Nature. Pretty sure that it's the most important ingredient to being a happy and healthy kid. Getting it into our curriculum is something that The Dad is particularly good at. Today he went to work really early so he could get done a bit early and pick us up for our yearly tradition: on one of the weekends before Halloween we go to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and take pictures of the kids in their costumes. The tradition started a few years ago when we used to do all the Sleepy Hollow stuff (Legends, The Blaze, etc...), but the events have changed and the kids have changed, and now we just go up for the cemetery photo shoot, and listen during the ride there/back to Washington Irving's tale on a CD that we bought at Philipsburg Manor a couple of years ago.
Costumes -- The Dad and The Boy are Lenny and Squiggy (in their Lenny and the Squigtones outfits), The Sister and I are Laverne and Shirley, and The Girl is Boo-boo Kitty. We totally know going into this that 99% of the people who see us won't get it... But it's fun to be a team. And we'll do it our way, yes our way... Oh shoot, let's just put the whole awesome song here for posterity:
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Sclemeel, schlemazel, hasenfeffer incorporated.
We're gonna do it!
Give us any chance, we'll take it.
Give us any rule, we'll break it.
We're gonna make our dreams come true.
Doin' it our way.
Nothin's gonna turn us back now,
Straight ahead and on the track now.
We're gonna make our dreams come true,
Doin' it our way.
There is nothing we won't try,
Never heard the word impossible.
This time there's no stopping us.
We're gonna do it.
On your mark, get set, and go now,
Got a dream and we just know now,
We're gonna make our dream come true.
And we'll do it our way, yes our way.
Make all our dreams come true,
And do it our way, yes our way,
Make all our dreams come true
For me and you.
source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/laverneandshirleylyrics.html
After taking pictures and exploring the cemetery a bit (we found a colony of rather sinister looking huge black beetles with weird bodies) we drove to Stone Barns -- such a beautiful, beautiful place. We have been a few times -- we've done the Saturday egg-collecting event twice -- and it's always beautiful, but today -- as evening was coming and the fall leaves were glowing, or floating, or crunching -- it was perfect (except for the poop smell). You can walk around and check out the animals any time you want, so we looked at the chickens and turkeys and sheep (and Stella and Stewart the two dogs that guard the sheep -- we love them -- once a sheep had been born the very morning of the day we were visiting and a farmhand stepped into a little corner of the barn to lift the baby up for our view, and Stella went nuts... At that moment The Girl and I felt a deep respect for Stella. Tonight when she barked at us we just loved her for it). Where was I? And pigs, and cows, and geese, and a zillion little gnats.
After leaving Stone Barns it was just a hop-skip to Swan Lake -- a part of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve -- and we walked around it (a bit over a mile?). The best part was when we heard swooshing and honking and looked up to see about 200 Canada Geese all coming in for a landing in the middle of the lake. It's for moments like that that you go outside. I hope that my kids caught the eternal quality of the moment.
We got to watch wild animals en masse settle in for the night. Dang.
If not for the scheme I'm pretty sure that at that moment when we were spellbound -- watching those geese descend from their overlapping formations, skim along the water and then settle their wings to their sides -- we would have been sitting at our kitchen table doing homework.
Now a word about something even more lame than homework:
I totally understand that hairy bung-holes are a part of nature in their own right, but you shouldn't be looking at them and coming to my blog. Seriously. Go away. This whole (hole? groan...) blogging thing might be too much for me after all... Feeling rather up about the blog because of a thoughtful email I received from a friend, I decided to explore my "dashboard" to find out fun tidbits about my blog's history -- how many people have visited, from what countries my visitors have come, etc... It was all kind of cheerful, until I made a mistake that might haunt me the rest of life... I clicked on one of the addresses from my "traffic sources" to see from what websites my people were coming from, and up came a grid of pictures -- of hairy bums -- a bung-hole bingo if you will. What is wrong with people??? Best case scenario is that it was a random throw-out to a bunch of random blogspot addresses, but still -- there's somebody behind those bung-holes... THIS is EXACTLY why I don't do social media. I just want to find a nice little rural British village -- without any technology -- and live my days in blissful ignorance of the weirdness of others.
