I am still working as much as I can in my free time, and thus still not able to write as much about the kids (believe me, they are more interesting than grant proposals, but you gotta do what you gotta do…), but I am going to try and take a little break here and at least get some stuff down for posterity.

We drove back to the Adirondacks yesterday AM, and all went really well until we were just outside of Cranberry Lake, which is about 45 minutes from home, and Ava casually says “Mom, I threw up.” I figured she meant that she had a little bit of a juicy burp, and looked back at her to see. She was absolutely covered in vomit. SCRREEEEEECH to a halt. She still remained calm and said with a sort of vague astonishment “there’s some lot of cheese in it too!” I wiped her down as best I could, took her out of the car seat, stripped her down, wiped her down more thoroughly, re-dressed her, wiped the car seat down, asked her if she needed water, did she feel ok now, etc, put her back in and got back on the road. The whole time, I kept thinking to myself “ahhhhhh…this is motherhood.” I find it amazing that I can plunge into a puddle of puke without ever even shuddering once. The power of love!

We spent the rest of the day at home, cleaning and unpacking. I have decided that if you have kids, the only way to travel is in HUGE chunks of time—otherwise the time spent preparing and recovering makes the endeavor pointless.

Today we had a birthday party to go to, so we scrambled to get to town in time to purchase a present. I have such a hard time with the whole present-selection thing. If you do not know what the child has already, it is hard. If you do not know the child very well it is hard. If you do not know the parents very well, it is hard. I mean, sometimes you can get a present that seems great, but then falls so flat because the parents are just not too keen on it, either because it is not in keeping with their child rearing values or because they think you are pushing your child rearing values on them! This may seem like an over reaction, but I distinctly remember one birthday party where the kid opened present after present of mechanized-plastic-walking-bouncing-singing-musical-buzzing-toys galore and was totally dreading the moment when my little wooden blocks and mini-garden set would be opened and I would be revealed as the “who does she think she is, better than all of us-mother.” And sure as sugar, my toy was shelved. And then there is the question of how much to spend. Anyway, this is all to say that I hate picking out birthday gifts. It was made a bit easier because I was getting it for people that are unbelievably nice, and I knew I did not have to really worry, but I still wanted it to be a good present.

Ava was just thrilled to go to the toy store.

Then we hauled our little entourage to Tupper Lake, the next town over, for a really fun birthday party. They had a jumping thing-a-ma-jig, where the kids go inside and it is inflated and they bounce around. There were a lot of kids in it when we got there, clearly having a good time. Ava held back, playing with some of the other toys, and you would have thought that she was not paying the slightest attention, but the minute the big kids cleared out to go eat, she took off across the lawn at top speed, sprinting to get into the thing while it was empty. I was so impressed that she was so on top of things. She had a great time, then retreated again when the kids came back. But there were 2 Great Danes to see, and icing to scrape off of a cake, and so she was still quite happy. It was fun.

It is interesting—Tupper Lake is routinely maligned by everyone in this area, particularly the people in Saranac Lake (and Saranac Lake is maligned by everyone in Lake Placid), but even though it is not particularly attractive, and even though they have some major issues with finding things for their kids to do, and even though it is economically depressed, and even though there is not a lot of drive to make things better, the people that I have met and known from Tupper Lake have almost across the board been genuine, and nice, and non-judgmental. It stinks that people in Saranac Lake put on airs and call Tupper Lakers white trash, assuming they are better than Tupper simply because they live in a town where the hospital is and thus all of the ‘professionals’ live. In some places, Saranac Lake is as bad, if not worse, than Tupper Lake. At least in Tupper, the people do not pretend to be better than the folks down the road. This is not a defense of Tupper Lake, it sure does need some help, but rather a sigh of frustration over living in an area that is so isolated and insular and obsessed with a ridiculous sense of drama. It is one thing to live here and appreciate the fact that we see bald eagles regularly, and I am thrilled that this is something that my kids can experience, but it is another thing altogether to live here and worry about the sort of social influence that the area can exert upon my children. For as much as I have wanted to live in town, I am actually very happy that we are as removed as we are. Perhaps this makes us a little island of a family, and not terribly community-involved, but who cares? We have friends and family beyond the confines of the tri-lakes, and well, there is a whole world out there, and no need to spend our time immersed in the theatrics that can paralyze people into doing nothing with their lives.