American Revolution Road Trip: Cape Cod National Seashore

We took another break from the American Revolution side of our road trip on this day, because it is completely impossible for me to be near the coast and NOT go to the beach! As an added convenient excuse, the Cape Cod National Seashore offers a Junior Ranger badge, and as an added ADDED excuse, the ocean off of Cape Cod is the natural habitat of the great white shark:


We barely looked away from the water the entire time we were there, hoping to see a fin!

Well, we looked away a little, but only because the rocky shore was so interesting, as well! It's a national park, so I couldn't take any home with me, alas, but I really wanted to!

The kids weren't cold. I was!

There was a lot of trash on the beach, washed up from the ocean, so much that we were able to fill a giant plastic bag with rope and plastic bottles and randomness. I DID take a couple of pieces of interesting trash home as souvenirs!

I didn't recognize it until it was pointed out to me, but this is the lighthouse on the bag of Cape Cod potato chips!

 We visited several beaches along the seashore as we made our way up the coast to Provincetown (where the pilgrims first landed), and at each one we hung out, ran around, played, picked up trash, and watched for sharks:

We never did see any great white sharks, although we did see a couple of seal or sea lion heads out in the water, so sharks could have been hunting there!

This one had to miss ballet class that day, so it's good that she got some dancing in:

Even though I was a little chilly, I actually fell asleep here for a while.

At the visitor center up near Provincetown, we had to watch a documentary for the children's Junior Ranger badge. Um, it was the creepiest, most depressing documentary that I have ever seen at a national park!



There's a scene where the sailors are scooping stuff out of a whale's head, and another where they're hacking things off of a whale, and I'm not even sure if it's dead yet.

But don't worry, because those sailors all die in shipwrecks, anyway.

Shudder.

No shipwrecks, whales, or great white sharks to be found!

This day-long detour from our American Revolution theme made for a VERY long day in Boston the next day and a VERY short day in Philadelphia a couple of days later, but it was worth it. We know more about sharks, we know more about the sea, and, well...

...we know much, much, MUCH more than we maybe wanted to know about whaling.

American Revolution Road Trip: Valley Forge and Washington Crossing the Delaware

Today was a day with a lot of driving, so as usual we were up and at 'em and at Valley Forge nice and early (with some fuel on the way, because the younger kid was OBSESSED with Dunkin' Donuts):

We checked out the museum for the site--

Kids and adults both immediately recognized this statue as a copy of one in the Mount Vernon museum (and indeed, upon further study, the placard stated that it WAS donated by them!). This is especially cool because the statues of George Washington in the Mount Vernon museum are apparently the most realistic ones available. They used forensic facial reconstruction to recreate his face at several ages, and his clothing to recreate his build.

I like paleography, so I enjoyed deciphering the inscription on this powder horn, although I couldn't work out a couple of the characters on my own.

 The highlight of Valley Forge, however, is going outside and tromping around all the places!

We didn't tromp around EVERY company's barracks, but we explored this one thoroughly.

A lot of what we know about Valley Forge was informed by Forge, a great read in YA historical fiction (the third book in the series, Ashes, recently came out, so that's next on our car audiobook list after we finish our current series), so we were especially excited to see these barracks, inside and out, as a lot of time in the novel is devoted to their construction:

The earthworks were also interesting to explore. I wouldn't let my kids climb on them (although other people were, and for all I know, it was allowed), so instead one of them hid behind them and shot at me: 

The other major highlight of Valley Forge, for us, was Washington's Headquarters--

--although not for the reasons that you might think, namely George Washington, even though Matt is a big fanboy of his.

Not me, though. I am no Washington fangirl, although his gardens were on point, but you know who I AM a huge fangirl of?

His assistant, Alexander Hamilton!

Alexander Hamilton walked these stairs!

Alexander Hamilton possibly slept in this bedroom!

I'm not the only one, either--there were two docents in the house while we were there, and I heard someone from both of the two families who came in after us ask about Alexander Hamilton!

I didn't hear either of them actually ask about George Washington...

We're not really souvenir buyers, but I did make a couple of amazing discoveries in this gift shop. One is Jeff Shaara's series of historical fiction about the American Revolution, which I've requested from our local library and which I'm deeply hoping is as good as Killer Angels and Panther in the Sky, my two favorite historical fiction books, and the other is that indie game makers have made a TON of board, card, and/or dice games about the American Revolution! I wanted this one the most, but all of them were too spendy for me to purchase without having at least tried them out first--I wish I had access to a board game lending library, or a rental service!

Next on our list we hit the road and came here. Can you tell its historical significance?

It may look like a regular old riverbank, but this is the place where Washington and his army crossed the Delaware!

We looked at it, sure, but you know what? It was also just a really nice day to goof off at a riverbank:

This kid wasn't satisfied until, as usual, she'd soaked her trousers to the thigh and had to change in the car.

This kid wasn't satisfied until, as usual, she'd created an entire bakery's worth of mudpies.

 It was kind of a crappy drive from there to the Boston area afterwards (why do you have so much traffic, New England!?!), but we had our Dark is Rising audiobook series to entertain us, and our sticker books and doodle books and coloring books and puzzle books, and our e-readers and print books...

...and, of course, a Dunkin' Donuts every mile, just in case we needed more sugar and caffeine.

Reader, we did.

Halloween 2016: A Field Trip for Two Hogwarts Students (and Their Professors)

There are some Halloween traditions that we missed out on this year, due to various reasons along the lines of not having an oven, of having too many weekend activities, of me grieving for Mac on his late-October birthday (and dreading that date for many days beforehand), of having kids who are simply older and older, every single year.

We bought the kids' Jack-o-lantern pumpkins at Wal-mart this year instead of at our local, family-owned pumpkin patch, because Wal-mart is open 24 hours a day and weekends aren't and I seriously had that much trouble getting my shit together. I still feel guilty, but fortunately Wal-mart pumpkins carve just as well as the Freeman Farm ones, even if they didn't come with all the good memories of their choosing:

We missed out on a dear friend's yearly Halloween party, if we were going to have a special family adventure on an actual weekend, it had to be that exact day or it would be no day. We took the kids to their first-ever corn maze:

I think they liked it!

They immediately ran off into the distance and left me and Matt to be corn maze failures. Sure, we looked cute and confident--

--but we walked around that maze for something like a mile, making what were apparently increasingly wrong turns:

We finally, finally, FINALLY saw plain air in sight, but when we left the maze, we saw not just our kids waiting patiently on some benches for us to finish the freaking maze already, but that, dang it, we'd accidentally found our way back out the entrance, not the exit. We had to call the kids to come and help us, lest we spend another hour and do the same damn thing!

We also discovered that along with a dog for Will, we deeply need a couple of miniature horses:

And maybe a couple of cows:

But probably not an outhouse:

And yes, this game DOES consist of tossing corncobs into a outhouse. Fun AND relevant!

We didn't make the Haunted Hoops run by our local university's basketball team, but a new tradition that I raced us out the door for one weekday afternoon was trick-or-treating on the university's sorority/fraternity row. Despite the horrifying amount of candy that the children received (fistfuls of candy at a time, my Friends. Fistfuls of candy!), I'm actually really glad that we did this one, because it involved putting on costumes early enough in the afternoon for photographs!

On Halloween night, Will went trick-or-treating early with a friend while Syd had ballet class, and by the time we all met up again it was far too dark for photos, so if it wasn't for this event, horrifying amount of candy or not, I wouldn't have had any photos of us in our costumes, and thanks to a promise that the entire family made me last Halloween night, this was my dream year of having the entire family go as witches and wizards from Hogwarts!

Here, then, is a Gryffindor student. She's technically a year too young to be a first-year, but her wild magic was so powerful and disruptive that she required early enrollment in order to learn to control it. They feed her lots of candy and get her to run laps around the lake like a Labrador Retriever, so that's why she gets to make a special field trip to America for Halloween--here's an entire semester's worth of candy in one night!


Here's her chaperone for this field trip, the Head of Hufflepuff house and the Quidditch coach/Magical Art and Design professor:

They're accompanied by this second-year student from Slytherin house, ostensibly here to gather research for a Muggle Studies project, but we all suspect that she somehow blackmailed the Headmistress into letting her come along, because candy:

In charge of the entire affair is the Head of Ravenclaw house, fencing coach, and Professor of Magical Literature. Someone has to keep this crew in line!

And it's certainly not going to be the Head of Hufflepuff House! Everyone knows that Hufflepuff is the party house!

I specifically told them not to perform magic in front of the Muggles, and yet look at that--caught right in the act of a Wingardium Leviosa!

Clearly the only thing to do is march them around and let college students give them lots of candy:

  

And then march them back home, blessedly too exhausted to throw a fit:

I'm told that holidays get easier, that one day I'll be able to tell the story of the time that I helped Mac dress as the guy who shot Ronald Reagan so that Jodi Foster would love him, and how that involved him getting fired from our library job, but it was okay because they just gave him a different library job, and in this job he had to manage the copy machines, which means that I never had to pay for another photocopy again thanks to all the left-behind copy cards that he scored, and I'll be able to tell that story with genuine happiness at the memory, not grief at the loss. I'll be able to tell the kids about my favorite Halloween costumes as a child without feeling deeply sad about Pappa, who isn't here this year, and all the family-related anxiety that's resulted from that.

What I'm also told, and what I'm really trying to do, although how successful I am at that they'd have to tell you, is to try to focus on the friends and family who are left to me, to be with Matt, to enjoy my girls, to make the kinds of memories that my kids can look back on one day as some of their happiest of the time.

The secret trick is that when I can do that, it actually lessens my own grief for a time. And if I carry on, and get through this year, then I won't have to go through one more first birthday without Mac, or first Christmas without Pappa. The first time that I have to do it will be the hardest, I hope, and the second time onward will be easier.