Four Boys and a Rainbow

I can't remember when my fear of driving first started to surface. I know that car accidents were probably at the top of my list of worries as a little kid, but I don't think I was particularly concerned about getting in an accident myself. I worried if anyone was late to come home, and I worried in anticipation of my parents going on long car trips without me. I didn't know anyone who had died in a car crash, and this made it seem all the more likely that it should happen to someone I knew sometime soon. After Lukas and Jasper were born, on our drive home from the hospital, my views on driving and cars became even more extreme. Suddenly driving around in cars seemed like the craziest idea ever. I felt so vulnerable watching the cars whiz past as I sat squished between the boys' car seats. I turned my anxiety into motivation to learn as much as I could about car safety, and even went so far as to become a child passenger safety technician (aka a car seat dork) to ensure that I knew as much as I possibly could know about how to keep kids safe in the car. In retrospect, the class was probably not the best idea since it exposed me to all sorts of dangers that I had yet to think about on my own (not to mention the crash videos). Lately, with all the biking I've been doing, I've become even less enthusiastic about driving. I pretty much loathe it. But, I understand that it does give us the freedom to up and leave for a distant destination whenever we feel like it. And sometimes that is nice.

On Monday we loaded up the minivan, and mentally prepared ourselves for the five-hour drive to Maine. We timed our trip to coincide with Zeben's nap, and hoped that he would sleep through the majority of our time in the car. Luke and Jaz were once again plugged into the trusty portable dvd player, and Lena and I were eager to continue with our David Sedaris marathon. And, for once, it all worked out perfectly. Zeben fell asleep and stayed asleep. Luke and Jaz watched movies and happily munched on snacks. Lena and I lost ourselves in "When You are Engulfed In Flames." It was the best car trip ever until it started to rain. And then it started to pour. The sky really seemed to have turned into a river. We slowed to 40 mph and wondered if we should pull over like so may of the other cars on the highway. But that didn't seem like a particularly safe choice either (I heard the stern voice of my CPS class instructor in my head, "NEVER pull over on the side of the highway. It's the stupidest thing you could do!"). The rain did let up a bit after a few minutes, and driving no longer seemed like an insane choice, though it remained somewhat dicey for a couple of hours (I think we were traveling with the storm).

We arrived at the cute little cottage on lake Damariscotta with our nerves shot, but with 3 happy kiddos who hadn't made much more than a peep during the entire ride. We didn't stop once! Pretty amazing. We spent the next day playing in the sun and water with Lena's parents, her twin sister Addie, Addie's husband Max, and their sweet baby, Tucker. We got the first picture of all four boys together, decked out in their anti-sun, protective clothing. Unfortunately, our kids couldn't take their eyes off of their tiny cousin long enough for us to take a picture. So, this is the best I got:


We got to take the kids out kayaking, and they did lots of frog catching and splashing around in the lake. In general, though, parenting was not particularly easy on this vacation. Tensions were high between the kids and we saw a lot of the "old" Lukas (pre-Gluten-free Lukas), despite the fact that I'm sure he didn't have any gluten. He was pretty much a nutcase for much of the trip. I started thinking about all of the things that adults like about vacations: a change of scene, a change in routine, a chance to eat different foods, a chance to try new activities, a break from regular life . . . and realized that these are all the kinds of things that can make life much less pleasant for kid, especially a highly sensitive kid like our Luke. He thrives on routine and predictability, no wonder a trip to a new place can throw him out of whack. So, despite the fun times with water and sun and family (I think the best part was a game of hearts that the 6 grown-ups played on the second night), it wasn't exactly the most relaxing vacation we've ever been on.

During dinner on the second night, the sky opened up once again and emptied itself on the lake. After dinner, the sun tried to come out for a last hurrah, and with it came one of the most amazing rainbows I've ever seen. It was actually two full rainbows, one was a bit brighter than the other. They made full arches in the sky over the lake. It was pretty breathtaking. I was bummed that the kids had just fallen asleep and were missing out, but not enough to go and wake them up! There will be more rainbows to come, I'm sure.

Our drive home was much less eventful, weather-wise (thankfully), yet much less peaceful in regards to the children. There was much less sleeping, much more whining, a stop to get gas, a stop to pee and nurse, and a stop to clean up the puke that carsick Zeben had drenched himself with. I ended up flipping his car seat around to face forward for the last 30 minutes of the drive, which is pretty much an absolute last resort for me (car seat safety freak that I am). But he was just so upset and I think it was making his carsickness worse (at least, he was perfectly happy once we flipped him). All in all, not the most enjoyable ride. I can't imagine that we'll be attempting that again anytime soon (although being on the lake in Maine did make us fantasize about taking the kids canoe camping on a different lake in Maine at some point), though who knows when inspiration will strike.

FamilyBed®, The Game

Sometime last week, Lena and I happened upon all three kids, happily playing together all by themselves. To say that this is a rare occurrence these days would be an understatement. Generally speaking, Zeben can play well with either of his big brothers, one-on-one, Luke and Jaz can play well with each other, but when all three of them are trying to play the same game, it usually ends in tears pretty quickly. Zeben's tears, to be more specific. He just can't help but "wreck things" when Luke and Jaz are trying to play something more sophisticated, and his wrecking usually results in him getting locked out of the room, or at the very least shoved aside and yelled at.

So, when Lena and I realized that the kids had been playing alone together for 20 minutes or so, and we hadn't heard Zeben crying, we thought we better check on things. Had they locked him in a closet? Thrown him out the window? Thankfully, no. The scene that awaited us on the third floor was just pure sweetness.

The kids were playing "Family Bed." They had built a bed out of their big blocks, and outfitted it with pillows and blankets, and they were all snuggled up together in it.

If only reality was some sort of reflection on the game version of Family Bed, and the kids actually snuggled each other in our bed, then Lena and I might even get to sleep next to each other. In our real family bed, the kids never snuggle each other (at least not on purpose), and each one requires the proximity of a mom (so it goes kid, mom, kid, mom, kid). But maybe this new game will inspire them to try something new one of these nights . . .

Speaking of trying something new, we're off for a little two-night vacation to Maine, where Lena's parents have rented a cottage on a lake for the week. We will definitely be figuring out some creative sleeping situations, and we're bringing a tent just in case that ends up being the easiest solution. Though, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe we should have just packed some of the kids' big blocks instead.

"Bakfietsing in the Rain. . .

. . . Just bakfietsing in the rain! What a glorious feeling, I'm happy again . . . "

Yesterday afternoon, we decided to bike into town for our special summer solstice lunch. It was a hot, sunny day, but I knew there was a chance of rain in the forecast. I debated about whether or not to bring the rain cover for the bakfiets. It's a truly fabulous design--if it's raining--but there's no way to store it on the bike in order to be prepared for the chance of rain. And it was just too hot and sunny to put it on the bakfiets as a preventative. So, I decided to take the risk of rain, and left without the cover.

Sure enough, after lunch it started to sprinkle, and by the time we got on the bike it was definitely raining. When we were half-way home, it started pouring. Thunder grumbled loudly in the sky. The kids screamed. And it all felt fabulous and free. I wished for windshield wipers on my sunglasses, but otherwise I was totally happy bakfietsing in the rain.

I hummed "bakfietsing in the rain," while the kids made up a song that went something like, "quick, quick, don't catch a drip!" Jaz exclaimed, "rain is getting in through the holes in the top of my helmet!" And Lukas lamented, "rain is dripping down my spine!" And the baby didn't say a word. They were all fine. So . . . rain cover, shmane cover? Or, at the very least, "don't worry, be happy."

Blast Off Into Summer

Today we celebrated the Summer Solstice, a highly anticipated event in our house. Pretty much as soon as we get done celebrating the Winter Solstice, the kids start asking "how many more days until Summer Solstice?" In the past we've gone all out and thrown a huge party with a homemade sun piñata, relay races, water games, and a big bonfire. This year we kept it mellow and didn't have a party at all. Our house in town isn't quite as perfect for hosting a big summer celebration as our house in the hills was. But we still managed to have a wonderful welcome-to-summer kind of day.

A couple of days ago, we made smoothie pops (yogurt, strawberries, bananas and fresh-squeezed OJ) in anticipation of solstice. This morning, the kids got to eat them (one great thing about homemade smoothie pops is that the kids really can eat them for breakfast and it's totally fine).

We used some new rocket-shaped popsicle molds, and the popsicles turned out fabulously! We've been through a few sets of popsicle molds in the past few years (which is unfortunate since this is the kind of thing that you buy, in part, to cut down on packaging and waste, etc.), and none have been quite this great. I hope they last! The rockets were so cool that Luke and Jaz hesitated before taking the first lick.

Zeben, however, has no idea what a rocket is, and wasted no time before starting in on the slurping.

We went out to our favorite restaurant for lunch, and it was delicious. Afterwards, we walked around town a bit, and there was definitely a summery kind of energy in the air. Our town is a really fun place to hang out in the summer, at least when it's not 90° outside.

For dinner we had some classic summer favorites: grilled hot dogs (organic uncured chicken), grilled zucchini and summer squash (from our CSA), and salad (also from the CSA).

All in all, it was an excellent start to Summer.

3 Babies in a Bakfiets

This morning Zeb and I took the bakfiets (still unnamed, sadly) downtown for music class. After class, we headed over to the little playground in the center of town where Zeb met up with two of his best pals, Elijah and Sina, who also belong to the one-and-a-half-year-old club. The bakfiets proved to be nearly as entertaining for the 3 toddlers as the playscape did. Really, they should advertise this unforeseen benefit--no need to buy a climbing structure for your backyard! No need to go to the park! Just put the kids in the box and watch them SIT!

So guys, where do you wanna go?

It looks like something fun is happening over there.

Are we moving? Can you see where we're going?

Let me see if I can figure out how to make the pedals go.

I'm outta here, guys. This bakfiets is not going anywhere.

Maybe the climber IS more exciting than the bakfiets.


Not for me. I'll be right here, watching you play.

What? Can't a girl have a moment of peaceful relaxation
in the bakfiets without someone taking a picture?
I finally have it all to myself!

Home Away From Home

On our drive out to Cape Cod last Wednesday, we plugged Luke and Jaz into the portable dvd player (which we bought in March in anticipation of our 28 hours of travel to and from New Mexico), played some music until Zeb fell asleep (it took about five minutes), and then popped in the first cd of David Sedaris' new book, "When You Are Engulfed In Flames." We love listening to David Sedaris. Especially on long car rides.

There was one timely quote that made us both laugh out loud. Sedaris is recounting some hilarious stories about a woman, Helen, who lived in his old apartment building and was always giving him unsolicited advice. She has just warned him that if he works on New Year's Day, he'll work every day of the year.

"I wondered for a moment if she was right, and then I considered the last little truism she had passed my way: you won't get a hangover if you sleep with the TV on. She also claimed you could prevent crib death by making the sign of the cross three times with a steak knife.
"If you're camping, could you use a Swiss Army knife instead?" I asked.
She looked at me and shook her head. 'Who the **** goes camping with a baby?'"

This little camping trip was our third time camping with Zeben. The first time he was about 6 months old, the second time he was 9 months old, and now he is 19 months old. And truthfully, he's the easy one to take camping since his food (he's still mostly breastfed) comes with us wherever we go. Really, as long as the weather is good (which we made sure of this time), camping with our three kids isn't very difficult at all. We make sure to bring a lot of stuff with us. Our minivan was packed (someday we'll go camping by bakfiets, but not this time).

Lena went out and got a 100-quart cooler just before we left, and it made all the difference in the world (we had never tried to bring perishable food with us before). We filled it with cut-up fruit, veggies, yogurt, cheese, and deli meat, and it was enough to feed the kids the whole time we were gone. We called it our "fridge away from fridge." We brought so many clothes and towels that there was no worry about anything getting wet or dirty. We brought pillows, and sleeping pads, and sleeping bags, and blankets in attempt to recreate our Family Nest in the tent.

When we got to the campground, we drove around and picked the most private of all the available campsites. We put up a shield of towels on the clothesline for extra privacy (when we first set up our tent, there was a very young, childless couple staying on the campsite adjacent to ours, and I did feel a little bit bad for them that we were crashing their romantic getaway. They left the morning after we arrived). We ended up with a very sweet and cozy home base.

The tent version of the family bed:

We put Zeben to sleep in the stroller at night, and then brought him into the tent when we went to bed. This is pretty much exactly what we do at home (at home he falls asleep on our backs, but it was too buggy at night to do that on the campground).


We kept all of the necessities (food, clothes, diapers, etc.) in the car so that we'd have them wherever we went. We stayed at the beach right up until bed time, got the kids ready for bed (teeth brushed and in pajamas) in the car, and then drove back to the campsite just in time for them to crawl into the tent and go to sleep.

Waking up in the morning in our home away from home was almost exactly the same experience as waking up in our real bed.

The one key difference is that the campground has pretty strict "quiet hours" from 10:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. In the absence of a clock (and in the presence of lots of early morning sun), our kids woke up around 6:15 every morning in the tent. So there was lots of "shhhh, quiet voices, remember" as we quickly got them all into the car and headed back to the beach for breakfast.

I admit to fantasizing that we had a Harry Potter style magical tent (the kind that looks like a regular tent on the outside, but on the inside, it's like a huge cottage), or maybe even just a real life "condo-sized" tent, but the fact is that our simple one-room tent works just fine for us. So, who the **** goes camping with a baby? We do, and quite happily.

A Thin Slice of Heaven

The majority of my happy childhood memories are beach memories. We spent a week or two on Cape Cod every summer until I was 12, and a week or two every winter at my grandparents' house on Captiva Island in Florida. The beach has always felt like home to me. Nothing makes me happier than a day sitting in the sand, watching the ocean. Perhaps my parents anticipated this when they gave me my middle name ("Beach").

However, because I'm of the fair-skinned, freckled, blue-eyed variety, I've never been much of a sun person. I burn easily, and seek out shade whenever possible. Much of my beach experience involves sitting under an umbrella with a hat and sunglasses on. But I still love it. When I was little, I'd often spend my under-the-umbrella hours fantasizing about my future babies and how much fun it would be to take them to the beach. And living this fantasy really is like a thin slice of heaven. Being at the beach with my kids is the most amazing thing ever. I could watch them playing in the sand and the waves all day, everyday, and be completely fulfilled. We spent the last four days enjoying the sandbar, digging moats and building castles, jumping over waves and searching for creatures and treasures of the sea. If it weren't for the sun factor, I really could have stayed out there forever. As is, I can't wait to go back.

Who loves the beach?

We do!

Whose is whose?

Luke and Jasper's biggest challenge these days seems to be coming to terms with the injustice of their life circumstance. Nothing is ever fair, especially not when it comes to their material possessions. For the first couple years of their lives, we pretty much believed that having two of everything was required for sanity. We quickly learned that to have only one of any given toy was worse than to have none. It's not that we didn't want the kids to have to share (clearly, they had been learning how to share from the moment they were conceived), it's just that the constant struggle over things wasn't worth it. Plus, they really seemed to enjoy playing with their toys more if they were both playing with the same thing. The joy would exponentially increase as they watched each other enjoy a certain object while simultaneously enjoying it themselves.

Jaz and Luke, Cape Cod, June 2007

Then, sometime around their second birthday, it all started to shift. It wasn't enough to just have two matching somethings. The boys wanted to have ownership over a particular something. We had to start writing their initials on their matching toys so that they could be sure of which one was theirs. This solution worked for a couple of years, but around age 4, it began to fail.

Luke and Jaz no longer enjoyed having all the same toys. They wanted to have different toys. But having different toys came with a whole new set of problems. One of the two toys would inevitably be "cooler" than the other. And then they both wanted the cooler toy. And it wasn't fair. One kid would scheme up a way to convince his brother to trade, and the kids would take turns being devastated about the situation. This is pretty much where things stand today. Nothing is fair, and nothing can ever possibly be fair. Getting two of the same toy is not a viable solution because then they won't know whose is whose (labeling isn't an option anymore). But some toys are just too cool for one kid to have and not the other. So they decide that they shouldn't get it at all. But that's not fair either.

The past few days have been blurred by impressive heat and Luke and Jasper's ongoing squabbles over toys. What belongs to who. Whose toy is cooler. What toys they wish they had instead. I should mention that the vast majority of our family toys belong to no one in particular, and are open-ended toys that encourage joint play. But for some reason, it's the few small things (the Playmobil guys, the Thomas trains) that are the most prized possessions and the source of most of our toy trouble.

And now we are packing up the car with 5 days worth of food, our huge tent, enough beach towels for a family of 12, sleeping bags and pillows and air mattresses galore, and 4 outfits per kid per day. We are bringing 3 yellow buckets and 3 blue shovels and leaving the rest of the toys behind. We will soak in the sun and the ocean air and 4 days without material objects and the conflict that they provoke in our kids.

I'm going to guess that we'll have at least an hour of peace on the beach before we hear about a certain rock that's more beautiful than another certain rock, and the injustice of the ocean for only tossing one such perfect rock up onto the shore. Good luck to us.

Kid's Eye View

Yesterday was my bakfietsiest day yet! At 8:45 a.m., I loaded Zeb into the bak and headed downtown to grab some bagels on my way to Luke and Jasper's t-ball game a few miles away. Since it was my first time bakfeitsing to t-ball, I thought it best that I just bring the baby since I wasn't quite sure about how long it would take me (and I didn't want Lukas and Jaz to be late). Almost the entire route is on the bike path, and it's almost entirely just slightly uphill. You don't really notice that it's uphill until you realize that you never really have an excuse to coast (and when you turn around to go home, you just fly back). It's somewhat aggravating. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see that it didn't take me too much longer on the bakfiets than it takes me on my regular bike (at least with only one kid in the box!).

I dropped Zeben at t-ball with Lena and the boys, and then pretty much right away had to turn around and bike a few miles back to town, where I was supposed to be doing car seat inspections for the Parents' Center starting at 10:00 (I got there at 10 past . . . bakfiets time?). Bakfietsing without any kids in the box was not quite as much fun (I just love getting to talk to them while I'm biking and getting to see how much they enjoy it), but it was still pretty fun. It was my first chance to try out the 8th gear. The bakfiets can go really fast once it gets going. It felt great.

After I got home from doing car seat checks, I loaded Lukas and Zeben into the box and we headed over to the library.

I gave Luke my camera and told him to take pictures of whatever he wanted to on the ride. Here are the results:






It's such a different view in the front of the bike than it was riding behind me in the trailer (where he could see the back wheel of my bike and my legs). It's no wonder the kids can't get enough of this. The hill that wiped me out on Friday was already so much easier just one day later (granted, I had one less kid in the box). Luke cheered me on the whole way up, a la "The Little Engine That Could." On the second hill, he said, "wow mom, we're going up a hill and you're, like, hardly even going slow!" I did still have to switch into 1st gear for part of it, but not the whole thing. Progress.

The only downside to having captured the kid's eye view from the bakfiets is that now the kids want to use my camera all the time. Which I'm not entirely psyched about. Though it is pretty fascinating to get to see things the way that they see them. I just might have to get them their own cameras, lest they destroy mine (as they have been known to do).