I love it here. 

We met up with my brother in Washington Square, and that’s really when our day got perfect. My brother lives in Chinatown, and meeting him at Washington Square fit the vibe of hanging out on his turf. A family of street performing break dancers and acrobats was showing off their stuff, telling kids to stay off drugs and not to drink. “Do you think we could do this if we were high?” Run, jump, flip over 5 volunteers. No, sir, I don’t think you could. My kids were convinced. We got ice cream from an ice cream truck, and my brother handed me spiked seltzer water, his new favorite thing, he said, because it’s low-calorie, low alcohol, refreshing, and you can drink it from a water bottle and nobody will know. He said he thought I’d need a nice drink after a day in NYC hauling 5 kids around. No joke, kid. My brother and I are cut from the same mold. 

No, we really are. As we walked through China Town to his apartment, he pointed to the jail where he had spent the night, to the tenement housing where “you aren’t supposed to go,” but there is a shortcut through, so no biggie. He snagged one of our subway cards and sent St. George under the turn style, so we didn’t have to buy subway fare. “You can’t get arrested for jumping the turn style, and to ticket you, they have to catch you.” He knows this because he’s been arrested for jumping…and he now jumps but also runs fast enough not to get caught. He’s all about breaking the rules. So am I. I love being in his territory and breaking the rules he breaks. I wish we were closer in age. I’d probably be locked up right there next to him instead of fronting as a respectable wife and mother. Oh, who are we kidding. nobody thinks I’m a respectable wife and mother. Everyone knows I’m a rule-breaker. Ha! 

Except at home. My brother and I have rules at home, and they are solid. You break the rules, you’ll be prodded into following them or scolded. I am so proud of my brother. He made us all take off our shoes, wash our feet, dry them, keep our feet off his white bed, keep our feet quiet to respect the very elderly Chinese couple next door, nobody could climb on the railing of the fire escape…and everyone listened to him because while he has few rules, they are firm. Everyone can remember a few firm rules and respect them. Did I mention that my brother shares an apartment with two other people, and the bathroom is accessed through two of the bedrooms…or through the common apartment hallway? Yep. You either walk through two bedrooms, or you go out of the apartment and into the hallway to the other door. So NYC. Oh, and the shower is in the kitchen. You can make your coffee and wash dishes while waiting for your intense oil treatment in your hair. I want a shower in my kitchen. 

We talked a lot about old times. He still remembers when he was 9 years old and my mother allowed me to drive him across the country to my place in Buffalo, NY. He was such a little one. I distinctly remember him accidentally cutting in line ahead of someone at one of those free hotel breakfasts. After all, he was 9 and starving after sleeping all night. The man he cut in front of started yelling at him, and at age 23 I remember not knowing whether it would be a better example to him if I were to lay into that mean person, or if I should apologize. I did neither. Instead, I pulled him to me and glared at the yelling man, and I wanted to shelter and protect him forever. I didn’t feel that level of protectiveness again until the first person yelled at Miss Magpie when she was only a baby and she pulled something out of their shopping cart thinking it was ours. But then I knew better what to do, and I laid into that woman. I wish I’d known to lay into the man yelling at my brother. I guess I learned something in the 8 years between. I should have spent more time with my brother while I was in college. It is one of my few regrets in life. When you are 13 years older than someone, you have this weird, sort of aunt-like relationship with them until they are grown. Then it’s all sibling again. But he had a set of struggles that I didn’t make time to help him sort out, or maybe I didn’t know he needed help sorting them out. Big sisters need to be mindful of the babies that come after them. It’s something I learned by not doing it, and I am putting a lot of effort into teaching my kids this about their younger siblings. Anyway, whatever the past was, he has always been a perfect creature in my eyes, and I love to be with him now. 

My brother had a party to attend, so we ordered pizza and took it to an adorably sketchy park while we waited for his friend to meet up with him. I wish my brother lived close to me so we could hang out all the time. He knows the most fascinating people. My kids adore him, and he appears to enjoy them. I adore him. It was hard to say goodbye to him and watch him walk away. 

It was night in the City by then, and so we all held hands in a long line and walked as quickly as we could across town to our ferry. Our feet were very sore. We walked 16 miles today. St. George and Miss L could hardly walk. Nobody had enough energy even to complain. 

As we floated along on the ferry back to Jersey City, Miss L said, “Can we go see the Statue of Liberty just for a second?” That closed the deal. We have a few days to spare on this trip, and none of us are quite done with the City yet. We are spontaneously going again tomorrow! 

When there is a pond at the campground, we start off with a swim. Sometimes it feels like we should just skip everything else and go on a pond swimming trip.

After our big day in Provincetown yesterday, it seemed like we needed some time in nature. Some of the most spectacular features of Cape Cod are the sand dunes at the northeastern corner of the cape. I asked the kids if they wanted to take the long way or the short way across the dunes to the Atlantic. They are my kids, so “LONG WAY,” of course.

These dunes are not unlike any other coastal or other aquatic dunes. The difference, though, is their vastness! It is at least a 2-mile walk one way from the highway to the ocean. And the landscape changes from forest to sand to grassland to shrub to grassland to dune to (FINALLY) icy water.

It was an unpleasant shock to the kids when they realized how unlike the Pacific this ocean is. It drops off into deep waters (well, above their heads) within 20 feet from the shore. And the waves crash right at the shoreline. Our “only go in up to your waist when it’s 5 kids to 1 adult” rule enraged them. It felt like they could barely get their feet wet. Sorry, kids. I can’t rescue 5 kids in unfamiliar waters at once. It was too cold to swim in, anyway, they decided.

The hike back was full of small animals, jumping from high dunes into soft sand below, and giggling at the lines of fancy people in broad, colored hats and long, linen dresses exclaiming about how they think the water is “just over the next dune.” Its not. Its not even over the next 2 dunes. Get off these dunes, ladies. You will get lost and sunburned, and you wont fund the water. It takes moxie to navigate this rout, and you don’t have it.

And just like that, its time to leave the Cape. One day i will own a tiny bungalow on a forgotten inlet here.

Our next adventure is in NYC, and since we have a friend with a baby just a skip from our rout, and since she bravely invited us for dinner, we took a detour to Newport, RI. What a beautiful baby. And what a perfect host and hostess! Thank you Matt and Caitlyn! What a spark of joy that time with you was!!!

Popi went back to California today. This means that for the next 2-ish weeks, we will be on our own. Precisely put, I will now be flying solo around the country with 5 kids. Things can get hard. Im hoping they are all old enough for smooth sailing.

Our first adventure was Plymouth Rock. This is a place I have never seen before, and it was barely impressive as a rock. It has broken apart a bit over the years, but even in its full glory, it wasn’t big. I guess I wanted it to scream “You’ve made it!” Instead it winks and whispers, don’t stub your toe on me.” It was a good stopping-off place.

This is looking more and more familiar. I am trying to remember the last time we came to Cape Cod. Was it really just after we were married? I have booked a tent site at the state park we slept at on that trip almost 20 years ago. Then we were on bikes. To experience anything from a bike is to hold it in your hand, to taste it, to roll around in it. A car sterilizes it a bit. An airplane ignores it completely.

The smells come back to me, those wild roses and wild berry blossoms that mix to smell like no other place. The kids are pros at setting up camp by now, so I make it look like I am busy while they pop the tent up, but really I am breathing as much of that fragrant air that I can. I never want to forget that smell.

There is a pond at this campground. We must swim in all the ponds. Judah found a log large enough to float around on, so he gave taxi rides around the swimming area. Atticus met some French kids and some Russian kids. Atticus will be an ambassador one day.

And, of course, Provincetown.

My first encounter with Provincetown was when I was 19 years old. My sister and I took the ferry from Boston to Cape Cod, and for a long time I thought it was the only thing to see on the Cape. It is really just a town of tourist stores filled with candy and t-shirts. Artists filled the stores with hand-crafted clothing, furniture, housewares, and other handmade curiosities. People went there to make art and not be bothered. Some places sell a lobster meal or hot dogs. But if you were to clear out the tourists, the town seemed to be filled with gypsies and travelers, and the houses were beaten up by the storms. The docks were filled with lobster trappers coming in with their catch, and shacks with bins of salt water waiting to be filled with the creatures. One could wander into these shacks and peer in at the doomed, and they were not opposed to reaching out a claw to snap at your face.

Provincetown has “cleaned up” over the years. Most houses are now freshly painted, the main street sparkles, the stores are filled with pricy items, most made in a factory. It now has the vibe of a classy beach town populated by retired white men and their partners. But it still has that artsy edge and color one likes to see there. There are still salty, red sailors lounging barefooted on the docks near their sailboats. My children were impressed. Judah said, “There sure are a lot of hippies around here!” “Then you should feel right at home here .”

My kids like high towers, so we had to visit the Pilgrim Monument. After all, Provincetown is VERY proud that the pilgrims landed here first before Plymouth Rock. The tower is so tall. Its the kind of adventure where mothers realize that all their efforts to stay in shape have culminated in this moment, as their energetic children race to the top up stairs that barely protect them from falling to their deaths. So for the second time in 2 days, we raced to the top of a tower.

It was beautiful. No wonder why we are so exhausted.

As we drove back to our camp site, we found a lobster stand and ate lobster. Well, I ate lobster. The kids took the eyes and green stuff and pretended they were prisoners forced to eat lobster guts, and they dared one another to eat it. It was not the civilized affair one expects a lobster dinner to be.

So bedtime was welcomed today, and I have had to play mom to a bunch of boy scouts who believe quiet time means screaming in their tents.

The best thing about Boston was the rain. It rained and rained and rained on our walking tour, and so we all got t have umbrellas. There is no joy like walking around Boston in the rain with an umbrella.

I have been to Boston several times, and each time i am struck by how small it is! When I was in college, I loved “stopping by” Boston to go shopping at Quincy Market for summer clothes before heading to NYC and then home to California. I hardly paid attention to to the historical significance of the city back then. This trip was all about the history. We did what everyone said was a must: the bus tour as well as the Freedom Trail walking tour. That was very good advice. Maybe it is because this was the first area we visited, but the kids were particularly fascinated by USS Constitution and Bunker hill. We scoured every inch of that ship, and we climbed every step of the Bunker Hill monument.

But there were other great places to visit. Like the balcony where the declaration of Independence was first read to Bostonians so long ago. Or the first State House near the site of the first public school. And the contrasting architecture of the old masonry buildings, and then the invention of steal building materials for the birth of skyscrapers. We visited the graves with their piles of coins. We honored Boston innovation by consuming Dunkin Donuts and wandered around Boston neighborhoods. We walked through Boston Commons, and visited Mrs. Mallard. There, I discovered that my children have been deprived: they have no idea who those ducks are. We will have to fix that problem when we get back home.

I think a person could live in Boston their entire lives and still not visit all of the beautiful churches. We visited Trinity Church. For an architect or art historian, I imagine this church is beautiful in ways the rest of us miss. For the rest of us, this church has all the holy space and majesty one likes to see in an old church. And it was quiet. The many stained glass windows had significance to the original rector and many were built in Europe. The audio tour kept pointing out the blue of the glass, and commenting that it is special glass. It looked like all other colored glass. The paintings were some specific color in some specific design. They were pretty, for sure. The gold and the stone and everything had some kind of cultural meaning. But what the tour missed completely was the reason the church was built. It wasn’t built as a work of art, although the beauty does lend some sense of the holy. It was built as a place to honor God. I wonder if the original rector was more fixated on a cultural masterpiece or on a place of beauty to encounter our mortality. Made me wonder. But it was still a place not to be missed.

And so we have visited Boston. Popi will be going home tomorrow, and we will continue on. It’s always a sad day when we take him to the airport.

Two days to enjoy both this forest and Boston. Best to begin with a fairy forest photo shoot. Except we didn’t have fairy costumes.

This forest bursts with natural art. The greens are bright and varied. Several bright red mushrooms peeked out from the leaves. Even the trees seemed to fall in ordered beauty.

Our hike took us past several ponds. We generally have to swim in every pond we come across, but there was a black rat snake blocking our path, so the kids thought better of that idea.

And as long as we are playing costume-less forest flower fairies, looks like Oberon and Titania showed up.

They look tired. Really tired. Maybe that’s why they didn’t bother getting all costumed up.

Well, the kids did find their pond in the end. This forest has winding roads throughout, and down the main road is a convenient place to swim, and it seems that the snakes aren’t as outgoing over there. Nobody got their toes nibbled while swimming.

There is rain, and more rain, and more rain predicted. But it is warm, so a little bit of soaking and wet bedding isn’t the worst we could experience.

So once again we find that if you camp just a little farther than hotels from the main attraction, you get a double vacation: one in the wilderness, and one in the city.

Today we took our kids to one of the stops we made on our honeymoon bike trip: Walden Pond. Of course, our kids have to swim in all the ponds, and they have no idea who Henry David Thoreau is. I have not yet tortured them with transcendentalism. I do love that Walden Pond is a bit untraveled, still, in that its not generally a tourist destination. There was even a free, hands-on demonstration for the kids in the basics of ceramics sculpting! My, aren’t we a fancy historical landmark!

Apparenty, I have previously expressed my love-hate relationship with Thoreau in earshot of my children, because they all had a good-humored, yet negative attitude about being at this pond. There was once this high school teacher who tried very hard to encourage our enlightenment by pointing out that the more you meditate, study, and ponder “big questions,” the higher you advance on what he called the “ladder of intellect,” or sometimes the “ladder of enlightenment.” He put Thoreau at the top of the ladder. He put himself a few rungs down. We were at the bottom. He was trying to get us to see ourselves as disciples ripe for teaching. We saw ourselves as too brilliant for our britches, and were just trying to finagle out of that AP class an A to add to our glutted GPA. Maybe a few seeds were planted, but mostly, Thoreau was wasted on us.

As we passed by the little replica cabin representing Thoreau’s cabin, the kids needed to explore and interact with the man of the house. Who knew Thoreau would be so tolerant of children!!! Maybe it was his interactions with Mr. Alcott. He allowed my kids to crawl all over his house, and all over him!

So scandalous.

We next took a drive through Lexington and Concord where great men made decisions about entering into revolution. I wonder if the men living there today would have such resolve.

There were so many artists and authors and statesmen who lived here. It seems that every house has a sign with a recognizable name on it.

Miss Magpie yelled out “Little Women!” What? Wait, she’s right! There’s Louisa May Alcott’s house!

Of all the houses we could have stopped at, Orchard House may have accidentally been the best choice. It was where Little Women was written. I learned a lot I never knew before. For example, Louisa’s sister, May, was a very talented artist, and counted among her students Daniel Chester French of Lincoln Memorial fame. Alcott’s father appears to have been an unsung giant in the free-range parenting movement, and he ran a school that had Montessori written all over it. The Alcott girls regularly mingled with great thinkers and their children. Why, Thoreau himself, and Emerson, appear to have been influential in the development of the girls when they were young adults. It all sounded lovely. Except that even though Mr. Alcott was a prolific writer and even built a school on his land, his schools failed again and again, and his writing are described as chaotic. Ahem. As are those of Thoreau and Emerson, but let’s move on.

Our camp site is beautiful, far in the forest. Perhaps the best way to end this day is with smoke bombs.

There are two main reasons we made this trip to the East Coast. One reason is the family reunion. The other reason is that my college partner-in-crime, Alicia, was getting married. I knew this would be hectic. However, I could not make it a one-event trip. My kids needed to see their cousins, and I needed to see my friend. I had to make both happen.

In college, Alicia and I were in several common classes during our first and second years. Those were was the years the PT and OT students took most of the same classes, and that is when I met Alicia. I can remember chatting with her over the college BBS, and she seemed a little nuts. I realized I could get to like this girl. I was taking philosophy classes at the time, hoping to get a philosophy minor, and Alicia mentioned that she was taking a class in existentialism with my Ethics and Latin professor. So I sat in on the class for the semester.

For the next 2 years, Alicia and I wreaked havoc on the school, or at least we did in our own minds. There was a particularly awkward professor, who helped me form a foreign film club, who was the target of much of our antics. One day we were politely sitting in his office as he brewed espresso on his Bunsen burner, and the next we were distracting him to steal his keys and make copies, and the next night we entered his office to fill it full of balloons, or tape eerie pictures to his office door. We showed up to these shenanigans masked.

I think he appreciated the attention, but he was a little horrified that his keys (as well as the keys to the building) had been so easily stolen and copied. We admitted to nothing.

Alicia was the kind of person who could match my energy and mind. I could call her up at midnight to hang out, and she was always up for studying with me. We were both the kinds of students who could study hard, get the best grade in our class, and still have time left over to play pool at the local coffee shop until the sun rose. We practically lived on Wilson Farms coffee and thought we were so grown up. We road tripped to NYC or Niagara Falls or anywhere in between on a whim, whenever that whim came upon us. We were both a little punk, Alicia favored combat boots and bright blue hair, and dog collars (and so I began to call her Aleasha…like she should be lead around by a leash…Oh, my…), and I favored shocking people by showing up in medusa braids, a corset top, and shorty shorts in a blizzard. We were so weird. Life was grand. Those were good days. People long for their high school years, but I would instead jump back to those college years in a heartbeat.

Then Alicia got married. She had a baby. She was my first friend to have a baby. I now spent spare weekends between exams traveling to Virginia to visit Alicia and her new baby. He was so cute. I remember that he laughed so easily, even as a tiny baby, and he loved snuggles. Then they moved to California, and I only saw them on vacations. I had lost to distance the only person who seemed to truly get me. But I was then dating Brandon, and he had moved to Buffalo, so it seemed like a good time to get serious about that relationship.

A lot of life has happened to us both in the years between then and now. A lot. We kept up with one another, and we saw one another a few times, even though we lived thousands of miles apart. I hoped that Alicia’s story would end well, and that things would get easier and easier for her over time. And it did. Alicia is a strong woman success story. She raised two spirited children as a single mother. She bought a house. She put herself through school several times over to better her financial situation. She fostered her children’s interests and was present with them. And she took time to keep herself sane.

So when Alicia told me she was about to get married a second time, I kind of FB stalked this guy for a while, and he seemed like maybe a good match. He seemed to put up with and adore her extreme quirks. He was thoughtful of her, and not only at the beginning of their relationship. Months and years in, he was still kind to her. She seemed really content and calm with him. So when she asked me to stand with her as a bridesmaid, I was overjoyed.

I am sure Alicia would disagree, but I thought it was the perfect wedding. She has married into a family that can match her nuttiness and energy. I think she may find peace in this marriage. She has many kind, attentive friends, as well as her angelic mother, to watch over her. Her wedding was so beautiful, and I have a million pictures to remember it by. Here are some of them:

We spent 4 days in Hershey Pennsylvania for the family reunion. Because of the wedding I was in, I spent only 2 days in Hershey, but my kids got to spend all kinds of crazy time with cousins. There were enough kids for everyone. Each of my kids had at least one cousin their age, and some had two.

The cousin who hosted has a beautiful house that is well over 100 years old.

My great grandmother immigrated from Germany when she was still young, married, and then had 4 very brilliant children who were quite ahead of their time. One went to Cornell and became an engineer. He participated in think tanks that were influential in the invention and development of some of the most advanced technologies we use today. One was a math major, and a woman, and helped program the earliest computers, and then went on to help build a multi-million dollar business based on robotics and advanced technology. One was a genius musician who invented and built several musical instruments that he then used in his church where he brought the beauty of his music to worship there, and his legacy lives on today in what he established there. And one, the youngest, went to college, worked for a while, and then raised a family of geniuses. Her children are a successful vet, an engineer, and an occupational therapist and horse breeder. I imagine my great grandmother and great grandfather looked at their grandchildren as I look at the 5^th generation, the kids running around here today. They have huge shoes to fill.

And the adults in this family love the children. They understand and accommodate their behaviors. Yet there is an expectation that the children will listen to adults. The children in this family understand that the adults wouldn’t tell them anything that is not important. There is a great respect for the older generations. They know they come from greatness, and they are to carry it on with humility and focus. They cannot do that if they are misbehaving.

My cousin, the host, volunteered through Kiwanis club at Hershey Park over the past year, and because of that she and her fellow club members received enough free tickets to send our entire family to Hershey Park for the day! My kids were blown away. They are used to Disneyland and its cute little rides. Hershey Park has Six Flags-style rides. It was like tiny birds used to a soft nest sent out on their first flight. It was exciting and terrifying all at the same time. St. George got to ride his first looping roller coaster! Little Lion for the first time ever, reached a limit of adventure. He refused to ride the biggest roller coaster after trying a slightly smaller one. It’s nice to know that he does have a bit of a sense of mortality. Haha! Miss Magpie couldn’t get enough. At one point she said, “That upside down loop drop would be even better if it were twice as high and twice as fast.” I’m not sure there is a roller coaster in the world that could scare her!

Miss Blue felt a little odd-kid-out at first, as all the cousins are so excited to see each other, and tend to be loud and chaotic. But she eventually found her place in the crowd of little girls chasing one another around. Nobody gets left out in this bunch.

Before we left, my family humored me and went on the Hershey World “tour.” I know they have changed some things, but it is essentially the same as it was the first time I rode it at age 7. I’m pretty sure the ride cars have never been replaced. I can remember believing there was real chocolate in the exhibits, and I dreamed of jumping from the ride car into the vat of liquid chocolate. I always liked Mr. Hershey because he gave all of his fortune to the orphans. Hershey still has a sense of serving the orphans, as there is a huge, beautiful boarding school for disadvantaged kids in the town. It’s an American corporate success story in the virtue department.

And just like that, another family reunion has come and gone. It’s something we look forward to for two long years before we can gather again! Next time, it’s in Yellowstone! YES!!!

I set my alarm for 7:00am so that we could look kind of responsible and like we were not utterly sleep-deprived. Alarm didn’t ring. We woke up at 9:00-ish. So much for looking remotely responsible for my husband’s family. But, shoot, better they know that we are just a wild bunch up front, right? So Brandon’s cousin Dana is my kind of girl. Her reaction time for clearing her entire day and planning an Amish Country tour extraordinaire was about 10 minutes. She was on a roll. She didn’t seem the least bit phased by the addition of 5 wild ones to her little bunch. Because of her, our day was exactly what we imagined. So, first the cheese factory. There were no tours when we got there, but it did not matter. The glass viewing areas were still there, and we could see the enormous vats and beaters. It was all so simple. We had seen the Tillamook factory many years back, and it was spectacular with it’s shining conveyer belts and busy workers and squared ropes of cheese oozing out onto the chopping block. But this was far more pleasant and personal. Cheese is a personal food. It is to be enjoyed while relaxing with a glass of wine. The workers in this small place would maybe have a glass of apple juice with friends after carefully pouring cheese curds into molds by hand. They would bring a cheese released from the mold that very day.

And Heini’s let us sample all of their cheeses. And their jellies. And their sausage sticks. And their cheese fudge. And everything else. Hundreds of samples. Maybe only one hundred samples. So much cheese happiness!

Of course we bought all of the cheese. If this cheese factory were the only place we went to on this trip, it would have been enough. But there was more. Dana next took us to an Amish farm. There we saw cats. Now, cats are an integral part of our lives at home. I like cats, and have always owned a cat. My kids have never lived without at least 5-10 cats, and right now we have more like 20. Our cats are working cats, and they do work hard to keep the rodents out of our house and off our property, but they are also kind of like family to us. So of course seeing a cat after no cats for the past 5 days was very exciting for them. They fought over the few farm cats, and the cats seemed very happy to comply with all the snuggles offered. My kids even allowed the cousins to have a turn holding the cats. Ha! Poor cousins think my kids are cat crazy. They are not wrong.

And then there were kittens. And puppies. And baby bunnies. And baby pigs. And baby horses. And baby goats. And baby chicks. And more cats. And, you see, this is how Ohio Amish Country is different than Southern California. The kids were allowed to pet and hold and love on all the animals they wished. Nobody freaked out over dirty hands. Nobody told them that the animals may claw them. Nobody worried that they may drop the animals. The kids were treated like intelligent people who could handle baby animals. In California, they think kids are far too dumb to handle a simple baby animal, and they believe that kids are certainly too unintelligent to explain such an activity to. Better to just avoid it or sanitize the whole situation such that it is not fun. There was so much joy and grit in this experience. And nobody got hurt. Amazing. We’ve got to get out of Southern California! It is sucking our souls dry.

Miss Bunny cried when she had to put the kitten down and go to the next part of the tour. “I want to be Amish!” I looked at her. “We all want to be Amish.” I wanted to explain that there is this weird Anabaptist rift between liturgical traditions and the Amish, and that they would need to wear dresses, and that they would not get to be as sassy as they are now. But maybe that wouldn’t matter. Maybe all of those things would become insignificant. Maybe we should become Amish. There was some kind of magic that made us all yearn for that kind of life.

We had to cross a creek in the yard to get from the barn to the farm house. We saw the simple living situation, the large rooms filled with almost nothing. We learned about house churches, we saw the kitchen in action as an Amish woman was baking bread. The kids were happy to taste the baked goods and pocket a few for later.

Of course, we went on a buggy ride around the field, as well. The man driving our buggy appeared happy to chat with us, but he also appeared to maybe be thinking about dinner, or maybe one of those cinnamon rolls the woman was cooking in the kitchen. Then it started to rain. It was a good, drenching rain, and the creeks running through the farm were suddenly filled and overflowing. This thrilled the kids.

Our last stop on the farm was the one-room school house. There the kids learned about the Amish school day, the kinds of things Amish children learn, and they found out that Amish children only go to school until they finish 8th grade. I could see their minds processing this. If we become Amish, we have only 3, or 2, or 1 more year of schooling. So many reasons to become Amish. They have cute kittens and cats, and you get to graduate school after grade 8, and there are creeks in the yard that overflow. Strong reasons. It was also interesting to discover that the local Amish school uses the same curriculum we use for our language arts.

We went for lunch after; all that eating of cheese and sweet baked goods had made the kids hungry.

Nobody likes to leave cousins. Cousins are some of those divine sparkles in life, and even if you have only just met the cousins, you feel that you have known them forever. My kids have so many connections across this great country, and so many more to discover! These two sweet baby cousins will grow up to be people my kids bring their kids to visit, and they will talk about that time we showed up in the middle of the night and spent the day being Amish together.

Now my kids are asking about the Phelps family reunions…I see far more road trips in our future!

Onward to Pennsylvania. We will get there before midnight. Maybe. Haha!

Pressing on. This morning Brandon reminded me of Jim Gaffigan saying of hotel pools, “Oh, yay! I get to swim and stay and pee all at the same time!” We stayed in our first hotel last night. We had to get two rooms because we are basically hauling a small village across the country, and somehow hotel people that kids sleeping on the floor is not civilized. I guess I agree. Hotel floors. Ew.

So I can report that we all took showers and no longer smell like rotting feet and old underwear. You’re welcome. Imagine all those dirty pioneers wandering around the hot desert states for months, no toilet paper, no showers, no change of clothes. No wonder why people in the Wild West were so prone to shooting one another.

It was all very exciting. There was free breakfast, and a hotel pee…er…pool…to swim in, and so much coffee. Endless coffee. Brandon and I are existing on coffee right about now.

We were supposed to make it to Lancaster PA by tonight, but when there are hotel pools to play in, destinations seem unimportant. But we did make it through Illinois, Indiana, and most of Ohio.

This is beautiful country. We are listening to the Little House books, and The Story of The World Volume III. There was so much sickness and death back then. Probably because people didn’t shower for 3 days and died from their own stench, but they called it Plague just to be polite.

There are farms and hills and forests here. Sometimes there are farms on hills surrounded by forests, sometimes forests surrounding farmed hills, sometimes there are farms surrounded by forested hills. And red barns. And horses. Highways are narrow and uncrowded. You might pass an onion truck, or a truck filled with pigs, a truck carrying a monster tractor with menacing blades hanging off of it, and this hippy mobile. Hippy driver included.

And our history audio book told us that Napoleon declared that women should have no rights, and they should stick to their knitting. Well, I am knitting on this car ride, and Napoleon is dead. I’m ok with that situation.