Apt. 11D

Sunday at the Lakes

Sunday morning, Steve and I debated what to do with the day. Nothing was on the schedule. Instead of lazing around in the house, we decided to take a spontaneous adventure. It was too hot for the city or the beach. The town swim club wasn't interesting. We decided to go find a lake to jump in.

We quickly did a little research on the Internet and found a public beach at Lake Hopatcong, which is about an hour from the house. Forty minutes later, we were on the road with towels, bathing suits, and bag of digging tools for the sand. We arrived at Lake Hopatcong at 10:30, however state troopers had blocked off the entrance to the park and were angrily waving people away. The park was already filled to capacity. We pulled over and asked the trooper where to we should go. He shrugged and yelled at us for impeding the traffic flow.

Other than that one public beach, the rest of Lake Hopatcong was reserved for private residents. We drove away and I furiously searched for another public beach on my iPhone. Steve remembered that there was supposed to be a lovely lake at High Point State Park, which is in the northwest corner of the state. We reset the GPS and headed northwest. 

We wound our way through rural highways of New Jersey past antique shops and farm stands. Some towns were cleaned up with money from vacationing New Yorkers. Other towns were sagging and depressed.

It took us another hour to get to High Point, which made for a longer adventure than we had planned, but the kids amused themselves in the backseat. Jonah read three chapters of a Harry Potter book, and Ian counted gas stations, which are his latest obsession.

We paid $10 for parking at the park and briefly chatted with a smart, young girl who worked for the Parks Department. Steve thinks that the best and brightest college grads are working for the government right now, because that's the only sector that is hiring.

We changed into our suits at a stony bathhouse by the lake. Not totally clean, but it had paper towels and toilet paper.

The park was packed with extended families grilling ribs and hotdogs at camp sites surrounding the lake. We hadn't brought food. Our plan was to take a quick swim and then find a burger joint on the way home. 

We wound our way past the grillers to find a nice place by the water. The boys dropped the bags and went running headlong into the water. It was warm from the weeks of 90 degree weather, but there was a cool breeze in the air. It was much better than frying up like bacon at the Jersey shore.

After a dip in the water, the boys concentrated on making sand creations. Other kids came by to chat. There was a nearby playground to amuse them and a snack bar a few feet away.

After a couple of hours, we had to head back home to get ready for the workweek. Another smart young Parks Department official asked us if we were going for the day as we pulled out of the parking lot. There was a line of cars waiting to come in. This park was also filled to capacity.

With the downturn in the economy and this record heat wave, people are leaving the cities to use the public parks. It's an affordable getaway for people who don't have swim club passes or beach homes. Instead of blowing $100 at the Jersey shore for parking, food, and beach passes, we spent $10. My kids were surrounded by a snapshot of the entire state, rather than the regular group of families at the town swim club. However, public parks, like every other vital service in this state, are under pressure from Governor Christie. With the long line of people needing relief at our public parks, we really should be putting more public money into parks, rather than coming up with schemes to save money.

Happy Meal Combat

I have a hidden drawer in the coffee table where I stash all the old Happy Meal toys. Every once in a while, the toys come out and rumble.

Summer Parenting

I was outside admiring the new porch on the front of our house, when my neighbor drove by and beeped the horn. We laughed about all the driving that happens in the summer time. She has five kids, so she joked that she should wear a chauffeur cap to make a point.

The kids have been safely ensconced in camp for the past few weeks. Ian has discovered a new love of dodge ball. Jonah is growing tan and strong from swimming and basketball. His hair is bleaching out in the sun and a spread of freckles covers his nose. Without that horror of homework hanging over our heads, the boys have plenty of time for drawing and reading. It's really perfect.

Every morning before the camp bus arrives, I make them take off their shirts, and I shoot their backs with a cold blast of sun screen. They leave with a brown bag lunch and a brief wave.

I've been on the computer most of the morning researching some last minute activities to keep them busy when camp gets out in a couple of weeks. I found a robotics class at the community college, cartooning classes at a local art school, a week long soccer program, but we might not do any of those things. Maybe we'll just read in the morning and laze around at the swim club in the afternoon.

It would be great if the whole year was like this.

A Goin' To Camden

As suburban parents, it's our duty to attend cheesy fund raising functions for the schools. I've sat through a crappy ventriloquist act, five-hour sit down dinners where I was stuck next to the mute moms, a contest where you make a sculpture out of discarded bread at a beefsteak social, and several reinterpretations of "The Night Before Christmas" as teary PTA presidents thanked the ladies.

Perhaps the silliest ritual at all these events is the Tricky Trade. You buy tickets and place them in a paper bag in front of a "basket o' shit". At the end of the evening, someone picks out a ticket out of the bag, and the winner gets the "basket o' shit." The basket o' shit is usually themed - "A Day at the Spa" or "Fun with Crafts" or "Build Your Own Future". It's often comprised of re-gifted items or T J Maxx specials.

Some people really get into the basket o' shit and screech with delight over their gift certificate for a French manicure at Nails R Us on the Route 17. They debate the pros and cons of the various strategies for winning - dumping all your ticket in one brown bag or targeting unpopular baskets.

Steve and I usually case the perimeter of the place and try to find the least offensive basket to drop out tickets. You have to participate or you look like an asshole, so we do our share. At the last Casino Night for Ian's school, I just handed the matter over to Steve and let him deal with the tickets. We never won anything before, so I chose to concentrate my energies on the blackjack table.

At the end of the evening, the PTA ladies started handing out the baskets to the winners and for the first time we won. But what did we win? We won tickets to a ballgame in CAMDEN. We're going to CAMDEN. Have you ever seen CAMDEN? This is CAMDEN.

 

 

This weekend, Steve and I sat down with a calendar to plan out the rest of the summer before we squander all that good time at the town swim club. There's a week down south. We want to go to the Jersey shore for a day. A water park. Oh, and we have to go to CAMDEN. 

11 Months

It's been nearly a year, since I finished my last academic paper and stopped teaching. I am watching kids full time. They have a slew of after-school activities and therapy that must be coordinated. I have to constantly prevent gravity from pulling down our old house.

Right now, there's a small puddle coming out of one of those confusing basement thingies, and a shirtless man putting in a new front porch. All that work countering the forces of gravity and chauffeuring the kids doesn't give me a whole lot of time to work on my own projects. Still, I keep plotting my way back to gainful employment.

I've had gone down some paths this year that turned out to be deadends. I spent a couple of months working on a small business plan with some friends. It might work out in the future, but right now it appears to be a dead shark. I worked on some rough drafts of amorphous drivel until I figured out that it was amorphous drivel. I think I finally might have the writing project that has more potential. We'll see.

Audio-Processing and Summer

Today is Jonah's last day of school. Ian is done tomorrow. Well, Jonah's school was really done about three weeks ago. He's had a week of half days, and the teachers started handing out worksheets and doing brainteasers ages ago. The school year really ends in April, but they babysit the kids until June 22.

Jonah will go to his fancy camp on Monday. It's ridiculously expensive, so we can only afford to send him for a four week session. But he loves it, so we keep sending him. He's made some very nice friends in other towns, and he'll be a counselor in high school, which will keep him off the streets.

After much debate, we decided to send Ian back to his summer school camp. As part of his program, he'll attend a town recreation program in the morning, and in afternoon, he'll go back to his classroom for academic review and therapy. He doesn't need the academic review, but he does need more speech therapy.

We're getting closer to understanding Ian's strengths and weaknesses. Ian is a visual-spacial thinker. He builds fantastic Lego creations, and he's the pet of any art teacher. He can memorize a page of spelling words instantly. He does math problems in his head. It's hard to not brag about his gifts.

Ian has audio-processing problems. He has trouble hearing the difference between fifteen and fifty. That's why he's had so much trouble learning how to talk. While his right brain is super sized, his left brain is a pea.

I've been looking at various therapy that we can do after school with him. With so many snake oil therapies out there, we've got to carefully choose a program. Then there's the crap of trying to get the health insurance companies to pay for these therapies. I just submitted insurance paperwork for the third time for therapy that Ian had last fall. 

My blog routine is going to shift after today, until the camp kicks in. I'll probably do a couple of quickie posts in the morning and then a longer one in the evening.

The Theater Crowd

On Friday evening, I took the boys into the city to have dinner with Steve. Once we got past the Yankee Stadium-bound traffic, we had clear sailing all the way down the West Side highway. It's thrilling to actually go 60 mph on the Westside highway and get a little air as you sail over the pot holes.

We had a very mediocre meal at a barbecue place in Times Square. We should have known the meal was going to be average when the waitress asked us where we were from. "We're from around here", we told her, and she was shocked. She said that everyone who comes in is a tourist.

For some reason, tourists seem to love barbecue food, so there are five or six BBQ joints right in Times Square, and they're all so-so. Two words of advice when visiting New York City. One, New York City is not known for its BBQ food. Please try a different type of food. Two. Don't wear shorts south of 125th Street.

While the brisket at this restaurant was really dry, it did offer $3 beers and large open windows with prime people watching opportunities.

I love watching people getting ready to go to the theater. They're dressed up and walking briskly down the street just sure that everyone is admiring them. Sometimes they're dressed all wrong. Mini-skirts with sequins. Three inches heels that haven't been broken in yet. Sometimes they've gone too causal in khakis and a t-shirt.

But regardless of how they're dressed, they are terribly excited, even those teetering in the three inch stilettos. They bought their tickets months ago. They've saved up for these tickets and hired a babysitter. They downloaded the music onto their iPods last week. They know that when the curtain goes up, they'll be transported to a South Pacific island or a French drag club.  

Mud Men

This is the view from our backdoor. It's not much of a backyard, but we make the most of it. Those are happy tomato and pepper plants by the fence.

Closer to the house, we recently ripped out an over grown shrub, aka the broccoli tree. We're putting in a pea gravel patio this weekend. We did some digging last weekend, but hadn't gotten that far on the project.

The boys took over yesterday and made "muddy rivers."

   

Weekends are For Nothing?

For the first time in ages, we had a weekend with no plans. Soccer season is over. I didn't have to prepare a meal for twenty. We didn't have any deadlines. We talked about checking out a barbecue festival in Manhattan, but we didn't feel like dealing with the crowds for the Puerto Rican day parade, so we stayed home.

We puttered. We mapped out plans for making a small pea gravel patio in the backyard. We made a pot of chili for a World Cup party. I read obscure sections of the New York Times. I stared at the Crate and Barrel catalog and tried to form an opinion about sectionals. We showed up to church twenty minutes late.

I did a lot of pacing, because I felt that I should be doing something. Too much restless energy. I need to break down my big goals for the year into smaller steps. In the meantime, I'm going to blog. Blogging makes me feel productive.

The Absence of Back Pain

There is a positive correlation between the absence of back pain and general happiness levels.

I threw out my back last weekend. It was probably because I had to carry an eleven-year old boy across a backyard to the car when he ripped open his foot. The little sucker is getting big.

All week, my spine has been out of whack. It hurt to unload the dish washer. It hurt to go to the gym. It hurt to breath.

After a lot of stretching with some distressing crunching sounds from my spine, everything is now in alignment. And my world view is back in alignment, too.

I've caught up on the boring chores that are necessary to keep the household moving. I had a morning business meeting. I'm meeting a friend for lunch.

When I first returned to life as a full time mom, I felt guilty making lunch plans. I was afraid that I was playing into the stereotype of the idlel SAHM. But I got over that. I would have lunch with co-workers all the time when I was employed. Going out to lunch once a week is mandatory for keeping one's marbles when you're at home all the time. So, I have guilt-free lunch plans today at a cute little restaurant in an old railroad station.

I'm rocking a cute little skirt that I got for $15 at the Gap. 

 

And we're looking at a weekend with no plans on the agenda. We might go to the Central Park Zoo. We might hang out and watch the World Cup. We might shoot baskets in Jonah's new hoop.

Or we might just do nothing at all.