Category: parenting

Bees, Please

Open Hands Potluck & Tour

Saturday, in what must be considered one of the hippiest things I’ve ever done, we went to a potluck dinner for members of our organic, community-supported agriculture farm, Open Hands, just outside Northfield. We are – thanks to Shannon’s bottomless industriousness, creativity, and plain old hard work, eating a ridiculous amount of fresh Open Hands food this summer, so it was fun to use the potluck to sample a lot of great food, to see who else belongs to the farm, and to get a tour of the farm’s five or so acres.

While Ben and Erin – the proprietors of the farm – did an excellent job showing about twenty of us around the property, I was most struck by the bees that they’d rented to pollinate the fields this summer. I am fascinated by bees, but I’ve never visited an apiary or even really read much about them (excepting Jay Hosler’s excellent Clan Apis graphic novel and current coverage of colony collapse disorder), so it was a treat to actually go right up to the multicolored hive boxes
Open Hands Potluck & Tour

and see the bees up close, both as they came and went from the hives
Open Hands Potluck & Tour

and as they wandered singly over the boxes.
Open Hands Potluck & Tour

It was transfixing to crouch next to the boxes (right near the cluster of entering and exiting workers shown above). My first impression was visual: hundreds of bees were zooming everywhere around me, individually too fast to track but collectively present like a living cloud. My second impression was auditory: a gentle hummy buzz emanating from the hives and ambient in the air, building and fading as bees flew around. My third impression was tactile: the tickley feeling of a dozen or so bees landing on me – bare arms and legs, face, hair – before realizing their mistakes and heading off again. Far from being scary or even unpleasant, having bees brushing against me felt almost exactly like walking through a thicket. My fourth impression was olfactory: a very subtle hint of baked treats, which I only gradually realized was the smell of the honey in the hives. Thankfully, I never had the fifth impression of tasting a bee. Equally thankfully, I have had the luck of eating pounds and pounds of food they’ve helped create.

Being Right Brings No Satisfaction

As we often do, the girls and I broke up the Sunday-morning monotony with a little outing in the neighborhood. Since the new bike path is so nice, I proposed that they ride their bikes up the road a ways. Vivi liked this idea, but Julia said, no, “I prefer to walk and push Care Bear in the stroller.”

I knew that there was no way in the world she’d actually push the stroller the whole time – and thus that I’d end up carrying it for most of the walk – but I decided to let that go in favor of encouraging her to wear actual shoes and socks, rather than the sandals which she is literally wearing to shreds and which are also pretty terrible to wear while actually walking. This recommendation was rejected on her usual grounds: “Daddy, I don’t like the way shoes look with skirts! Sandals are much prettier with skirts!”

This is an argument I cannot win, so after my usual grumbles about how she’d be picking pebbles out of the straps and stumbling over rocks, we headed out. Vivi rode up ahead, riding her Big Wheel at a million miles an hour, and Julia trailed behind, pushing Care Bear in the stroller and stopping frequently to minister to the doll. After we stopped for our snack, Julia decided that she didn’t want to push the stroller anymore. I folded the $#&(#% thing up and started carrying it, trying at the same time to keep Vivi was veering off the path into the weeds.

Noticing that Julia wasn’t next to me, I turned around to find her sitting in the dirt, shaking rocks and sand out of her sandals. “Daddy, the rocks really hurt my feet!” I didn’t even respond, mostly because Vivi was again motoring toward some obstacle. As I corrected her course, I heard a scream from behind us. I whipped around. Julia was just getting up off the pavement after falling. Her right knee was magnificently bloody, and her left sandal was falling off her foot. “What happened, honey?” I asked, wiping the blood off her knee with my hand. She sobbed out, “My sandal strap wasn’t tight and the sandal made me trip!”

I derived no satisfaction from being right on every count. Thankfully, she got over the accident quickly and enjoyed the rest of the walk – even though sometimes we had to jog to catch up to Vivi.

Tour de Francing

While I was out east, the city paved the new bike path that runs directly behind our house and connects us – finally! – to the rest of the city’s sidewalk grid. The girls were happy to ride on the path. As we ferried the bikes to the path, Julia announced that she “loooooves Tour de Francing.” Here they are, poised to start the trip to Prairie Street, two-thirds of a mile to the west.
Tour de Francers

I dunno about you, but going one and a third miles on a tricycle is not my idea of fun. Perhaps that’s why, halfway through the trek, Vivi had to stop to “shake out my wegs.”

Tour de Francing from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.

After this little routine, she resumed the trip, which went very well. Maybe we’ll even be able to bike to the swimming pool this summer!

Business Travel

Tomorrow morning I head off to a grants conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. There is nothing like a business trip to rip open all kinds of psychological fissures. You’d need a dozen octopi for all the “one the one hand… on the other hand…” situations. The crowning aspect of any business trip, of course, is that it leaves one partner home alone with no shift change. This, Shannon does not like- not that she should. I don’t like that part of it much, either. As difficult as evenings can be (with Vivi’s hijinks), there’s no substitute for simply being there with the girls – which is what’s made it so unpleasant for me to be cut out of the bedtime routine these last few weeks and months.

On the other hand, I love traveling and especially seeing new places. Skidmore and Saratoga Springs both sound like fascinating places that’ll eat up my few hours of downtime. Having attended earlier iterations of this conference, I know it too will be great in all the important ways – such as finding new ways to drum up money for the college.

On the other other hand, travel like this is a pretty far cry from relaxing. The days are, after all, full of rather intense work. And yes, as Shannon reminds me, I can eat what and when I want and sleep without a baby monitor buzzing in my ear. But airplanes are not exactly dens of comfort and bliss, and having had quite a bit of the usual modern air-travel trouble every time I’ve flown for business, I doubt I’m going to arrive in Saratoga Springs tomorrow feeling particularly tanned, rested, or ready. But if all goes well, I will probably head home on Friday in a pretty good mood.

Independence Day Blowout

Froggy Bottoms for the Fourth

Our Fourth of July continued our tradition of busy Independence Days, including a long walk downtown to hang out with friends and watch the Northfield Criterium bike races, good naps, and a great party at some very generous friends’ spacious house in the countryside north of town. One girl is, at present, worn out; the other is wound up. This is a bad combination, but the day was fun enough that even the prospect of a rough bedtime can’t ruin the good moods.

(The picture above is the river side of the Froggy Bottoms restaurant/bar in downtown Northfield, done up for the holiday. It struck me that it looks a tiny bit like Monet’s Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878.)

Funday

A minute ago, in the middle of a conversation about our post-bath, pre-bedtime activities (centered on coloring pictures of Disney Princesses [I’m ready for my lobotomy now]), I commented on how I was having fun with the girls. Julia paused, pencil poised over her sheet of paper, scowled, and said, “But grown-ups don’t have fun, Daddy.”

I’ll grant that I’m rarely having a blast at 7:45 p.m., but nonetheless I did have quite a bit of fun today. I used the bike trailer to take the girls to the Arb for a nice long walk, I went downtown during their naps to do some drawing, and after nap we played outside until the sun said, “Oh my god, can’t you people take a rest?” Julia enjoyed jumping off our Little People slide/climber thingy – jumping being a skill she has lately been cultivating) and Genevieve enjoyed running the bases after her mother helped her use our big new oversized baseball bat to clobber a line-drive triple to center.

Short version of the above: today was a perfect summer weekend day.

Mid-Jump

Runing the Bases

Sprinkleritis

The girls enjoyed another 45 minutes with the sprinkler this afternoon. Well, Julia did. As these photos show, Vivi was as bored by the whole deal and Julia was energized by it. The funniest part of the activity was Vivi’s constant requests that I “durn up” or “durn down” the sprinkler, which accompanied promises that she would run through the appropriately high or low sprinkler. She never did. After roughly 20 trips to the faucet (I counted!), I only had to touch the handle, but not even turn it, before one or the other said, “Oh, that’s the perfect height!” I bet I didn’t actually change the height at all over my last 20 trips (I counted!).

Subjects Belabored by My Daughters (A Partial List)

Who goes first.
Why the other one went first.
Whether one really needs to wash one’s hands.
Whether hand-washing is actually just “a silly grown-up idea” (an actual quote).
The content of the next meal/snack.
Whether or not that next meal/snack has the “right” number of items in it. (“A starch and a fruit or veggie for snack; a starch, a protein, fruit or veggie for a meal, plus milk and water.”)
Whether they need to have their hair washed today, tomorrow, or this week.
Dogs.
People walking dogs.
Dog poop.
Whether that thing on the sidewalk is a worm or dried bird poop.
Whether they can take off their sandals.
Why they can’t take off their sandals.
Which day of the week it is.
Which day of the week they thought it was.
Whether today is a “weekend day” or a “work day.”
What those kids are doing.
Why those kids are doing that.
Who is passing gas (or as Vivi says,”pathing gath”).
Whether the gas-passer has said “Excuse me” with any sincerity.
The Disney Princesses.
The distinctions among the various princesses.
The similarities of the various princesses.
Why this or that princess ought to be your favorite.
Why it is not, in fact, quite time to clean up.

Mer-Girls

This afternoon, the girls enjoyed their first “swim” of the season in the wading pool. They played for about 45 minutes, which easily doubled their previous record, and best of all, most of my time was spent in the lawn chair, making sure nobody tried to (make the other one) drink the water. Easy, wet, and fun.
First Swim of the Season

First Swim of the Season

First Swim of the Season

Princessed Out

As someone who’s routinely and systematically harassed by subjects of the Disney Princesses – or, as their littlest lady errant says, the “Dizuh-dee Wincesses” – I was amused today to discover a great set of photographs by Dina Goldstein that tell counter-fairy tales, like this one of Snow White living unhappily ever after:

Snowy by Dina Goldstein (via JPG Mag)
"Snowy" by Dina Goldstein

The other six are just as good, and two more are in the works…