Defining moment

C had to work late at the museum on Friday night. In the car on the way home from school, L started making pouty noises when she remembered this. "No whining in this family," I said. She said, "I'm not whining, I'm grumping." I said, "No whining or grumping." She said, "I'm not grumping, I'm growling." I said, "No whining, grumping, growling, or complaining in this family." She said, "I'm not growling, I'm talking back." Then she cracked up.

Tasting menu

This morning:

C: Milo, what do you want for your birthday dinner tonight?

M: Macaronicheese....and pizza...and dumplings...and chickens on a stick.

Camping

We went camping with friends at Grayson Highlands State Park. Lucie has been itching to go back ever since last year's Labor Day weekend trip. How fast a year goes by.


The great climbing tree.




The great free-for-all in the Stinehelfers' enormous tent.


Danny cooking breakfast.


Milo clowning for Molly in the meadow.


They kept poking the thistle and saying, "It's sharp."


Setting off to hike the Rhododendron Trail.


Milo had a hard time not eating all of the huckleberries and blackberries that he saw along the way. The walking stick helped.


Molly posing before our destination -- the rocks at the top.




Lucie at the top.


Milo also conquered the summit.


Claudia wasn't the only child who got carried on the way down.


Alex brought his model rockets.


The rocket veered over the campground. We had a moment of excitement wondering if it would set anyone's tent on fire. We never found the rocket.


We ate s'mores, of course.




Last fling on the swings.



Many more pictures are in the Boo Blog Annex.

Flavor fav

L: Milo, what's your favorite color?
M: Um... chocolate.
L: Okay, brown. What's another favorite color?
M: Um... cherry tom... cherry tom... cherry pie. Cherry cake.

Train of thought

This morning Milo had one of his chronic nosebleeds. C was holding him in his lap while Milo held a tissue to his nose waiting for the bleeding to stop when they heard a train horn.

C: Milo, do you hear the train? Where do you think it's going? Charlotte? Memphis? California?

M: [taking the tissue from his nose and looking up at C] I think it's going to the train station.

Meadowmont Swim Club

Woo hoo. We went to a birthday party for one of Lucie's friends at the Meadowmont Swim Club.




The kiddie pool was really great. Milo hung out on the shore...


... and at the deep end.


Lucie loved the waterslide. Milo was scared at first, but I told him that, once he tried it, he was going to say, "I want to do it again! I want to do it again!" He thought about that for a while, then said, "I want to go down the slide." As soon as we hit the water, he said, "Do it again! Do it again!"




Cake


Blue teeth


Milo and Eleri doing the happy dance done by Sherrill's kids when they encounter each other out in the world.

More pictures are in the Boo Blog Annex.

Ice skating

We took Lucie and Milo ice skating for the first time today. Our friend Maureen joined us on the ice, while Craig kept the bench warm.


These skates looked cool but were really dull. Lucie and I exchanged ours for some old, beat up skates that hadn't been rented in a very long time and were much sharper. That made things much easier.


Lucie skating with Maureen. We were so proud of her persistence, and of her progress. She was really going great at the end.




Milo was reluctant to enter the rink at first. He stood in the doorway and said, "I scared I will fall down." But after watching everyone for a while, and thinking about it, he said, "I want to go on the ice." Milo also made amazing progress.



Both kids appear to be hooked and want to go back again soon.

Lucie's birthday

Lucie's birthday being in August, each year I've wished it were possible to do some kind of water play -- a slip-n-slide, a sprinkler or small pool for the kiddies -- but we just don't have the yard for it. This year, nature provided the perfect shower.










The nice woman at Whole Foods designed this cake around the lizard we supplied.


Who gets which piece?


Etsub is cute.


Milo is tough.


Henry is Angus Young.

More pictures are in the Boo Blog Annex.

I can't know

One of Milo's charming expressions is "I can't know." Tonight, for example, when he appeared wearing his bike helmet, after C and K could not locate it in multiple scourings of the garage, we asked, "Where in the garage was your bike helmet?" Milo answered, "I can't know." It means, basically, that he is pleading the fifth. Milo explained, "I say, 'I can't know' when Sherrill is mad to me."

What we've been up to

Reading


Milo's been listening to story records from my childhood. He especially likes "Peter and the Wolf" and "Jack and the Beanstalk."


Lucie and Milo say they are tired of blueberry pie.


First day of second grade (July 21st)


Painting

Philosophy

Lucie went on a philosophical tear in the kitchen last night. I can’t recreate it, but it was an intelligent and passionate attempt to express the inexpressible, and it filled me with love and pride.

It started with my talking about something, and Lucie having that weird experience of the opacity of language (a common experience for her). “Words are just sounds. That’s all they are – just sounds.” I said something like, “Yes, isn’t language amazing, how through making sounds we can communicate our thoughts to each other.” Then she just went off on every unanswerable question. “Why is there anything? I mean, WHY is the universe here? How did it get here? And what about time? Time isn’t ANYTHING, but we’re IN IT…” We talked about how time is a measure of something relative to something else, a measure of change or passage, and Lucie insisted that time has to have been here forever. I mentioned that the author of the book I am reading argues that time precedes existence, and that led to her trying to describe the impossibility of nothingness, with tears in her eyes. It was all very cosmic, and I wish I had a transcript.

Tony sent Lucie an intelligent book about philosophy for children, which I haven’t read to her yet. It is time to pull that out, I think.

I am currently reading Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty, in which he explains his work to introduce the arrow of time into classical dynamics and quantum mechanics. He uses Poincare’s discovery that resonances in physical systems lead to nonintegrable equations in classical dynamics as a starting point for arguing that a statistical description of these systems, rather than a trajectory-based description, is fundamental. He argues that a probabilistic description of nature is not the result of a lack of knowledge or precision of measurement on our part, but the only possible description of our evolving universe, and that determinism is therefore untenable. I still don’t get this, but maybe Lucie will be able to explain it to me one day.

Music and yacaputas

We had a fun time on July 5th with some of our friends. There was a guitar-uke jam session followed by an amazing yacaputas performance.