just starting to wonder what we could find for lunch, "Live Bait" seeming like our only option when we stumbled across the Red Barn Cafe. It proved to be the most perfect and delightful location for Mother's Day brunch I could have wanted. A tiny, rustic dining room attached to a plant nursery. The food was incredible, the pies (which are locally famous) were among the best we'd ever had, and when it turned out to be a cash-only establishment the owner handed Eric her business card and told him to mail her a check (we found enough between us once we emptied our wallets).

From there we decided to drive down the coast a bit but we wanted to find some shoreline apart from the beach town culture. We ended up all the way down at Cape May which is the southernmost tip of New Jersey. The beach there is protected and beautiful and there was something for everyone.

Eric caught me on camera pointing out the huge ship off the coast to Joseph.

William still hates the water but is loving the sand.

If you ask, Margaret will tell you she's a "beach fanatic." She loves everything about the beach and will go into the ocean water in May, will lie on her stomach and army crawl through sand and loves running around like some kind of seaside nymph.

Joseph loved the long boardwalk. You can see his hair blowing back from the speed he was using to careen down the ramp. Joseph is doing his best to turn my hair gray.

And the requisite unimpressive shot of my oh-so-photogenic family.

At the end of all these adventures we realized we'd spent about 13 hours traveling which was a much longer day than any we'd planned for our summer road trip. So we ended the day feeling optimistic.

She can sleep anywhere

When I took William up to bed this evening both kids were outside playing. Our Brazilian neighbors have a six-year-old boy who had finally come home after being out all day and we let them have some rare after-dinner playtime to celebrate.

From the upstairs bedroom I could heard Eric say, "Time to come in, kids. I'm going to bump Joseph up first and then it will be time for Margaret to come in." I hurried downstairs as soon as William was asleep. Margaret has been begging for my presence at bedtime recently and I indulge her while working on knitting projects.

Downstairs I saw Eric and Joseph but neither heard nor saw Margaret. I said, "Margaret didn't fall asleep already did she?" Eric responded, "Check the camera."

This is what I found:

Don't worry, she'd been relocated to her bed by the time I saw the pictures.

What's William up to?

William is most definitely not up for walking. He has no interest whatsoever in getting around on two legs. But, as my grandmother said the other day, "Don't make trouble for yourself." He's easier to keep track of for now and I don't think there's anything wrong with him.

He has gotten super communicative lately. We're really trying hard with baby sign language because he is a shrieker. I've seen bystanders visibly jump when he opens his mouth to let loose and just today I ran into a total stranger on the street who recognized us from church and asked, "What was wrong with him on Sunday?" What was wrong was that he wanted to be outdoors and I had the gall to keep him in the church building. William cannot get enough of being outside. He wakes up in the morning or from his nap and gleefully points to the bedroom door. Then he points to the stairs. Then he points to the stroller. I put him in and he points to the door. So we've been doing a lot of this:

He's definitely not to the posing for pictures stage yet. He was neither asleep nor sad but very happily hanging out while the kids and I worked on a project. Sometimes Margaret pushes him around a bit. And I've been looking for a good excuse for a walk every day lately because he's so happy outside in the stroller.

One of the signs William has mastered is "more." It's always a big hit for "baby's first sign." He recently exercised his powers of communication to get lots of his new favorite food:

No, that is not my hand in the picture. I would never dream of feeding one of my children Nutella for breakfast.

Although William has definitely arrived at the demanding, shrieky stage of babyhood he is generally a really happy, incredibly sweet little boy. He loves to give hugs--especially to Margaret and I. He prefers to fall asleep cuddled up next to me with his arm around my neck, and we're all having a lot of fun watching him learn and explore.

And does it make me a really bad mother that I snapped a picture before rescuing him when he got stuck in the plastics cupboard today?

Sprucing up the Place

Ouch. Has it really been over a month since I last posted? Is anyone still reading?

We've been busy here surviving the last few weeks of winter and enjoying the spring (summer?) weather. I don't have any pictures to prove it but we had a wonderful Easter spending Sunday with a priest friend in Manhattan. We went to a fabulous Mass with wonderful music and then took a long walk in Central Park with about 4 million other people. We have a real knack for picking the most popular holiday destinations--we went to Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas Day.

At home we've been busy making our house work better for us. We briefly considered aggressively pursuing home ownership because we'd love a home that works really well for Joseph. But we decided instead to save up for awhile and make our current rental work better for us. We love this house and its location so we don't mind staying put for a bit.

Our biggest problem was that the kids were sleeping upstairs. Joseph is getting too heavy for me to carry up and down stairs and we want his bed and clothes and everything to be more accessible to him. We suggested to him that he could sleep downstairs in what we'd been calling the "playroom" which is right off the living room but he didn't want to sleep alone and we couldn't figure out how to fit two beds in there given the constraints of the piano and our "fireplace" (hating that thing more all the time!). It finally occurred to us to try bunk beds. We hemmed and hawed about Margaret being on top but finally decided to go for it. They were a big hit with the kids.

The beds were plain, unfinished pine. I don't particularly care for light-colored wood and they were getting grubby fast. I spent last weekend finishing them and I'm pretty pleased with my first try at staining and coating wood furniture.

Before:

After:

I think it's a big improvement and I'm excited to try my hand at some more wood-working and home improvement.

But, first . . . .

Putting the kids bedroom right in the main living space (there is just a double doorway separating this room from the living room) is awkward for using the living room in the evenings and it meant losing our "guest room." The futon is still in the kids room. We were also left with an empty upstairs bedroom. We moved our bedroom into where the kids used to sleep. It's a bigger room and the design works much better for us while William is still sleeping with us. There is room for our king-size bed, a toddler bed, three large bookshelves and two dressers. The room at the top of the stairs we turned into a sitting room with some on-sale IKEA chairs:

The braided rug was made by Eric's grandmother (Eric's mom made the one in our living room) and the bookcase has been around forever. I'm hoping to refinish it with the help of my new power sander :) The coffee table came to us courtesy of bulk trash day. Twice a month the city will collect anything you leave on the curb and one morning we were headed out to Mass and saw that our neighbors across the street had left out this perfectly good coffee table. Our furniture budget was maxed out after the beds and chairs but this room really needed something. Eric almost broke his back hauling this wood and metal piece up our stairs but it works pretty well.

Also gracing this room is the antique roll-top that has been in my family forever (and that door goes to the stairs):

And Joseph's old bed:

We intended for Joseph to use this bed on his bunk but when we tried it out we discovered that it was about one inch too long. I don't think it's an official "extra long." It was given to us by someone from Canada. I made a bunch of nice pillow covers for all our spare pillows and put a king-size fitted sheet around both mattress and box spring and it passes for a day bed. That's pretty much our only closet there to the right.

This big rearrangement actually makes us more guest-friendly. We can now have a single guest sleep in this upstairs sitting room. Or, if a whole family visits, we can move to the futon in the kids room and offer the entire upstairs to guests. I know you all loved that futon but I hope we can make it up to you somehow on your next visit.

Eric made me promise to finish making curtains before tackling any other furniture re-finishing/building projects. We have horrible vertical blinds in our house. They are so popular in this neighborhood but they are definitely not our style. I've been replacing them with simple curtains in most of the rooms in our house. The top picture in this post is our new kitchen windows. I have only our bedroom left to do. It's nice to make this place our own a bit more. And maybe all these projects will get me posting more often.

Help me out here . . .

I need help convincing certain adult members of the household that this baby just wouldn't look this cute in pinstripes.