Cleveland Trip: Day 4 (Monday)

We packed up Monday morning, and checked out of the hotel. Our stuffmeter pretty much balanced from the way there, since we had brought two big containers of consumables (snacks and drinks) but then we’d bought a similar volume in board games and books.

Our only big mistake on Monday was in forgetting that it was a national holiday. We had planned to go to the John Glenn NASA Visitor’s Center, something we were all looking forward to (except maybe BabyGirl, who really only looks forward to her next meal). We drove up about ten minutes after their opening time of ten, only to see the gates shut. Well, duh.

So, we did the only thing we could have done. We went shopping at the Border’s Outlet and at an educational supply store nearby. Then we had a quick lunch, and it was goodbye, Cleveland.

JediBoy was talking non-stop about coming back “next year, and the year after that, and every year until we’re too old to come.” We have grand plans for next year already, including visiting the Glenn Center not on a holiday, heading up to Lake Erie for part of one day and possibly taking in a major league baseball game. But definitely going back to visit the stingrays and Jane. I was so happy that JediBoy had such a fantastic time.

I’m glad we went. It was a lot of travel and a lot of money, but the experience of being in a crowd full of other light-skinned mommies holding GuateBabies was so fulfilling. I truly believe that it’s a big part of human nature to seek out that which is similar, and being in a place where for one day our family looked like the norm was a renewing experience. Being able to have that time to renew once a year is going to be amazing.

Cleveland Trip: Day 3 (Sunday)

I know you’re both out there, waiting with baited breath for the next installment of The Cleveland Trip. But really, I’m just living in abject fear that I’ll always be four days behind in blogging and never catch up, so here goes.

On Sunday morning we slept a bit. JediBoy and I were up around 8 and BabyGirl woke PisecoDad around 9. We had planned to go to the Natural History Museum which opened at noon, but in browsing the local paper and the tourist brochures from the lobby, we happened across an ad for the under-renovation Museum of Art. It happened that the Museum of Art (which is on University Circle with the Natural History Museum) opened at 10 and it did have just one exhibit open now.

The exhibit was Arms and Armor from Imperial Austria! PisecoDad and JediBoy were beside themselves. JediBoy in particular thought it was amazingly cool to see real armor and real weapons, a suit of armor for a horse and a “real lance they really used in a real joust!” He liked the different kinds of helmets, the black-and-white armor, the two-handed swords, the crossbow, and a very cool display of pikemen’s armors on mannequins set up as if for battle. Unfortunately, no photography at all was allowed inside the museum, but we did pick up the postcard book from the exhibit.

After the art museum, we headed back to the Natural History, where we’d parked. The kids played outside on the stegosaurus, which made JediBoy think of the book, Can I Have A Stegosaurus, Can I, Mom, Please? and made me think of The Enormous Egg and Mr. Beasley on the Mall.

We went inside, and JediBoy was beside himself to find the juvenile t-rex, Jane, right there! (Or is she a nanotyrannus? It’s up for debate.) For him, this was the absolute best part of the day.

JediBoy did greatly enjoy other parts of the museum - the first hall looked like this:

We spent a very long time in there as JediBoy was fascinated by the animals and wanted to read their names and talk about them. He was also captivated by the dioramas - something he’d seen in the movie Night at the Museum but which our local museums don’t have. Each habitat area had at least one diorama with animals (and occasionally people) which we pored over in great detail.

From there we headed into the hall of dinosaurs (and other fossils and prehistoric stuff). Again, JediBoy was absolutely loving it. We looked at all kinds of dinosaurs and the skull of a full-grown t-rex. BabyGirl spent a long time (and lots of luscious energy) racing around, and around, and around the allosaurus display.

When we left the hall of dinosaurs, we went two separate ways. JediBoy and I wanted to see a planetarium show, and PisecoDad agreed to stay with BabyGirl elsewhere. JediBoy and I enjoyed the planetarium show - his first ever - which was geared towards kids and spent quite some time on local (to Ohio) star positions and constellations for this time of year. JediBoy was very impressed when the planetarium drifted to full dark.

While we were in there, PisecoDad took BabyGirl on the outdoor path, which had native animals on display. She particularly liked the turkeys.

In case you’re wondering why she’s spending so much time in the stroller… it had to do with her deep interest in removing any and all footwear whenever possible!

Both museums were very interesting and we had a delightful time.

We returned to our hotel room about 3:30, surprised that my cell phone call to a friend who had hoped to come up and meet us hadn’t been returned. We checked our messages at the hotel, the messages on our home phone, even my email (via my DS browser) but had no luck.

The kids were wiped out and we decided to take the time for a siesta, not pile anything else onto the day. By that time, PisecoDad said, if our friends were in Cleveland, they would get ahold of us, and if they weren’t, it was too late to start the trip! I was a bummed, but snuggling with JediBoy and watching movies on tv helped.

We headed back to the mall area that evening to have dinner. We wanted to go to the Border’s Outlet bookstore but it closed at 6 and we were just a few minutes too late. We drove around instead, checking out the other stores in the area and taking a main road (but not the highway) back to our hotel.

Sunday was a much more solitary day than Saturday, which seemed to fit PisecoDad’s temperament better, and we went to sleep that night tired but not exhausted.

Cleveland Trip: Day 2 (Saturday)

Forgive the long wait for more on our fun trip to Cleveland. Yesterday we spent the day running errands, mowing the lawn, taking BabyGirl in for another set of shots, unpacking, and goofing off in general. This morning I’ve been having a little trouble with flickr so I’ve been waiting for my pictures to upload. Here we go…

Saturday morning we were up bright and early, if a little groggy from a bad night’s sleep. We headed out to our big destination: The Cleveland Zoo. EAC, our adoption agency, was having a huge reunion and zoo day. We spent the morning looking around the zoo, then had lunch at our pavilion and marched in the EAC “Coming to America” parade around 1:30.

We started out watching the elephants. BabyGirl had never seen real elephants before, so she stayed curled up in the stroller, shaking her finger at them and telling them NO.

We went all through their Australian zone, seeing koalas, kangaroos and wallabies and walking through an open air lorikeet cage. JediBoy enjoyed that, but started to tire out towards the end, so I told him he could share Baby Girl’s stroller and snacks.

We saw a long line for a tram, but since we’d never been to the zoo before, and the maps they give out are not topographical maps, we thought it would be easier to just walk over to the aquarium / gorilla area. (Don’t ask me why the aquarium and gorillas are in the same building.) We found out very quickly why the line for the tram was so long, because the long, desolate and steep hill puts the hill at our local zoo to shame. Fortunately, PisecoDad was up for a turn pushing the “double” stroller.

When we finally made it up the hill, we enjoyed the aquarium. Both kids wanted to be held up at once, and of course my arms were full of precious camera, so PisecoDad had double duty!

JediBoy was absolutely thrilled to see the one male gorilla who wasn’t hiding. He had been talking for weeks about seeing a gorilla at the zoo, and proudly beat his chest at it. He also found out just how big a gorilla’s hand is.

We were starting to get hungry for lunch, back at the bottom of the hill, so we smartly waited in line for the tram this time! Here we are, getting ready to ride down the hill. Baby Girl loved having the wind in her face.

We had a nice picnic lunch at the pavilion - hamburgers and hot dogs, chips and potato salad, yogurt and applesauce for the kids. The place was PACKED but we had several nice conversations with the other families who were sitting at our table and nearby.

After the picnic lunch it was time for the parade. We spent a long time milling about, waiting for the parade to step off. Families congregated by country (we had signs and flags raised to show us where to go). We loved this part of the process - even though we were waiting, we had many great conversations with the other Guatemala families around us, including meeting Tara and Donna.

Finding our place in the crowd:

Making friends…

Meeting Devon…

and Logan. JediBoy and Logan invented some bracelet-tossing game that got them laughing hysterically.

As the waiting stretched on, a lot of dads found themselves in the same position…

Finally ready for the parade to begin!

I learned quickly that it’s hard to take good pictures of a parade you are part of, but it was a huge and wonderful sight. We stopped all those other zoo-goers in their tracks. After the parade, we gathered at the amphitheater for a short presentation by the agency director and representatives from several countries, including Guatemala - and those folks had some very positive things to say about adoptions restarting there soon. Although PisecoDad and I enjoyed all the great news, BabyGirl was done in.

After the parade, we continued to wander the zoo on our own, seeing lots of fun animals and having a great time on a gorgeous day. We made our way over to the “Touch!” exhibit, which has a pool with stingrays and small sharks that you can wait in line to touch.

The whole experience was very typical of our life with JediBoy. When we first saw the exhibit, he was excited and insisted we go in. But as we waited in line, the doubt crept in. How could we be positive the rays wouldn’t sting or the sharks wouldn’t bite? He became more and more afraid and was soon vowing he would NOT put his hand in that water one bit.

It’s so hard to keep your cool in the face of your child’s adamant refusal to try something new. We did our best, though, reading the signs about how the barbs are clipped off like toenails, telling him stories of other touch tanks at Sea World and PisecoDad swimming with the rays as a Boy Scout in Florida. When we got ready to go in, he was willing to say he would stay and watch the rays, but he wouldn’t touch them. We asked him to rinse his arms anyway, in case he changed his mind.

As I kept my hand deep in the water, hoping for my chance, JediBoy did slip closer and closer to me, so that he was pressed against my side when I finally felt my first touch. He could sense my excitement, and see all the other kids loving it, and so he tentatively poked his hand half an inch into the water.

Those of you who know him know where the story will end. I continued to try constantly to talk him into it and talk past his fears. Eventually he had his hand deep in the water and stopped jerking it out whenever the rays swam by. Pretty soon, he felt the magic velvet touch of a ray on his palm, and he was thrilled, ecstatic, and hooked. We stayed for fifteen more minutes, he begged for (and got) a plastic ray on the way out, and talked about almost nothing else for the rest of the day.

The whole experience mirrored, for me, the ongoing discussion on several blogs this month about homeschooling methods: radical unschooling versus child-focused but parent-led schooling. Radical unschooling doesn’t work for our family (at this time) both because JediBoy is truly not good at self-regulation (and loves movies and video games) and also because he is often fearful to try something new, or to try something he thinks he can’t do. He knew his letters at 18 months and his letter sounds at 2, but he wouldn’t try to read out loud until he was almost 5. He could crawl at 6 months and cruise at 9 months but he wouldn’t let go and try to walk until he was 15 months.

Touching that ray was a fantastic experience for him, one he will remember always. But if I had let him make his own decision with no badgering (because really, both PisecoDad and I were keeping up a verbal barrage trying to talk him into it), he would not have had that experience. I would never have forced his hand into the water, of course, but I did everything I could to talk him into it. And he loved it.

After that wonderful time in the Touch! exhibit, we worked out way back out of the zoo, stopping for an hour in their Rain Forest exhibit just outside the main gate. We’d had a great time and we were very tired and ready for dinner.

We drove an exit or two past our hotel to get to a mall area. We had a little dinner in the food court and shopped at the mall’s two brick-and-mortar board game stores, a little slice of heaven for us. We even stopped at a Half Price Books before heading back to the hotel. It was a long day but so much fun!

Cleveland Trip: Day 1 (Friday)

We had a wonderful trip to Cleveland!

I know I won’t have time to post about it all at once, so I’m starting with Friday.

We were, miraculously, packed and ready on Friday morning and left the driveway at 9:04 (we were shooting for 9 am, that’s close enough!).

The kids rode okay in the van. It took us about six hours to drive. BabyGirl took a couple of gigantic naps, and JediBoy was thrilled to find a new-to-him Pokemon Ruby cartridge in the bag I packed for him.

We stopped a little more than halfway to have lunch, and got to our hotel about 4:30. JediBoy was especially tickled to be staying in a hotel for only the third time in his life, and BabyGirl had made a GuateTot friend before we even left the lobby. Both kids liked the elevators and the luggage carts.

We brought our luggage in, cleaned up a bit and changed clothes so that we could head out to the party at our adoption agency. BabyGirl wore one of the dresses from the open air market in Guatemala City and JediBoy wore his Guatemalan soccer set.

We weren’t sure what to expect from the open house, and we were pleasantly surprised. They had a bunch of things set up outside - bounce houses, snow cones, basketball, sidewalk chalk, balloon animals, and so on.

The whole building was open for us to peek around, and in the basement was the real party with food and dancing and a visit from some of the Guatemalan officials. There was lots to do and plenty of people to chat with. It was a very nice way to spend the evening, especially getting to meet our adoption case worker and the director of the agency. We are so grateful to the agency for helping us become a family of four.

After the party, we headed back to the hotel, where we faced the only truly unpleasant stretch of the trip. First, we ordered a pizza that was promised to come in 45 minutes but came an hour later than the time promised. Once we’d eaten and were ready for bed, BabyGirl had a terrible time trying to sleep, crying and waking and screaming most of the night. The only solid hour of sleep I got was between 7 and 8 in the morning. The next morning, we figured out it was probably because she’d had pineapple in her fruit cup at lunch. The only other time she’s had pineapple, she broke out in hives. Sure enough, Saturday morning she had tiny hives on her face and arms, poor thing. Benadryl to the rescue! We got much more sleep the other two nights.

More details to come later.

Hanging Out

Sometimes I get slow with posting because we’re all sick, or I’m blue, or something.  Yesterday and today, though, we just haven’t done much!  I’ve been researching things for our trip to Cleveland (okay, plotting routes to the best-looking game stores!) and doing laundry that I can pack away, and other pre-trip things.  The kids have been playing with blocks, construction paper, real watercolors, swords, knights, a basket of balls, noisy toys, quiet toys, and reading a mess full of books.  We’ve just been hanging out at home - the kids did seem to be coming down with something last night and this morning but seem better tonight, after lots of rest and orange juice.  I want us all to be healthy for the trip.  You’d be amazed at how excited JediBoy is to “GO TO CLEVELAND!”  It’s only the 3rd time he’s stayed in a hotel, so it’s pretty exciting for him.  I’m sure that next Tuesday you’ll be seeing plenty of big trip-updates.  For now, pardon our quiet.

Toi-Dough

So I’m sure you’re wondering, “What happened to all that toilet paper?”

This morning we used some of it to make toilet paper dough or, as Nate called it, Toi-Dough.

We put about 4-5 rolls worth of toilet paper into a big, shallow plastic bin. Then we grated Ivory soap into it - somewhere between 4-5 bars, in the end. The kids loved this part - I’d picked up graters at the dollar store so they each had their own. We only had a few small scrapes, and no real blood, so I think they did very well!

Leigh helped BabyGirl work on a bar of soap too.

After the soap was in there, we added about 1/4 cup of Borax powder for each bar of soap / roll of toilet paper. The kids each wanted to dump in their own scoopful. I slowly poured warm water over the mixture as they started smushing it together - this is the part that’s more art than science. I kept adding water until they seemed satisfied.

Then we played, and played, and played with our toi-dough. Leigh was brave enough to do some of the mixing, but quickly stepped back to let the rest of us play. We made mush-balls and mush-men and drew our fingers through it and passed it from hand to hand. It was warm and smushy and smelled great. Eventually, Nate and Emily decided they needed to test it with their feet.

After that, things got a little too wild and crazy, and the foot-stomping kids started flinging and tossing. We wound up with toi-dough on the cabinet, the wall, the ceiling… the hallway, the back patio door… in hair and all over clothes, and pretty much everywhere. JediBoy was more than done by then - he doesn’t like the foot-squishing part so much - and BabyGirl and Anna had both been more wary of the toi-dough from the beginning. But Nate and Em were in their messy, messy glory.

Game Night: Egypt & More

Why can’t I get “Walk Like An Egyptian” out of my head? We had an Egyptian/Mid-Eastern themed game night last night!

Leigh asked to play Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, so we built a theme around that. Leigh cooked up some seriously yummy dolmas, hummus and spanikopita (and why didn’t I remember to take a picture of the food?) and PisecoDad insisted on stopping by his favorite diner for a tray of baklava.

I rummaged through our game collection and was amazed to find so many titles that fit the theme!

We had: Alhambra, Tutankhamen, Babel, Old Mummy, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Settlers of Catan Historical Scenarios I (Cheops and Alexander the Great), Source of the Nile, The Arab-Israeli Wars, The Last Straw, Aladdin’s Dragons, Egyptians and A Line in the Sand. Jer brought Civilization to add to the mix.

The group of seven adults split easily to play games. First, the guys played a shortened game of Civilization while the gals played Alhambra for the first time. Then we shuffled the groups and one side of the table played Cleopatra while the other end played the Cheops historical scenario of Settlers of Catan. We felt pretty accomplished at getting in four great games!

Alhambra had been on my wish list around Christmas and my birthday, and though I got it for my birthday, we just hadn’t fit it in before last night. I had heard great things about the game, and there are many expansions published for it, so it’s obviously pretty popular.

Alhambra is a tile-laying game. Each player is trying to build the most impressive Alhambra by placing new building tiles around the starting tile. The twist is that tiles in the market are placed at random on four squares, corresponding to four different currencies (four colors of money cards). In order to buy a tile, you have to have the right amount of money in the right color.

Once you’ve bought a tile, you place it with your others, following a set of rules. All buildings have to be right-side up and reachable from the starting fountain tile “on foot” - without going off the board or over a wall. (Some tiles have walls on 1, 2 or 3 sides.)

There are six types of building. The game has three scoring rounds in which players are awarded points for having the most of one type of building, so it’s important to try and collect more of the type you already have. Points are also awarded for having the longest continuous wall - which is how Leigh eventually won this game!

It’s an interesting balance between saving, spending, collecting and wall-building. Alhambra falls in the lighter end of our collection of eurogames - the mechanics are fairly simple to learn, but the strategy may take a while to develop. Robin, Leigh & I really enjoyed it, and we’re now curious about the many expansions.

What were the kids up to? Oh, they tried on JediBoy’s old Thoth costume,

played with some of JediBoy’s Egyptian figures and toys,

and maybe someone, an unnamed and innocent person of course, handed them a 16-roll package of toilet paper, with which to become mummies and otherwise frolic through the house.

It doesn’t get more fun than that!

Fierce First Base

We had a nice, lazy afternoon. JediBoy and I spent a large chunk of time out in the yard, watching ants and slugs, while BabyGirl slept. She kept sleeping, so we sorted through one shelf of books (not a whole bookshelf, mind you, just the single shelf) and made room for new books while weeding out those we don’t enjoy. We played a little Disney Trivial Pursuit (finishing a game from this morning) and cuddled on the couch together, each reading our own books. Then BabyGirl woke up and wanted to spend more than an hour in the high chair, eating away.

This evening, JediBoy had his third t-ball game of the year. He had to wait until the fourth and final inning to get another chance at first base, his favorite position. Here he is, our fierce first baseman.

Vocabulary Word for the Morning: Prosthetic

JediBoy came downstairs this morning while I was still looking over my Google Reader, at the moment that I was reading this morning’s Mental Floss post on animal prosthetics. He asked about the dolphin with the rubber tail in the first picture:

and I wound up reading the whole article to him. He was fascinated and thought some of the moments were funny - like when George the African Grey ate his prosthetic leg. We had a nice little discussion about several of the elements of the story - the word prosthetic, why a dolphin can’t swim without a tail, what titanium is, and so on. Okay, so I glossed over the blurb about “Neuticles” at the bottom of the story! I just didn’t want to go there.

As I was getting breakfast ready, JediBoy branched out from his usual artwork (Pokemon and Star Wars characters) to create these two charming animals:

an elephant - with a bag filled with wood shavings to extend one leg

a happy dolphin in a tank

Then one of those too-cute-not-to-tell-but-don’t-tell-him-I-told-you moments came…

JediBoy said to me with pride and excitement, “Do you see? Do you see his pathetic tail?”

Hope you have a happy morning in your house too!

Wordless Wednesday