I Read Act Natural and Now I Feel Better about My Own Parenting, Ahem

Okay, if you’re just reading the reviews and you haven’t read Jennifer Traig's Act Natural yet and you’re wondering why so many people are griping that there’s a ton of talk of infanticide in this book--um, yes. There is a TON of talk of infanticide in this book. You might not have expected that if you were looking for a history of parenting, because, well, obviously, so here’s your friendly neighborhood trigger warning: there’s tons of talk of infanticide here!

But also… it’s super interesting! And also relevant! Like, Traig claims that the early medieval constant reference to “overlaying,” ie. rolling over onto your baby and accidentally smothering them while co-sleeping, was often a euphemism for infanticide. I would be very interested to know if there are any actual, verifiable stats on this, because I think it would be an insightful addition to the current co-sleeping controversy. How unhappy would that one already-unhappy NICU pediatrician have been when, in response to his lecture about the dangers of co-sleeping that he made me sit through before releasing my baby to my custody, I’d informed him that many of those historic references were actually murders? My baby would have been in a foster home by the end of the day!

Most of the infanticide discussion is in Chapter 1, the ancient history of parenting, and the context, then, is why there would be so much infanticide in a world without modern medical technology. The answer, in part? In a world without modern medical technology, you don’t have reliable birth control, and also don’t have the ability to get a reliable abortion. Combine that with the already abysmal infant survival rate, and I, at least, can see how entire cultures came to the idea that newborns weren’t exactly locked in on existence right at first. Just imagine me doing the little hand-gesture towards my brain and making the explody noise, because that blew. My. MIND!

Also exposing children to the elements, or to whatever animals might want to eat them or whatever other adults might want to snatch them up. And sending them to baby farms to be slowly starved to death out of sight and mind. Traig reports that in Paris in 1780, there were about 21,000 infants born. Seven hundred were nursed by their biological mothers. Three thousand had in-home wet nurses or were placed into Parisian “nursery homes.” SEVENTEEN THOUSAND were sent to baby farms elsewhere in the country. Oh, and also orphanages and foundling hospitals! People used orphanages WAY oftener than I thought they did. Traig reports statistics of over 40% of infants being abandoned to foundling hospitals in certain geographic areas over specific periods of time. I have since worked into my casual conversations the common surnames for foundling children: do you know anybody with the surname Columbo, Esposito, Vondeling, Temple, or Iglesias? If so, I have some bad news for you about one of their ancestors… You could tell Traig was high-key gleeful when spilling the tea about all the famous Western dudes we’re supposed to respect who actually dumped most or all of their kids off at orphanages. For instance, Jean-Jaque Rousseau had five children, and ABANDONED ALL FIVE TO FOUNDLING HOMES. Like, yikes!

I think I would have picked all of the above, though, over being a medieval European baby mummified in filthy swaddling for 24 hours at a go and hung on a hook or propped near an open fire where I was likely to burn to death. 
The one flaw in Traig’s book is that it is mostly a white European cultural history of parenting, and doesn’t much address other cultures than those. That’s fine, obviously, because otherwise the book would have to be nine times as long, but the lens isn’t specified in the title, so it would be understandable for a reader to be disappointed at the lack of other perspectives. 

Because Traig’s cultural history is necessarily too brief to thoroughly flesh out all the hot goss and scandalous tidbits that she drops, my favorite thing about her book is all her references to the historical works that I can now go find and read myself. I’m most interested in the craziest-sounding of the parenting tomes, so apparently I’ll be flipping through several early 20th-century parenting books and cackling about all the cocaine use. I’m also interested in the mid-1990s hippie birth and parenting books, especially when contrasted to the other extreme also coming around then: we’ve got both twilight sleep, which I already knew was a Whole Thing even before I watched that one Mad Men episode, and that stupid “your birth is not progressing” timetable that I am now learning was made up by one bored dude killing time by tracking a whopping total of 25 women over the course of one overnight work shift when he’d rather be elsewhere. 

Tangential shout-out to Channel to a New Life, the hippie birth film that I watched on VHS during one of my hippie birthing classes, and that I later walked my best friend over to watch with me at the hippie parenting center because I literally NEEDED him to experience this with me. It involves an outdoor water birth, of course, aided by one guy playing the drum and another guy holding a crystal that has had dolphin song channeled through it, and ends with the newborn’s preschool-aged sibling stripping nude and hopping into the bloody birth pool to play. The video was “lost” (I promise it wasn’t me!) long before the parenting center eventually shut down, and I’ve never found another copy. If you ever see one, pleasepleaseplease snap it up for me!

My other favorite thing about this book is the random miscellaneous factoids that Traig drops throughout. Such as: did you know that Dr. Spock has an Olympic Gold medal? Or that L. Ron Hubbard wrote a recipe for baby formula that some people still use?!? Or that the original edition of Aesop’s fables featured some VERY suss tales? Or that it was a terrifying evangelical children’s author, Favell Lee Mortimer, who invented both the flash card and the titling trope of [insert topic] Without Tears? I also really enjoyed finding connections to some of my other Special Interests--I already mentioned Dr. Sears, who I used to be OBSESSED with and would now actively enjoy gossiping about, but Traig also references the Satanic Panic scare of the 1980s that led to those messed-up accusations that the McMartin Preschool was conducting Satanic rituals with young children that led to the equally messed-up made-for-TV movie Do You Know the Muffin Man, which was released exactly in my unsupervised TV watching wheelhouse era. Here it is on YouTube:

I would have had an absolute cow if my own under-tens had been watching that on heavy rotation. Like, Good Lord, did my parents care about me AT ALL?!?

In conclusion, I guess I’m just really glad that I live in a time in which my obstetrician didn’t show up and dive right into my vagina with bare autopsy-hands…

Just kidding--I had a nurse-midwife, and actually she was super mean to me! That’s probably a future chapter of Traig’s, how the dummies of the early twenty-oughts were so obsessed with “natural” medicine that they’d choose a body-shaming midwife over a perfectly nice obstetrician. Sigh. But don’t worry--Traig also has a lot to say about Dr. Sears!

P.S. Find me on Goodreads, where I'm reading 104 books this year!

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

There Was an Eclipse Over My Backyard

Seven years ago this August, I wrote the following in my blog post about driving to Carbondale, Illinois, with my family to watch the 2017 eclipse:

I don't know what mood I'd be in if I didn't know that there's another total solar eclipse coming in seven years, but there is one coming, and I am buoyant. Better yet, Friends, my town is in the path of totality. 

Lemme just repeat that: MY TOWN IS IN THE PATH OF TOTALITY. MY HOUSE WILL SEE AN ECLIPSE!!!

You can come stay in a tent in my backyard, and I'll haul out the lounge chairs. The little kid, who will be graduating from high school the next month, will decorate us eclipse-themed doughnuts. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, will read and ignore us. And we'll have another powerful encounter that's beyond belief, in just seven years.

The little kid, one month from graduating high school, scored her homemade sourdough loaves with sun shapes for us. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, worked on her Environmental Science essay instead of a novel. All the out-of-town guests stayed in hotels instead of tents, but we did have the lounge chairs, sidewalk chalk, basketball and cornhole, and jump ropes out.

And my house, and all who stood on the driveway outside it, did see a total eclipse!

I played around with both my camera's phone and my Canon DSLR with this sun filter that I impulse-bought a couple of weeks prior. They both worked pretty well, but I was so worried about spending all my time fooling with photos instead of being in the moment that I didn't really use either to their full potential, and somehow, even with a sun filter and the sky going dark, I managed to over-expose every single photo.

Ah, well. The eclipse is happening somewhere in the middle of that white light and lens flare!

Here's the altar to Zeus we'd been working on all the previous week. Everyone in the family contributed nice things from their personal collections, and we lit the candle and incense daily while telling each other how much we appreciate the wonders of the universe and wouldn't it be nice to see the majesty of Zeus in an eclipse.

Trusting in the power of Zeus hadn't been enough to quell my fervent and rabid anxiety about the weather, however, and my regular eclipse anxiety dreams ratcheted up to a fever pitch during the full week of regular downpours we got prior to the eclipse. I dreamed the weather was overcast, I dreamed I got the day wrong, I dreamed it was raining and I couldn't go somewhere else because the car didn't work. One night I even dreamed that I saw the eclipse and then forgot what I'd seen the second it was over--I mean, what on earth?!?

One last downpour the night before the eclipse might have finished me off if I hadn't been distracted by the Trashion/Refashion Show, but thankfully, the day of the eclipse couldn't have been a more perfect day. Praise be to Zeus! 

I did miss, a little bit, the 2017 camaraderie of hanging out together in a parking lot, but spending a beautiful eclipse day in and out of our own house was objectively a lot more convenient. We had everything from Sun Chips and Cosmic Brownies to Oberon Eclipse beer on offer, and the yard toys got more love than they'd seen in the past five years or more. I even found the Spotify playlist I'd made for the 2017 eclipse and yep. It still rocks!

How magical to have one more beautiful day to play with yard toys and draw with chalk pastels with my daughters!

And imperceptibly, the sky darkened:

Did I get a sunburn right smack full on my face on this day?

Why, yes. Yes, I did.

My camera looks like it's set up to do a way better job than it did. Oh, well...

Proper exposure is for calmer people than I!

Just like seven years ago, our shadows became delightfully sharp as the light source grew smaller. You can't tell from the photo (SIGH!!!), but you can see every strand of the kid's hair in that shadow, and when she turned her eclipse glasses sideways, you could see the paper-thin shadow, deep black, of the cardboard frames.

At one point my college kid was reading the inside of the eclipse glasses and said to me, "You're looking away every three minutes, right?"

ME: "Um... Wut."

Because here is literally me for four entire hours:

Notice the cones at the bottom of my driveway to keep random people from pulling in and running us all over. Traffic wasn't crazy busy, but it was busy enough!

My kid literally had to Google it right then and be all, "Okay, our glasses are certified so you don't *really* have to look away every three minutes, but I think you should anyway." It's been a week, though, and I don't seem to have a blind spot in the center of my vision (...yet), so I think I'm good!

Look at the light around 3:00!

Check out the lens flare at 4:00 to see what the eclipse ACTUALLY looked like, grr. Even upside-down, the lens flare did a better job of photographing my eclipse than I did!

Here's the light at 3:04, including the neighbor's automatic outdoor lights. Check out that horizon!

And here's what we're all looking at!

It wasn't quite the same experience as in 2017. In 2017, when the Moon eclipsed the Sun, I was SHOCKED. I don't think anything can prepare you for that visceral feeling the first time you see a total eclipse. This time wasn't *as* shocking--although I think it always will be somewhat shocking, because the human mind, at least MY human mind, can barely comprehend it--but it was still beyond anything I've ever seen, wondrous and awe-inspiring, and beholding it remains, again, one of the best moments of my life. 

And again, just like in 2017 although it was nearly twice as long, it was over far too soon:

The waning of the eclipse was a great time to fool around with various pinhole projectors and lenses and my colander:

I was a little disappointed that the chickens hadn't seemed to react at all--they always put themselves into their coop at night, and I'd been looking forward to seeing them march themselves inside when the light reached some threshold known only to them--but I think the whole thing just happened too fast. 

The shadows were still predictably delightful, however:

Luna didn't do anything weird, either, but she also hadn't during the 2017 eclipse. She just hung out with us and wore her eclipse glasses like a good citizen scientist:

I watched through my own glasses (still not taking a break every three minutes, oops) until the Moon had completely finished its transit and every speck of the Sun was back in place, and then I made myself an enormous sandwich, tossed it, the rest of a bag of Sun Chips, a Cosmic Brownie, and an Oberon Eclipse beer into a bag, grabbed the rolly suitcase that I hadn't unpacked yet, hollered for the college kid, and by 5:00 we were in bumper-to-bumper--smooth but bumper-to-bumper!--traffic back to her college, where she had a science lab the next day that mustn't be missed. 

Squeezing in four more hours of kid-time, listening to Gastropod episodes and debating the deliciousness of every fruit we've ever tried, was the BEST way to continue this perfect day, and the ending was also the best possible ending: me in my jammies in a hotel room, face massively sunburned, noshing a giant sandwich (on homemade sourdough bread, no less), chips, brownie, and beer, casually starting the first chapter of a fantasy novel I'd been eager to try, and you'll never guess what I found on the hotel TV:

And just like that we circle back around to my Titanic Special Interest right in time for its 112th anniversary!

And don't worry, because now that the eclipse is over, my anxiety dreams have made a smooth transition to the next big thing on my list. Last night, I dreamed that I was traveling with my kid and lost her and couldn't find her and she was in danger. Sending her off to college is going to be SO FUN FOR ME!

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Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

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Before the Greatest Moment of My Life, I Spent 24 Hours in Columbus, Ohio

You know, as you do!

My kid goes to college in Ohio, not in the path of totality, but I figured that if I picked her up from college on the Friday before the eclipse, and hustled her back home as soon as the Moon had finished its transit of the Sun, she'd only have to miss one day of classes AND she could experience the greatest moment of my life with me.

And as a bonus, she could watch her sister walk the runway in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show, which was ALSO that weekend!

And as another bonus, she and I could go to the live show of our favorite podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, which was performing in Columbus also ALSO that weekend!

So that's what I did!

Around here, people are already joking about how overblown our city's crowd predictions for the eclipse were, as if the city council was just being dramatic because we didn't end up quintupling our population that day, after all. But let me tell you that I drove from here to Columbus, Ohio, and back TWICE that long weekend, and traffic was no fun. There were speed traps every few miles for the entire trip, and although the traffic was moving pretty well, the highways were soooo crowded and it was exhausting to have to constantly be on high alert. Like, just let me put my cruise control on for a few minutes, ugh!

I was SO happy to grab the kid, check into our hotel, and veg out for a couple of hours... while watching the eclipse countdown on cable news, of course!

And then off to our favorite show!

Afterwards, it had been my ultimate dream to go to the Sonic two minutes from our hotel and buy their super weird and disgusting-sounding eclipse slushie float, but Sonic saved me from myself by having a drive-through employee who was all, "Welcome to Sonic. Hold a minute, please," and then... just never came back to take my order? The kid and I waited a couple of minutes, then I thought I'd maybe swing around and take another run at it, and I pulled back up to the drive-through line just as another car was entering and I could hear the employee say over the speaker, "Welcome to Sonic. Hold a minute, please." And then... he never came back. 

We waited another couple of minutes before the kid could convince me to bail and drive over to a different fast food place, also a couple of minutes from our hotel. I hotly protested because I've never been to a Raising Cane's before and therefore have not pored over the menu to decide what I want and practice my order, but fortunately the kid's reassurances that the menu is so easy even I could figure it out while in the drive-through line held true. Now that I am old, I REALLY love a simple drive-through menu!

I also REALLY love a hot hotel breakfast! This one had mini omelets and sausage patties, which are all excellent with toast for making your own breakfast sandwich. One of my favorite things in life is a breakfast that's already included so you don't have to think about it.

In related news, I swear that I find the best things on TikTok. A couple of days before this trip, I'd seen a TikTok about things to do in Columbus that weekend, and in it was news about this fairly new Titanic artifacts exhibit at the COSI.

I mean, we're already going to be there, and it *is* one of my Special Interests, and it *is* almost the anniversary of its sinking...

Here we go!

Is this the most expensive LEGO set? It is $680!!! It would have been cool to be the curator responsible for assembling it for display, though...

When you enter the exhibit, you're given a boarding pass for a real passenger on the Titanic. The kid got to be someone fancy!

I, however, don't like my own particular odds nearly as much...

The exhibit is produced in part by RMS Titanic, Inc., the only company that's allowed to retrieve artifacts from the Titanic site. Recovering the artifacts allows them to be preserved, and the company also works with other organizations to do scientific and historical research at the site. They also produce several exhibits of Titanic artifacts around the country.

Crow's Nest bell

The best part was when they'd put an artifact next to a photo of it before it was recovered:

They recovered so many of these that I think there's a set in every one of their simultaneous artifact exhibitions:

I would be very interested in putting together THIS as a LEGO model--it's the Titanic as it was discovered on the ocean floor:

This is a porthole with a solid bronze frame. Imagine the pressure it would take to warp it like this!

Okay, this is the coolest part: it's a hands-on exhibit where you can touch a real piece from the Titanic!

In related news, thank goodness for this one shot of me, because all the other dozen the kid took of me TOUCHING THE TITANIC are... unflattering, ahem. I have a bad habit of wearing an exceptionally gormless, open-mouthed expression when I am beside myself with delight, and am, for that reason, considering making a sticker for my phone that contains one of two phrases: either "Close Your Mouth" or "Fix Your Face." You can see how either of these phrases would be endlessly useful in a wide variety of circumstances!

Mouth closed, face more or less fixed, and TOUCHING THE TITANIC!

Please also note that in the photo above I am representing in my Maritime Museum of the Atlantic Titanic merch.

I found where I live!

The exhibit actually had a LOT of paper artifacts--these luggage tags, several currencies of paper money, playing cards, etc.--and I never did learn how they hadn't dissolved in the water:

The occasional recreation was peppered among the artifacts, and I was SO INTO IT:

Found the doorknob to my cabin door!

Okay, y'all: I am so in love with the third-class dishes! I found out that the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, actually sells recreations, so that's now on my holiday wish list...

More paper artifacts--how did these survive?!?

Here's a glimpse of the kid's fancy first-class cabin:

I'm also a really big fan of my third-class floor tile. We DO have a couple more rooms in the house that need new flooring...

Here's MY room! I also want that blanket...

Okay, this is horrifying: did you know that something like 1/5 of Titanic's boiler room crew were CHILDREN?!? Look at those little faces!

Lol that they had an iceberg--with some kind of condenser involved because that is real ice!--that you could take your photo with:

Mouth not closed. Face not fixed. Oh, well!

This is one of the lifeboat hoists:

And this is also really cool: they projected the footprint of the lifeboat onto the floor so you could see how you fit into it:

Closest my third-class self will ever get to a lifeboat!

Of course this kid is examining the lifeboat like they're old friends. Lucky first-classer!

They had some portraits of people they KNEW we'd know from the Titanic movie, of course:

ANOTHER PAPER ARTIFACT!!!

Okay, moment of truth! Do I live or do I die?

Poor Johannes...

Now it's the kid's turn:

I love that she devoted the rest of her life to charity. What a beautiful response to tragedy.

I was also surprised to see clothing on exhibit. How did THIS also survive?!?

Look at that beautiful visible mending. I didn't even realize you could hand-sew that stitch!

Afterwards in the gift shop, my mean kid would not let me buy a tiny Titanic and iceberg in a floaty thing OR a Titanic and iceberg ice cube tray. To be fair, they both *are* on Amazon at nearly half the price, so it was a good save on her part, but still. I have longed for that floaty Titanic thing every day since.

Since we were already at COSI and who knew if we'd ever come again, we decided to quickly swing through a couple more exhibits before we hit the road. This Oceans exhibit was actually an amusing interactive water play area that we enjoyed just as much as the toddlers we were playing alongside:

And this Dinosaurs gallery features artifacts from the American Museum of Natural History!

Here are a couple of Apatosaurus vertebrae:

These are Ornithopod tracks on sandstone:

You had to check out the labels very closely to see what was a cast and what was real. I feel like I'm the only person annoyed by that! I strongly believe that casts should be a non-realistic color:

I love a good Dinosaur As Bird model!

I also don't usually see amber on display, so I was VERY stoked about this:

And then just when we thought we were about to leave... we found an augmented reality sandbox. We must now sculpt all of the landforms!

I am still distraught that I didn't come home with this Layers of the Earth candle--every layer is a different color and scent!--but the kid managed to wrestle it out of my hands, and good thing, too, because it was FIFTY DOLLARS. For something I WILL LITERALLY BURN AWAY.

Also this Sun stuffie at FORTY-FIVE DOLLARS JUST NO:

Sigh...

After a lovely morning spent at the museum, the kid and I were hoofing it back to the car when suddenly she announced, "I am STARVING!" I said, "OMG me, TOO! Let's grab lunch before we head home." I pulled out my phone to see what Dr. Google Maps recommended for lunch nearby, but then when I looked at it I was all, "Oh, NO!!!" We had accidentally spent five hours at a children's hands-on science museum! I'd thought it had been maybe... half that? Maaaaybe three hours, tops? I think we must have been in some kind of fugue state to not notice all that time passing! 

So that was ixnay on a sit-down lunch, and full steam ahead on a gas station lunch so we could get back into the stream of traffic headed towards the path of totality. It was an absolute slog of a drive, but the kid was back in time to surprise Luna before dinner!!

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