so, before getting back into the details of the trip, a few things from our first full day home. today, carter was playing in the bathroom, and i could hear him turning on the water in the sink, turning it off, talking to himself, etc. since i had recently taken to hiding the toothbrushes to avoid their recruitment into various cleaning projects (the dog was a recent one), i was not too worried. but, just to be on the safe side, i said "hey carter, what are you doing in there?" to which he replied:

"making a toothpaste castle!"

ah. hmmm. well, huh. that's pretty creative. now can i have the rest of the toothpaste please?

yesterday was spent unpacking and finding/cleaning all of the things that we forgot about before we left -- i thought i had removed all of the perishables, washed everything and so on, but i did find pumpkin seeds in the oven and i realized that despite removing all of the fruit etc, i forgot about the orange juice. but it was a good chance to clean the inside of the fridge, and the house was not that bad. today was the errand day: dump run, groceries, and a full scale leap back into actual cooking. i thought i was sick of cooking, but after 2 solid weeks of junk food i could not wait to make something fresh, whole, un-chemicalized, un-processed, just real. no matter how much fruit we bought on the trip, it still failed to compensate for the grease and sugar and millions of ingredients that we ended up consuming. i found it interesting to recognize how much of our diet is actually simple unprocessed foods, despite resorting to c-a-n-d-y and some other carefully selected treats on a reasonably routine basis. i guess i have always felt that if 90% of their diet is unprocessed, organic-ish, whole foods, i could care less if they get some treats. but you can be darn sure that after the 4th serving of fries in a week, they were not about to get a single skittle. that and i discovered carter has an incredible capacity for popcorn. he ate a ridiculous amount of it, and it was that fake-buttery movie-theatre poporn, and it was killing me to watch him shovel it into his mouth during the dolphin/shamu shows. i forcibly removed it from him at one point, having capitulated one too many times to the logic of "i'd rather he not whine and fuss" and when the meltdown occurred, i saw peter wince and reach for the bucket, but i became Super Assertive Mother and said "absolutely not. no more. we have food in the car." (we were exiting the park at the end of the day). there must have been something in my voice/expression that suggested imminent doom if anyone contradicted me, because that was the end of the discussion.

oh--and here's a somewhat related tangent: have you ever heard any of the discussion about Hidden Valley Ranch's secret recipe? I am not sure where i read this, but apparently it is some carefully guarded secret, they won't reveal the exact spices/herbs and their proportions blah blah blah...turns out, no one bothered to actually read the label. i'll tell you their secret: monosodium glutamate. right there, in the middle of the list. no hiding, no disguising, just plain old flavor enhancer. i guess they figured if they could keep up the mythological allure, they did not have to bother with trying to sneak it in under some other name. i find it astonishing that whatever article i read bought into the whole scam, but what a load of baloney.

anyway. today we went to Nori's (the local natural foods store) and stocked up. i ate black bean soup, falafel, a vegan blueberry muffin (remarkably good), made mashed organic potatoes, roasted a hormone-free chicken, bought tons of fruit, vegetables, dried fruit, freeze dried fruit and vegetables, fruit leather (you CANNOT get real fruit leather in the regular grocery store), and i am fally starting to feel like the toxic crud is being mopped up out of our bodies. maybe i am sounding a bit more vehement than usual, but i was really distraught by the end of the 2 weeks, when i had 2 hungry cranky kids and we could not find anything reasonable to feed them.

except! at the space center, they had fresh fruit. it says something that both kids chose bananas over chips or ice cream. they literally wolfed them down. oh, and we went to one restaurant where the waitress apologized that the lemonade was fresh-squeezed (no free refills as a result). i must have looked ridiculous when i nearly hugged her--i said "are you kidding? that is great! please don't apologize for not giving us pretend lemon flavor and corn syrup! thank you thank you thank you!"

the worst of it was that ava managed to catch a cold right before we left, and here i was desperately trying to get her better, (and then carter and then myself), and i was not able to feel confident that i had any control over what she put in her body.

speaking of ava's health, she has recovered from the cold (standard everyday virus--we all got it), but we are right back to the headaches again. same pattern. we have an appointment on tuesday--it kills me to see her struggle. on our last day at sea world, she refused to get out of the car and needed to lie down in the back because her head hurt so much. the problem is, she is so pain-intolerant that she is nearly impossible to deal with when it is at its worst, and i am at a loss. she obviously cannot keep living on motrin and tylenol. i expect that now that we are returning for the 2nd time in a month with complaints of headaches, some sort of imaging/testing will be done--given that her bloodwork was basically fine last time. one could say it is a sinus headache, but they always occur after the sinus infection is either resolved or nearly so. one would think it would happen concurrently. i don't know. try googling pediatric headache and see how confident you are after doing that. it isn't exactly helpful. is it structural? migraines? allergies? none inspire relief, and it appears that the diagnostic process is far from straightforward. i am just trying to get to tuesday without full-scale panic.

and now, i have written all of that, and none about the space center. darn, i am completely exhausted. tomorrow i guess. in brief, the phenomenal cost of admission became not so jaw dropping when we went on the tour--we were able to see a tremendous amount, and the presentation was actually well-done and as i said before, i emerged with a whole new perspective on the space program. that and the saturn V rocket is really really really huge.