We went a lot of years without electronic road-trip entertainment for the kids. No game systems, no iPods, no DVD players. The closest we got to new technology was listening to books on CD instead of books on tape. And even then we listened to quaint titles like Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.
This low tech choice was mostly due to circumstance. We were a family of four living on one graduate student income, so we prioritized things like food and shelter and winter coats in Minnesota over entertainment gadgetry.
Had we had the money for DVD players, though, I’m still not sure we would have bought them. I secretly wanted our kids to entertain themselves the old fashioned way, even though I cringed every time they asked me to play I spy or find-the-letters-of-the-alphabet-on-road-signs games. I have romantic notions of watching the landscape change, listening to music, having conversations, taking quiet time to think deep thoughts about things like men and their socks.
But the reality of road trips with kids is that the changing landscape out the windows does not interest them, you can’t enjoy your music because the kids are constantly talking over it, conversation is replaced by boring road trip games, and deep thoughts are interrupted by complaints of “I’m hungry,” “I’m bored,” and “my butt hurts in this seat.”
That all changed today, though, as our son pulled out his brand new 3DS, hand-held Nintendo game system, complete with his very own earbuds. Since he had this fancy new birthday toy, I loaded a couple of new games on my Nook and dusted off our ancient iPod, “purchased” with credit card rewards, and loaded it with all the High School Musical soundtracks for our daughter. We found her some earbuds and she is bopping silently in the backseat, knotting a friendship bracelet as I write.
And let me tell you, our road trip was glorious. I don’t regret or feel bad about their electronics, not even for a second. My husband and I got, not minutes of quiet in the back seat, but hours. Hours of satisfaction and contentment for the kids. Huge stretches of concentration for my husband, who navigated the treachery of sleet and fog and driving rain on steep, slick mountain passes. Wide expanses of time for me to watch rivulets of rain stream across my window, trees creep out of the fog, farms and hay bales and rolling hills drenched with December rain. I listened to the spatter of rain on the windshield, the hum of tires on the highway. I had conversations with my husband.
On this trip, our kids received the precious gifts of 3DSes, and iPods, and Nooks, and of unlimited screen time.
And I received the gift of putting pen to paper, of scratching inky words on lined paper, of writing the old fashioned way, my family all around me as I fulfilled my commitment to write 30 minutes a day.
Yesterday was our eight year old son’s special day*, where he got to pick a meal and a family activity for the day. Knowing his tendency towards lounging all day in PJs, I bribed him. I told him, “If you pick an active family activity, like, I dunno, hiking Dragon’s Tooth, I’ll make cinnamon rolls for breakfast.” Lucky for us, his sweet tooth pulls more weight than his lazy bones.
We’ve taken our kids on several hikes around Blacksburg, and they always love the first third of the trail. Then it all looks the same to them, and the boredom sets in, and they begin asking for snacks, telling us their legs hurt, wondering, “Are we almost at the top? Are we almost done?” Neither of us care about pushing our kids to be any certain way except the way that they are – we won’t push them to be scientists just because their dad is, or pastry chefs just because I like donuts and cupcakes and croissants – but we really, really, really do hope that they will enjoy and appreciate the outdoors. So we try to make it fun for them, taking them to waterfalls, pointing out cool spider webs, oohing and ahhing over golden leaves, showing them boulders they can climb. Playing 20 questions if it comes to that.
And most importantly, finding new trails that will keep them excited about the woods.
When I hiked Dragons’ Tooth with two girl friends a couple of weeks ago, a 2.4 mile trail (4.8 round trip) that involves nearly a mile of scrabbling over rocks, I knew the kids would love it. Their most recent hike was a really steep 2.3 mile hike (Angel’s Rest) with great views at the top and a beautiful trail to boot, but after a demanding 4.6 mile round trip, I think they were done with hiking for a while. We knew we had to pull out the big guns to get them excited again, so I showed our son photographs from the Dragon’s Tooth. Pictures of metal ladder rungs bolted into rocks, shots of sheer rock faces with the white blazes of the Appalachian Trail painted on them, photos of trail that was nothing but jagged ledges of stone. And the prize at the end of the hike? The Dragon’s Tooth itself – a massive sheet of rock, jutting 35 feet out of the ground like an ancient snarled tooth. That, and trail mix with M&Ms.
Our kids ran a good portion of the first half of the trail. They could not wait to get to the rocky part. And once we hit the boulders, and the sheer faces marked with the AT’s white blazes, and the rocky ledges, our kids may as well have been at Disney World. They were high as kites scrambling over those rocks, picking their own paths, hopping from boulder to boulder, then sprinting up the steep trail to the next technical patch. Our son declared, at least four times, “Dragon’s Tooth is the Best Hike Ever!”
The best part for me, though, was not just how much the kids loved the rocks (though that helped). It was the conversation. The morning was grey and raw, we had the trail to ourselves, and everything looked different than our normal hikes – more mysterious because of the mist and the dampness. On our way up, I pointed out some pink leaves that were still hanging on – papery ovals quivering in the deserted forest, ready to fall at any moment – and our son observed them, trying to pinpoint their exact color, when he finally proclaimed that they were peach. Not the darker orange color of peach flesh, but the delicate pinkish orange of their skin. He was specific about this.
When I exclaimed over lichens, plump and green like I had never seen them before – they were the same shape as the dessicated lichen discs we often see, and I wondered if they were those same black lichens, only hydrated – our daughter said, “They look like those noodles I like – the ones stuffed with chicken and cheese? Ravioli! They look like green ravioli.” And indeed, that was exactly what they looked like. I jotted this down for a future haiku.
On our descent, after both kids had climbed partway up the Dragon’s Tooth (our daughter wanted to climb higher, our son said he would never climb the tooth itself again – getting down off of it was too “freaky”) and after the four of us had eaten nearly two pounds of trail mix, the kids were subdued. They loved the rocky parts on the descent, but they were quieter as they scaled them. Once we were back down to the regular old hiking trail, we feared the tiredness and boredom would set in.
So we talked about farts. For probably 15 minutes. We talked about animals farting in the woods, and our son asked why we never smell them. So we said, “You can’t smell their farts if they’re not even around. Have you seen any animals today?”
“Yeah, chipmunks.”
“Well, chipmunks are pretty small. We probably wouldn’t be able to smell them anyway if they farted.”
Meanwhile, our son explored a hole in a tree, sticking his head inside to see what he could see.
“Be careful,” I said. “A chipmunk might stick his butt out and fart on you.”
And then we talked about chipmunk farts and what they probably sound like (a short pffft or bzzt, according to Dad). We talked about a bear’s fart after hibernation, and how godawful it would smell after being held in for three months. To which our son replied, “I fart in my sleep, why wouldn’t a bear?” Yes, this is true. We talked about bird farts, and how we can’t smell them because they’d be even tinier than chipmunk farts, and besides, birds are dainty and would fart high in the sky, where nobody would ever know.
And so on.
After the fart conversation died, I slowed down with our daughter and held her hand while we strolled through the leaf litter. She told me, “I know what function means now.”
“Oh yeah? What’s it mean?”
“It’s the job something does. Like on a plant, the seed’s function is to grow a new plant. The stem’s function is to hold up the plant and bring water to its different parts. The leaves’ function is to make food, and the flower’s function is to make seeds.”
And then she told me about the life cycle of a plant, all the while warming my big hand with her little one, impressing me with her first grade knowledge of botany. I thought I’d stump her when I asked what part of a plant a pine needle might be, but after thinking about it a minute, she answered “I think it’s a leaf because it comes off of the stem.” Right-o, Smart Tart.
We ambled our way back to the parking lot, glad we had hit the trail early, because now the lot was full. I smiled to myself. After hearing our son say somewhere along the way, “I love those peach leaves, and the little baby pine trees, and the ravioli on the rocks. Basically, I just love all the things that nature makes,” I had to agree with him that Dragon’s Tooth was the Best Hike Ever.
The Dragon’s Tooth, Catawba, VA
Peach leaves
Ravioli Lichens
Ladder rungs on AT
Rocky trail
Dragon’s Tooth in the clouds
*We instituted Special Days last year after feeling bad for dragging the kids around on errands, or feeling like we could never all agree on what to do on a Saturday afternoon. So now, we rotate. Each weekend, one of us gets a special day. On a person’s special day, in addition to getting to choose the brunch menu, a special dinner, or a dessert on their day, the special person also gets to choose a family activity. This motivates my husband and me to set aside a chore-free, errand-free time for the four of us to hang out, and it has been a huge hit with the kids. They’ve had a lot of fun trying new foods, going to the antique car show for Dad, going to the conservatory for me, and especially, not having to go to Home Depot or the shoe store when it’s their turn to be special. I highly recommend it.
We signed a lease on a townhouse yesterday. Our house-sitting gig ends in November, so right around the time we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving, and our son’s birthday, and our daughter’s birthday, and right there in the thick of the Christmas season, we will be moving! Sounds fun, doesn’t it? But we are thrilled because we will be moving into our own place again, with our own stuff, unpacked and out of boxes. With our bread board, and our recipes, both hard- and paperback versions of Lonesome Dove, my green coffee mug, a checkbook we need to find.
And my diaries.
My grandmother gave me my first diary – a baby blue book with a tiny gold lock – and I loved that thing like a best friend. I can’t remember how old I was when I started writing in it. I think I might have been a little younger than our daughter is now because I can picture my handwriting, a kindergarten-like “Dear Diary,” scrawled on every yellowed page. What did I write about at age five? What was on my mind? What were my secret thoughts, my concerns, my deepest desires at that innocent stage in life? Maybe I just wrote about what I did that day. What color shirt I wore. “I ate Cheerios for breakfast. They were good. Bye.”
It is highly probable that that diary was the genesis of my love for writing. I think in words rather than images*, and my head is often swirling with sentences, theoretical conversations, random words that have no context. If I don’t get them out, phrases and fragments begin rearranging themselves in different combinations in my head, over and over and over again, like headlines on the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the TV screen. Those damn mind-tickers keep me up at night and distract me during the day. Penning my thoughts on paper has always been an effective release, as writing them out removes them from my head, much like Dumbledore’s Pensieve.
I generally don’t go back and look at my private writings, because as I grew, my journals mostly became a repository of stress. But I had a genius idea at work the other day. When we move, I want to finally open my box of diaries – all 30 something years of them – and read them as our daughter grows. To use them as guideposts, to gain perspective, to remember what it’s like to be a seven year old girl, a nine year old girl, a teenage girl. To remind myself what was important at each age, which thoughts were so significant, which stresses so overwhelming to me that I was compelled to write them down.
To put myself in her shoes so I’ll know where she’s coming from, whatever age she may be.
Because I’ll be frank with you. I have a hard time remembering what it was like to be a kid. Even though I consider one of my greatest strengths to be empathy, of being able to see situations from all sides and understand each person’s point of view, I have a terrible time doing that for our kids. I am not child-like (unless we’re talking fart jokes and footballs in the crotch – that’s funny stuff), and I often treat our kids as if they should be more grown up than they are. I struggle with being stuck in my adult frame of mind, distracted by my grown-up mind-ticker, and I want to appreciate their point of view. How can you help someone, how can you be close to them, if you don’t see their point of view?
I can’t wait to find that first diary and read through the entries til I find my seven-year-old self. Maybe even read it with our daughter when I present her with her very own first diary. A diary that will house her own child thoughts, an outlet for now, and a window back in time when she wants to be able to tell her own daughter, “I understand. I remember.”
*I recently discovered, in year 14 of our marriage, that my husband often thinks in images rather than in words. This discovery was a revelation to me – I thought everyone thought in words! – and has deepened my understanding of him, and of myself, and of us, and of communication styles.
Butterfly Mind 