I Apparently Went to Nashville Just to Eat, Sleep, and Shop

When my partner invited me along to his graphic design conference in Nashville, Tennessee, I thought that I was going to use my tagalong time very differently, ahem.

Without the distraction of all the other million things there are to do on my property, not to mention the kids and the pets, just think of all the writing and photo editing I could do! No spending half the day sewing, or taking a spontaneous bookstore trip with a teenager or two, or puttering around transplanting lilacs--instead, I could bring my laptop and all the books I'd been meaning to review and get so darn ahead on my freelance pieces and my personal blog that I wouldn't have to touch the computer again all summer if I didn't feel like it.

Ooh, and the sightseeing! We've gone to Nashville as a family several times, but of course the rest of the family's interests don't quite overlap my own, so this time I could really dive into the honky-tonk tourist sites. I could do the Johnny Cash Museum this time, or sit in one of the open-front bars on Broadway, or even just walk around the Country Music Hall of Fame again on my own agenda. Or I could go visit The Hermitage! I could finally eat some Nashville hot chicken!

Look, here are my guide books to prove that I really did have plans!

My motivation continued throughout the four-hour drive, as I texted the kids photos of us crossing the Ohio River--

--and the scenic, wildfire smoke-infused skies:

But then... I dunno. We checked into the Gaylord Opryland Resort (just a short walk from the new location of the Grand Ole Opry! Which I planned to tour!), and my partner headed straight off to his first conference activity, while I orienteered myself and the luggage through this baffling and overwhelming--though very pretty!--garden sanctuary--

--to our room, where I somehow found myself putting the air conditioning on high, closing the curtains, turning the TV on to the exact mumbly volume level that I find relaxing as hell, and then flopping onto the bed and snoozing away for several hours. 

It was... delightful, actually! The room was dim, I could hear a waterfall somewhere outside the window--and you KNOW how delightful rushing water sounds!--the temperature was perfect, and although I had all these plans that I could be enacting, it just felt like there was nothing I really needed to do and nowhere I really needed to be, so I might as well be sleepy.

OMG y'all, is this how those vacation-type people feel when they're on vacation? Like, those vacation people who don't travel to see all the sites and do the stuff, but instead just want to lie on the beach and eat yummy things? The ones who leave home just so they can relax for a minute?

If so, y'all, it's NICE!

I snoozled away the entire rest of the morning like that, and rallied only so that I could meet my partner at one of the on-site restaurants for lunch--because even when the promise of sightseeing fails to motivate me, the promise of food always does!

After tacos--and a margarita for me, because after all, *I'M* not on the clock! I'm on vacation!--I figured that since I had my pants and shoes back on and everything, I maybe should go out and do something. I found my way out the front door of the resort--which is not as easy and it sounds!--and found a quite lovely, quite well-marked walking path that led around the giant building and towards the Grand Ole Opry.

See, I'm headed right there, and I have the selfie to prove it!

I crossed the giant parking lot, found the sidewalk in front of the Grand Ole Opry, passed the family of geese without getting chased or bitten... and then I took a right turn and went to the mall instead.

And that is somehow where I spent the rest of the entire afternoon!

But to be fair, there was much that I had to do there. I found a store that had the exact style of pants that I knew the teenager would love, so then of course I had to send her many photos of the options and engage in a detailed text-based back and forth about color and style and sizing. Would she like the grey, or a less-traditional-for-her green? Would she perhaps prefer to go completely off-book and try the khaki?

She went with grey and green. I don't think she's ever worn khaki on purpose.

And then, of course, there was a LEGO store, which there is not at my mall at home, so obviously this was the time to buy birthday gifts and maybe a couple of stocking stuffers. I mean, is this not the perfect birthday gift for my older kid or what?

Ooh, today I learned that there's an off-label lighting kit for this LEGO set! I'll have to look into that for her next gift-giving holiday...

I was just about shopped out by the time my partner texted that he was almost done with his conference stuff for the day, so we both got back to our room at about the same time, and since we were both tired, it made sense that we spent the evening just vegging in our room, eating takeout burgers and watching hotel cable.

Okay, so that's one day down, and two days to go. Plenty of time left to do all that writing and photo editing and all that sightseeing I'd planned. 

Except that the next day, I sort of did the same thing again? But lazier? I slept in, I ambled around the resort a bit and bought myself a coffee, I brought my nook with me and sat somewhere pretty and read for absolute hours, I met my partner for lunch, and then I went back to the room and took a giant nap.

And when my partner was done with conference stuff for the day, and we could have gone into Nashville to walk Broadway and dip in and out of honky-tonks, I instead suggested that we walk over to an outdoor concert at the Grande Ole Opry--

--and after hanging out there for a while, I convinced him to go where else but back to THE MALL with me. I don't even know, you guys! But I hadn't gotten a Cinnabon the previous day, and I wanted one!

Goal achieved!

My final day at the resort was actually minimally more productive, since I had to check out and move all our luggage to the car, so that put an end to my previously endless napping. Instead, I spent the day sitting by the river, listening to the spiel of the occasional guided boat tours (?!?), and trading chapters of my book with editing a few photos now and then. The kids texted constantly with all those queries of the teenager who thinks they're being smooth about the fact that their parents will return home shortly from an out-of-town trip--"Mom, where's the steam mop?" "Mom, what do you do with the trash bag if it's already full?"--so that was also entertaining.

And then my partner finished up his last conference activity, we played Marco Polo by text to find each other, and off we went back home! No Hermitage. No Johnny Cash Museum. Definitely no summer's worth of freelance posts! No travel activities to speak of, really, other than the fact that I got a decent amount of the year's birthday and Christmas shopping done... which is not nothing, I guess, so I suppose it was a fairly productive trip, after all.

It WAS pretty nice, though, to come home from a trip all caught up on sleep, for a change, all super relaxed and with no desire to take to my bed for a couple of days to recover. And coming home to a spick-and-span home well-run by the two teenagers in my absence did not hurt, either.

And if the house smelled suspiciously of bleach and Pine Sol, and we were surprisingly nearly out of paper towels even though I'd just bought a huge multi-pack right before we'd left, and I'm pretty sure we used to own more forks than this, well... teenagers deserve a bit of a vacation, too!

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I Met a Sloth

Did I ever tell you about the time that I met a real sloth? It turns out that this is something that one can do simply by paying the zoo lots of nice money!

My older kid has always been the zoo's biggest friend, and the world's second-hardest human to shop for (her father is the world's hardest human to shop for, so it might be genetic), so her big Christmas gift from me last year was a day at the zoo with us, with the extra activities of a sloth encounter AND a dolphin encounter.

We met all the animals for Christmas!

But first: my favorite sea lion pose:

And, of course, at this zoo there are plenty of animals that you can meet without paying any extra money:

If you, a full-grown grown-up, don't leave the touch tank wet to your elbows, are you even a homeschool graduate?

As someone who has regular internal hysterics on the daily about the fact that all my family! Is not in the same room at the same time! Much less the same state!, just walking around the zoo together was my own favorite part of Christmas break:

Okay, I lied. My favorite part of Christmas break was THIS guy!!!

We got to hang out with him and coo over him and watch him eat snacks while his zookeeper talked about him and answered our questions--

(Look! He smiled at me!)

And then WE got to feed him snacks and take our photos with him! And then, THEN he curled up in a little ball!

He. Was. ADORABLE. 

Sloths don't seem like big thinkers, and there weren't really any thoughts apparent behind those big, brown eyes, but here he is scratching himself:

Oh, and here he is eating just one more snack:

Look how slowly he moves!!!

I swear I felt like I came out of a fugue state when we finally left our new sloth friend. I had no idea how much time had passed, what day it was, or what was happening in the outside world.

Might as well go visit the flamingos!

If nothing else, they'll scream you out of your meditative zone of contemplation!

We've seen free-range kangaroos at other zoos, but I think this is the first time we've visited since they've come to our zoo. There were very few people out on this cold late afternoon right before the New Year, so the kangaroos had plenty of room to hop all around in our vicinity and act like we weren't there:

I always forget that in December, the elephants and zebras and giraffes really aren't there, so we walked through a silent and empty African savannah--

--but the orangutans were around--

--and so were the dolphins!

After the dolphin show, my partner and kid went off to meet the stars of the show, while I hung out by the fire pit and got completely obsessed with the entity I call Twinkle Tree:

Every few minutes, it would do a whole light-up musical number, then go back to being a regular Twinkle Tree for another ten minutes or so. Even after the others came back from their encounter and wanted to walk around some more and tell me all about the dolphins they'd met, I was all like, "Shhh!!! Twinkle Tree is about to go off!"

I... may have sat there until I watched Twinkle Tree's entire repertoire. I don't even want to guess how long that took.

Eventually, my partner only managed to lure me away by wondering out loud if the Twinkle Tunnel also put on a show every few minutes...

It didn't, humph, but it was still pretty cool:

This turned out to be SUCH a good present! The kid loved it, of course, but I definitely loved it the most. We spent the whole day together, and although I sobbed miserably a couple of weeks later when we dropped her back at college, then spent another couple of weeks in a depression, pretty much just crying, listening to lavender country, and finishing the puzzle we'd worked on all break, I think all that together time shored up my emotional state so that I wasn't as much of a wreck as I usually am.

Yes, that was me NOT being as much of a wreck, ahem.

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My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Retired Games for Life IPP During a Troop Trip

What I'm pretty sure will be the last Girl Scout badge I earn with my Girl Scout troop was also one of the most fun!

My Girl Scout troop does earn current, official GSUSA badges, but there's not enough variety in those badges to accommodate the full scope of all their interests (you should hire me to fix that, GSUSA!), so we've always incorporated retired and Make-Your-Own badges into our troop activities. 

In particular, the kids have been wanting to earn the retired Games for Life IPP for over a year, but what with one thing and another, between cookie sales and volunteer work and their high school activities and troop travel and part-time jobs, we just never made time for it. But I also like to have the kids earn a badge while we travel, and considering that there's also not a good Travel badge for Ambassadors (SIGH, GSUSA!), when we were planning our Spring Break troop trip to Boston I figured that this Games for Life IPP would be as good as any to earn then... as long as we rewrote it entirely, of course!

And if you're going to be traveling, what better badge to write than one all about travel games?

That's how this Games for Life IPP turned into the super fun, travel-themed Gamemaker badge. And this is what the kids did to earn it!

Step 1: Teach someone a new-to-them travel game. Learn a new-to-you travel game.

The kids actually completed this step last summer during our troop trip to Cincinnati--I told you they'd been wanting to earn this badge for a long time! When the kids were packing for that trip, I asked them each to include a favorite travel-friendly game. Then while we were hanging out in our AirBnb that night, they spent some time together teaching each other their games and playing them. Turns out my kid isn't the only one with a decade-plus obsession with Professor Noggin!

Step 2: Make and play Travel BINGO.

My partner made super cute blank BINGO cards and printed them two-to-a-page onto cardstock. I brought the cards, pens, and some scrap paper, and bought a couple of pairs of $1 scissors during our grocery shopping trip. I explained the concept of what I wanted us to do, then we all worked for a while on writing out fun BINGO prompts of things to do or see, inside jokes, and little dares, cutting each prompt out, and folding up all the little slips of paper and putting them into a hotel coffee cup. 

We passed the cup around, and each person took a prompt, wrote it in a blank space, and then put the prompt back so someone else could maybe get it. After we'd gone around a couple of times and I'd gotten an idea of the overall tone of the prompts, I also sneakily wrote out a few more and popped them in, ahem. I wanted every kid to have a prompt that was directly about them, and the kids seemed really excited about the prompts that read like little dares. 

When we got to the last couple of rounds I pulled out all the prompts one by one and read them out loud, and people could use their last couple of blanks to "adopt" a prompt if nobody had pulled it yet, or just write one down if it sounded especially fun.

Everyone's BINGO games turned out so great! Here's mine from the first night:

The kids and the chaperones LOVED this activity! It really seemed to encourage everyone to stretch themselves to try new things and put themselves out there a little more than they might otherwise have. We're not very competitive together and there weren't any prizes, anyway, so we just cheered each other on and all tried to get BINGOs.

Step 3: Make and play travel games in an Altoids tin. 

Only a Girl Scout troop leader can travel TO a place with more luggage than they travel home with, because I traveled to Boston with six Altoids tins and a ton of cardstock travel game templates in my backpack, and I came home with zero Altoids tins and far fewer cardstock templates!

For this project, my co-leader donated all the Altoids tins, and I printed several of these gameboard templates and these tangrams. If we'd been home, we would have had more craft supplies available and so could have put the effort into decorating and embellishing the Altoids tins, but for our immediate purposes it was enough for the kids to put together some fun travel games in their Altoids tin, then try them out by playing together. 

Step 4: Play a live-action game.

There are actually tons of games of this sort available when you travel to most cities, from Escape Rooms to Murder Mystery Dinners to Scavenger Hunts or even Geocaching. Boston has all of that, and I was especially tempted by the scavenger hunts, but I was already force-marching the kids around town enough while making them earn their Junior Ranger badges, and the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum is at least less walking!

When we checked in for our tour, we each got a real character to play:

Alas, you didn't *have* to be in character during the tour and activities, so in that manner it wasn't so great for the badge, but the paid actors were VERY in character, so at least the kids got to experience that part of it. 

And we all threw some tea into Boston Harbor, so we *were* all in character a little bit!

Step 5: Play a historical or geographically-relevant game.

I had thought about bringing the supplies for everyone to make a set of Nine Men's Morris and play it, but I was already bringing so many other craft supplies that I ended up deciding not to pack even more. I was VERY excited, then, to see that Abigail's Tea Room, part of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, not only had sets of Nine Men's Morris, but there was also a costumed actor who taught one of the Girl Scouts how to play.

And then she could teach the other kids!

Step 6: Play some travel solitaire games, then create your own original travel solitaire game for someone else to play.

I printed and packed mazes and word search puzzles for our trip--I had SO much Girl Scout stuff in my luggage! I'd intended for us to do them one night in our hotel, but our last couple of nights had been so busy that we didn't get to them until we arrived at the airport for our flights home.

That actually turned out to be a terrific time to pull them out, since the travel games could really fulfill their purpose of keeping the kids actively entertained while we waited for our flight, then again during the long layover before our second flight. 

I also brought along graph paper (because of course I did) so that the kids could create their own word searches and mazes and Sudokus. I loved seeing what everyone came up with, and some of their word searches were REALLY hard!

This turned out to be the perfect badge for a troop trip! Rewriting badge requirements should be, in my opinion, a far more normalized process within Girl Scout troops. It requires the kids to be actively involved in the planning, it increases relevancy, and it improves buy-in much more than using the pre-packaged activities does. 

These travel games also modeled a screen-free, social way for the kids to entertain themselves during our long travel days. People DO need brain breaks while traveling, and while your phone is always an easy solution, I think the kids saw that ultimately it was a lot more fun to chat together while solving word searches than it would have been for each of them to sit silently together on their phones. Boston BINGO was also SO much fun, and really improved camaraderie and kept everyone mindful of encouraging, cheering on, gently teasing, and just plain interacting with everyone else. 

So, fine, GSUSA. If you'd had an Ambassador-level Travel badge like *I* think you should, we would have just earned that and not stretched ourselves to make this Games for Life badge fit our trip, and we would have missed out on all the fun we had making and playing travel games together. 

I still think you should have an Ambassador-level Travel badge, though... You could even put travel games ON it!

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To Philadelphia and Back in 22 Hours

How are we already here again? Two years ago exactly, my older kid and I were on a whirlwind tour to see one last college before she made up her mind about where she was going to go to school. 

That feels so long ago, but also like it was yesterday, you know? That kid I took on her last college tour before Decision Day was still a kid. Just two years later she's still my baby, but she's no longer a child. She finished growing up there at college when I wasn't there to see it.

Now I'm supporting my younger kid as she makes the same kind of agonizing decision, and she's simultaneously the most grown-up, confident, sophisticated human I've ever had the privilege to know and also my precious four-year-old in a thrifted velvet dress, butterfly wings strapped to her back, mashing dandelion flowers into a pretend pie in her backyard mud kitchen.

How can I let that tiny little sprite out of my sight, much less drop her off and leave her at a college 700 miles away? Wasn't it just last week that she sat on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted a kitten for Christmas?

How about we just try not to think that far ahead for a bit. Let's just think about not forgetting where in this massive Economy Lot we're leaving the damn car:

Then we'll just think about the following:

• airport security
• napping during the flight
• finding the SEPTA station at the Philadelphia International Airport and buying rail tickets for later (the station in the college town apparently doesn't have its own ticket kiosk? Because... reasons?)
• booking and riding in my very first Lyft (super smooth process, but our driver did treat us to an anti-Philadelphia screed while also spurning the highway in favor of only surface streets, making the ride take so long that the Lyft app sent me a push notification asking if I was okay or was I in peril)
• getting dropped off at the campus gates and then immediately hoofing it to the nearest Starbucks for caffeine and a breakfast wrap
• taking one sip of my chocolate cream cold brew and realizing as soon as the stimulant hit my brain that we were about to be late for the Welcome event
• hoofing it back to campus at double-speed

And then, of course, exploring this beautiful college campus and learning about the school and meeting some students and staff and watching my kid make friends with the other kids on the tour. 

This school has a literal cloister why?

The kid is more of a sucker for the Collegiate Gothic architectural style than I am. Who wouldn't want to have class inside a castle?

Just between us, and knowing what y'all know about this kid, I'm pretty sure the fact that this school is basically a poorly-disguised cult for worshipping Athena is its biggest draw for her...

Statue of Athena, at which the students leave offerings. Tell me it's not a cult.

When we were given a little free time, the kid and I OBVIOUSLY beelined straight to the library. College libraries are some of my favorite campus buildings to explore!

Check out the original statue of Athena up high where students from the rival college can't reach her, and also plaster casts taken from the genuine Parthenon metopes on display at the British Museum. I'm just gonna leave this right here.

So envious that they have a whole room of puzzles! They also have a craft club with its own permanent, dedicated studio and an art club, also with its own permanent, dedicated studio. 

I read this book in grad school!

I'm telling you, the owl iconography is INTENSE. I kind of wanted to ask how this impacted their enrollment of students from certain Native American nations, but I'd already asked soooo many weird questions that I felt I should probably leave some weird questions for other people to ask.

Tell me that this is not a shocking number of owls, though?!?

I am SO glad that I'm not seventeen years old and trying to figure out where I want to go to college. The amazing choices that she has are a blessing, a luxury, and a direct result of the hard work this kid has done and the phenomenal person she is, but it's also an awful burden to have to decide.

Let's spend the next few hours not thinking about it, and instead thinking about how to navigate the SEPTA system, especially because Jefferson Station booted us out into a shopping mall with no discernible exit, and it took us at least 20 minutes to find our way out to the street. Also, while I was standing at one of the big maps and figuring out our route, a kind stranger came over to gently point out that I was tracing the trolley line and not the rail line. Because apparently Philadelphia also has trolleys!

I'd wanted to see Chinatown, browse a couple of bookstores, walk around the Independence sites, etc., and we had plenty of time to do that, but I'd neglected to take into account that by the time we got downtown we'd have been up and at 'em for approximately 14 hours, and shockingly for me when confronted with a tourist site, I was starting to fade.

Imagine! ME!!! Forgetting to so much as take a snapshot of the Chinatown Gate as we walked under it! Unwilling to walk a few extra blocks over to the bookstore I'd Pinned! Too tired to make the extra effort to take a close-up photo of Independence Hall!

Not even the facts of my own exhausted near-tears and the kid who dances on pointe six days a week admitting that her feet hurt could stop me from paying my respects to Ben, Deborah, and Francis Franklin, though:

That was the last tourist thing we did, though. After that we trudged straight back to Jefferson Station, caught the train back to the airport, did the whole security theatre dance number one more time, and collapsed at our gate, where the kid proceeded to sleep as soundly as if she'd been in her bed back home for the remaining two hours until our flight.

I, on the other hand, finished my book (Peter Darling), started another (Beartown), and discovered that, gasp, the Philadelphia International Airport only stocks Pepsi products?!? NOOO!!! Mama needs her Diet Sprite!

I reluctantly nursed my... Starry? WTF is a STARRY?!?... and made it last until we got back to our home airport, at which point I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a photo of our parking spot. Thank goodness for the teenager, who just flat-out remembered where we parked in her head, and who loudly sang our personal mash-up of "Party Rock Anthem," "California Girls," and the entire Percy Jackson musical with me to keep me awake for the drive home. 

I want her to go to absolutely the BEST college, y'all, and also I never want her to leave my side for a second. 

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!