My cousin‘s oldest son was the first person awake on Sunday morning, and when he accepted that his parents weren’t ready to get out of bed yet, he came out to wake my girlfriend and me. We played with him for a couple of minutes and then I convinced him that helping me to make coffee could be fun, too.
If you’re a podcast listener, you’ve probably heard Nate and me rave about the aeropress. It not only makes great coffee, it’s also highly portable and convenient, which makes it great for camping or even for giving yourself an option other than hotel coffee or Starbucks when you’re on the road. My cousin’s wife made oatmeal with brown sugar and banana, so between us we put together a tasty breakfast. The boys helped us dry off and pack up the tent, then we surprised them with presents.
When Emily and I were in Prague, we saw this adorable “Little Mole” character everywhere. Some research revealed that he was an extremely popular Czech cartoon character who never got much exposure in the US. We mailed the boys a Little Mole postcard from Prague and later learned that that got them started watching Little Mole videos on YouTube. There’s little to no talking in the videos, so they cross language barriers easily, though the content can still be different than what you’d see in American children’s programming. In one episode, two rabbits do some pretty heavy hugging and kissing, after which the lady rabbit starts to get fatter and eventually lies down on her back and screams in pain as babies emerge from between her legs. Anyway, the kids got pretty into him, but it was next to impossible to find any Little Mole toys in the US.
When Miklos came from Hungary to visit me in DC before the PCA earlier this year, I asked if he could bring some Little Mole stuff over for the boys. He obliged, and though I’d seen them several times since then, Emily had not, and I’d waited on giving them the best gifts: matching backpacks. So we had those for them, plus an extra present for the older boy’s birthday: a real boomerang that we’d purchased for him in Switzerland.
A weapon might not seem like an appropriate sixth birthday present, but this isn’t just any six-year-old. This kid has had a Swiss Army knife and a real hatchet for two years now. He felled a tree on his own when he was barely four. As he ran off to play with his new boomerang, his little brother reminded us, “you know, my birthday is coming up pretty soon.”
Soon it was time to leave, although we didn’t make it far before deciding to stop off at Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day of the American Civil War. Although I grew up barely an hours’ drive from the battlefield, I have no memory of visiting it as a kid. We didn’t have much time, but we did walk around a bit and eat a picnic lunch there. It’s now a beautiful, quiet, and peaceful place, and it takes some work to imagine the rolling green hills covered in smoke and the bodies of the dead and dying.
Finally, we decided we’d dawdled enough and needed to start putting some miles behind us. We drove the rest of the day through the verdant hills and rolling farmland of western Maryland and the mountains of West Virginia. We tried to stop for lunch in Wheeling, but apparently the whole town closes down on Sunday. We spent the night at a hotel in Zanesville, Ohio, which was nothing more than a convenient place to get a good night’s sleep.
“Rednecky”??? Dang son! He’s still wearing shoes like a city boy!
Yeah he’s a city boy at heart but getting the kids to wear shoes can be a struggle. Likewise with teaching not just to pee into a random bush when walking along a busy street.
Wish I knew you were going to Wheeling, was visiting family there at the same time. Crazy how downtown really does shut down on Sundays