Toronto Trip 2024

 We celebrated Mother's Day by giving J three days away from the kids again this year. I crossed the border with them (proudly bearing their own brand new passports for the first time across international lines) after a morning of church and then sitting through an RPO concert, and we went adventuring again in Canada. 

This is the third time that I've taken the boys across the border by myself, and we've had a great trip each time. (This was the first time that Canadian customs gave me any trouble about not having J along--"be sure to bring a note from the other parent next time.")

We stayed a little north of downtown off of Yonge, and our (very thin-walled) hotel had a balcony

Dinner out the first night. All Felix wanted to eat the whole time we were there were hot dogs, but he did say that if burgers tasted like ones that we had here that he would be interested in them more regularly.

Breakfast for the boys in the hotel lobby after we avoided paying for the gourmet ($49) hot breakfast buffet that Owen started helping himself to while my back was turned.

"I found a pet!" (He has a rubber dragon puppet on his hand.)

They played in this park across from the hotel each morning after walking out to places where I could find a real cup of coffee.

James was super distressed by the garbage in the pool. And by the fact that I wouldn't let him pick it up. Or bring it home to add to his seltzer can collection.

Picture for Mom. This trip was in many ways about building traveling muscles for James' London trip this summer. He says that he thinks it helped.

Shawarma for lunch, which we couldn't finish. Owen was pretty morose through this meal, and then admitted how much all of the homelessness he was seeing bothered him. He packed up our (substantial) leftovers in a carryout box and gave them to a homeless man a few blocks away. Felix would have preferred a hot dog.

Looking for the subway, found something more fun.

James watching the trains switching at Union Station on our way to a Blue Jays game. 

Tried to do a panorama picture and boys were too excited to get into the stadium to hold still for a second attempt.

Maybe the highlight of the trip for these guys. Because we were among the first few hundred fans in the stadium we all got free jerseys. We ended up sitting in the upper deck for over an hour before the game started.

Pretty nice view for a game. We passed the hour by doing a crossword on my phone, which was the highlight of my trip. 
"Complete the popular Beyonce lyrics: "...Cause if you liked it then you should have put a____", 8 letters. Owen: "Marriage"
"Bury one's____ in the sand" Felix: "Brother"
"When I Was Your ____," song by Bruno Mars, 3 letters, starts with M. James: "Mom?"

Blue Jays won, 9-3. Several double plays, several homeruns. It was a great game.

Finally!

Riding very crowded trains to get back to the hotel.

Eating pizza on the balcony and reading Asterix to finish out the day. (Which was Victoria Day!)

Back out on the balcony again first thing the next morning and eager to go swimming.

We have the same photo from 2019. Can't find a way to upload it. Felix looks very young and is howling because I'm making him hold still for a photo.

Felix and Big George pose in front of Monkey Sushi

Found out after we'd picked up the sushi and walked 4 blocks that they only gave us chopsticks. Managed to cadge a few spoons from a coffee shop but they pretty much made the sushi and rice bit work exclusively with the chopsticks. Not bad for first-timers.

Back in the States, their first time at Old Fort Niagara

"This must have been where the soldiers put their TV!"

Shortly before meeting the reenactor to watch him load and fire his musket. (Or, as Felix called it, his "muskrat.")

In the bakery. "I'm Mom!"

And that was it! We stopped for ice cream at Circle R on the way out of Kuckville, but then we were Irondequoit-bound.

Lascaux

 I read an interesting book about the cave paintings at Lascaux last week by the French art historian Jean-Jacques Lefrere. I've always been curious about those paintings, especially after reading the first chapter of Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" in college. Whatever we know about cavemen, despite all of our caricatures of and speculation about them, is as simple and as profound as this: in the beginning, human beings had the impulse to make art.

Lefrere was puzzled by the technical aspects of the cave art--namely, that it didn't have a right to be as good or as consistent as it apparently is. (There are cave drawings separated by over 17,000 years and hundreds of miles that are remarkably similar.)

It was a great book in which he slowly laid out what we know about the paintings:

They are all in profile. They are all of animals, and there is never any vegetation or other landscape elements. The horns, antlers, legs, and bodies are remarkably well painted, without any apparent hesitation or correction. A number of paintings are started, but unfinished. The paintings all appear in locations in the caves that are far, far away from any natural light. The paintings are on unusually textured and irregular surfaces, very rarely on a blank/flat space. The paintings vary wildly in size (some are enormous, some very small) but all have a harmony of style and proportion.

Lefrere speculated that the paintings were done not by freehand or from practiced technique, but by placing a carved statue of an animal before a clay lamp (hence reindeer, bison, and horses rather than rabbits, frogs, or snakes) and by painting in the projected shadow on the illuminated wall.

The boys and I decided to give it a test. We checked out a book about the discovery of the caves from the library, then set about building a fire last week to make ourselves enough charcoal. Not having any berries or madder on hand, we colored the charcoal with food coloring, and then blocked off all of the light coming in through the basement windows. 

At first we tried to light a paraffin lamp, but it was stinky and hot. A flashlight worked fine for a light source. (Except when an older brother thoughtlessly bumped the chair it was up against. Hence the unfinished reindeer.)

Owen's favorite part of getting the charcoal

Felix, who blistered his hand after putting it on the chimneia

Projecting the shadow. We had a cow, a horse, and a leopard

Cave-child

Finished work

Owen's (typewritten) Science Essay

 Louis Pasteur was a smart French scientist who cured a few viruses, many with assistance of his wife Marie. Louis Pasteur (Louie Pass-ture) MN helped against Chicken EN Cholera a disease that killed livestock. Now all these farmers became vegetarians! But really, it was no laughing matter, the people needed their livestock. Just like what we did with the Coronav-irus Pasteur tried giving the livestock a little bit of weakened Chicken Cholera but it did not work. He produced other ideas seemed to work! He forgot about a batch of bacteria in his busyness. He rediscovered it months later, xxxx and tried it on the livestock, and it worked Pasteur had discovered a cure by accidentt! Louis Pasture had many more success with livestock. His most famous cure was a cure for rabies. People bitten by a infected animal have rabies because of the animals saliva. It leaves the poor victim in a state of confusion. Most victims die. Pasteur came up with a idea that seemed to work, and when it worked on Joseph Meister, the first person to ever get the rabies shot Pasteur was seen as a hero.

                                                                            Louis Pasture was a great medical hero!

Signs of Growth

​The boys are aging, ever so slowly but with undeniable upward progress. 

James, who asked to borrow a tie for the orchestra concert that he attended last Friday, approached me confidentially the day after and told me that he really liked wearing some nice dress clothes and would it be possible to get him some more?

It was possible, and he has a blazer, a proper leather belt, and his very own striped silk tie heading his way. (Now he’ll need to learn how to tie it on his own.)

Owen continues to pound away at the piano as soon as he wakes up in the morning, as a formal part of his school day, and in an exploratory and informal manner whenever he passes it. I cherish no hopes of him going into music professionally—if anything, I’d try to steer him away from it. But it gives me undeniable pleasure to hear him picking out melodies he knows in increasingly difficult keys, to hear him making up basic left hand accompaniments to his ear tunes, and to be pushing further and further outside the lines of basic diatonic harmony.

And Felix is the most overtly resistant to growing up. He declared that he can’t read, he sucks his fingers defiantly, and he still carries Big George everywhere he goes. But he only plays the baby when he is with us. Increasingly he is the older kid who assists with looking after the small ones at church, and despite his best efforts to evade and stall from his schoolwork, he described cars that we pass on the highway with fanciful pronunciations of their license plates and a description of their gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter, depending on the sex of the driver) and number (singular or plural, depending on how many people are riding in the front seat.)

They are all looking very tall. 

A Farewell to Mint

Today is the end of a family institution. 

For the last ten years I've written a financial summary for us once a month, every month. I would login to mint.com, sort all of the data into the appropriate categories, and then type it up and send it to Julie. Mint was great. It was easy to use, intuitive, and free. 

For these reasons alone it was doomed. 

Intuit is discontinuing Mint and trying to move all of its users over to Credit Karma, which is not going to be particularly useful to us. We've been switching over (with some help from Excel-savvy friends) to homemade spreadsheet tracking over the first part of this year.

But it will be sad to no longer have the written financial summaries. There have been some gems over the years.

Apparently back in 2014 we needed to have a line item just for purchases of pens. But, then again, our entire monthly childcare expenses were only $25 back then.

There were student loan payments back then, and a running talley of how many months were left in each car payment.

There were some notably bad months. The header to the email for the August 2015 summary is:

"August Financial Summary (WTF)" (Life insurance due, car insurance, and several major home repairs)

It was apparently in 2016 that I started labeling trumpets as "Business Expenses" whenever I bought them.

I recognize many of the transactions, but some are completely bewildering. I have no idea what we would have spent $5 on at a Sears in 2017. (Did we run out of diapers in a semi-abandoned mall?)

I started to keep running percentages of a yearly budget on a month to month basis at some point during that year, but it must have been too much work--that was abandoned fairly quickly.

There are also a number of destruction related lines that I find as the kids get older. 

"Window replacement--James/baseball."

"Library book that Felix tore the pages out of."

"Treadmill repair visit which accomplished absolutely nothing."

But, to be fair, there aren't nearly as many of these as 

"Another piccolo trumpet mouthpiece that didn't work."

We'll miss you, Mint. You are a good reminder of when we used to buy diapers every month...

The Typewriter

 Meeting a new baby was fine and cool and good, but the REALLY exciting part of visiting Uncle Lucas and Aunt Melissa's house (for Owen) was discovering that Uncle Lucas owned several typewriters.

He was fascinated.

"Dad, I HAVE to have a typewriter. Will you please get me one?"

Remembering his relentless and incessant campaign for a harmonica I decided that I would set a specific and difficult-to-obtain bribe from the outset. 

"I think that only children who have read the entire Lemony Snicket 'Series of Unfortunate Events' are able to own typewriters."

"I'm on it. James, can you get me the first book the minute that we walk in the door?"

This was Sunday afternoon. Owen had decided several years ago that Count Olaf was too scary for him to read the Lemony Snicket books, and nothing that I said in their favor could change his mind. Now all of his objections were gone. He read them on the couch. He read them at the dinner table. He read them at bedtime, and he woke up early so that he could read them in the morning. He read them instead of his school books. He read them on on the beaches, and on the landing grounds, and in the fields. With growing confidence and strength he read them. 

On Wednesday morning he came down to breakfast and informed me that I owed him a typewriter. So I bought him one. You all are about to get receive a lot of letters.

He's been quiet all day except for an incessant click-clacking. He handed me this letter within five minutes of owning it. 

     dear dad

Thank you for this typewriter it is simply glamorus. Thank you for porposing this deal and thank yguo goodness porposing thjy   fit you make my life better in EVERY POSIBLE WAY!

LUV U

                                            LOVE

                                    Owen Nicholas Smith 

This personality shines through his prose. I'm reminded of when we first got the ipad and showed the kids how to message our phones.

(Messaging James)

J: James, how did your piano lesson go this morning?

iPad: Let's discuss this at a later time.

(Messaging Owen)

J: Owen, did you have a good piano lesson with Grandma?

iPad: <gif of dancing shirtless fat man>

it was SOOOOOO good i got 3 my songs checked of and a star

<sticker of a star-eyed unicorn vomiting a rainbow>

Given that the typewriter can't insert gifs or emojis I think that it will be a helpfully tempering influence on Owen as a correspondent...

Catch

 There are some February 10ths in which we spend the whole day going in and out of the garage, taking turns to shovel out the driveway because it is blizzarding and we need to keep the driveway clear. The snowplows keep on filling up our driveway apron, and you want to move all of the heavy stuff out before it freezes in place.

This year's February 10th almost hit 60 degrees. There were some patches of warmish rain, but for most of the day you could find some genuine yellow sunlight if you stood outside long enough.

I played catch in the backyard with the boys for an hour, and I hope that my Dad enjoyed playing catch with his sons on an unseasonably warm winter day as much as I did with mine. (I have very specific memories of playing catch in fall weather with my Dad, avoiding the work of and the physical obstacle of the unstacked pile of firewood by the cellar doors.)

James, who can easily throw the ball the entire length of the backyard now, is a great sport. Owen zigged and zagged and enjoyed "covering" people as much as any of the throwing and catching he did. Felix caught some balls but mostly used the game as an excuse to roll around on the muddy ground. He started the day in a blue raincoat with blue pants and a red hoodie. He ended the day in a brown raincoat with brown pants and a brown hoodie.

They also tracked in mud whenever they came in and outside. There is a permanent line of discoloration on our walls and door molding at about the three foot line...where they put their hands when they turn into the kitchen, run up and down the stairs, or brace against the wall to take off their shoes. (Just kidding, they never take off their shoes. They just clomp bits of mud all across the hardwood.)

I didn't care. It was just nice to throw a football around in the sunshine with three happy boys. 

It ended in tears, as it always does. Owen pushed Felix harder than he intended, and Felix now has an enormous goose egg on his forehead that hasn't quite stopped bleeding. I gave him a baggy of ice to hold against his head and told him it would keep the bruising down. He put his muddy feet up on the kitchen table and sat with the bag open on his lap, picking out and eating the ice cubes with muddy fingers.

They've had a great day.