Aden the Chameleon

In recent years Aden has waited until only a week or two before Trick-or-Treat before deciding on a Halloween costume.  She likes being a kangaroo, and can always happily fall back on that, but luckily when she has a last moment inspiration we've been able to put it together in time.  This year she wanted to be a chameleon.

Mona the Jackal

Mona does her own costumes.  She has for the past few years starting with her head for her tapejara, then she did most of her griffin, then the scorpion was all her, as was last year's ostrich.  This year she decided she wanted to be a jackal, and I got to help with bits of tailoring, but it's fair to say this outfit is again all Mona.

The head in particular is genius.  She started that months in advance, and the jaw somehow hooks onto her jaw so the mouth opens and closes with her own.  The dark spaces that accent her glass eyes (that she also made herself) are actually a mesh that she can see out of.  She used the same mesh at the back of the mouth so she can breathe easily.

Quinn the Chimera

 
Quinn has been selecting Halloween costumes based on checking different categories off a list: mammal, reptile, arthropod, bird, fish, etc.  Among the remaining categories he was contemplating this year were amphibian and mythical creature, and he finally settled on mythical creature, specifically a Chimera.

Now, I knew a Chimera was a mash-up of different animals from Greek mythology, but honestly didn't remember (if I ever knew) the specifics.  Being imaginary, the details vary depending on the source you use, but after looking online, Quinn settled on: goat legs for the lower half, lion on top, a snake for a tail, wings, and the heads of a goat, lion, and dragon.

So this was kind of like making several costumes.  I'm just glad he decided on it early so I could start it back in September.

Writing Again

Last week I got to use our cottage in Michigan as a mini-writing-retreat.

I went with a talented writer friend who helped me salvage my first novel a few years ago, and she agreed to help with the second if I would keep her on task with writing her own book.  We had five straight days (plus two chatty driving days) of writing.  For the most part no internet, no schedule, no news, no responsibilities.  There were a couple of trips to the library, a few trips to pick up food, and some lovely walks here and there, but more or less we stayed in the house and wrote without interruption.

I can't emphasize enough how much I needed this.

Shards of Beauty

Sometimes life is too full.  It overwhelms.  There are days I feel so much I wind up numb.

There are moments anymore where I don't know whether I'm in the throes of hormonal shifts, or I've simply reached a stage of my life where I cannot look back over so many years without stumbling into emotions of all kinds.  I miss people and places and situations that will never come again.  I look forward knowing certain opportunities have passed, and yet at the same time I don't feel limited because life is full of so much.

A couple of weeks ago my son and I went to our Latin lesson and the teacher didn't show.  We reviewed our notes a bit, wrote phrases on the white board (we left up a sentence that roughly translates to "Take your things and leave!" because it amused us), and then left early because we could.  It was beautiful out, so with our extra time we stopped at the beach.

Dubuque

Due to a weird transition happening in our public school system's scheduling, my two oldest kids went back to class in the middle of August, but my youngest doesn't start until after Labor Day this year.  He got an extra three weeks of summer vacation, but while everyone else was in a different routine.  It's been odd.

I asked him if there was anything he would like to do during this last little bit of time he had free while his sisters were away all day, and he decided he wanted to go to Iowa.  He has a passion for geography as well as a desire to check things off lists, and Iowa is the only state that borders Wisconsin that he'd never been to.  We took to Google Maps and determined the closest destination from our house would be Dubuque.

I picked a day that was likely to be slow enough at work that I wouldn't be needed so that Ian could take the store, and after the girls were off to school, Quinn and I hit the road.  It's only about two and a half hours to the Iowa border, so not a big deal in our book.  We fussed with the GPS and found a restaurant to aim for, and enjoyed an easy drive where we left the rain on our side of the state and enjoyed clear skies over the Mississippi.

Wild West

We spent the last two weeks of July doing a whirlwind tour of the West.  We visited nine states and drove over 4000 miles.  (We saw a lot and this post will be long, but there are lots of pretty pictures like this one from Utah.)

It wasn't the most convenient time for this trip for several reasons, but we kind of felt we needed to do it.

First of all, Ian's side of the family is all out that way, and there were several relatives of his we hadn't seen in a long time or had never even met, and we felt a need to address that.  It's hard for us to travel anyplace we can't reach by car, so usually seeing family means seeing my family, but we wanted our kids to get to know the other side of their family, too.

And second, our oldest is halfway through high school and we won't have that many opportunities to travel together as a family in a few years and there is a lot we want our kids to see.  We've barely scratched the surface, really, of what we want to show them in the world, but at least when they go off on their own they will have a decent idea of the scope and variety of what's in our own country, and that's a start.

My kids are good at road trips, but we didn't want to spend time driving across parts of the country we've already seen, so we flew to Salt Lake City and rented a car to drive from there.  The plan was to pick up camping gear in the first few days of the trip to use later, but the one snag in the plan was the equipment we scoped out at our local Walmart that we figured we could find during our travels was not available in the quantities we needed at any single store.  We had to stop at several of them to get five cots (after our air mattress disasters we decided cots were the new way to go), but toward the end of our trip my kids said they preferred to go hungry rather than stop at another Walmart for snacks and supplies.

Our flight left Milwaukee very early on the morning of the 17th, and an incredibly kind neighbor (thankyouthanyouthankyouAubrie) drove us to the airport at 3:30a.m.  We flew first to Phoenix, then on to Salt Lake.  One of the advantages of finally traveling with older kids (they are now 16, 14, and 11) is that we could take Southwest and not have to worry about all of us sitting together.  (I remember flying to New York when Ian was deployed and trying to manage five-month-old Quinn in my lap while tending to the girls across the aisle.  Very different times.)

We picked up our rental car at the airport from Enterprise, which was the only rental car place in the city that my husband said didn't have a one-star Yelp review.  That never even occurred to me to check because how bad could a rental car place be?  Apparently pretty bad because the lines and complaints at every other place were impressive.  We piled into our new minivan and drove north through Boise to Nampa, Idaho.

It's so interesting to drive through landscapes that look nothing like home.