Catching up

It's been a while since I have taken the time to update this old blog. To tell the truth, I started wasting time on that facebook thing and I don't get over here so often. But things are still happening in our world. The boys and I just got back from a quick trip to visit Jean and Rodg in Florida. I thought it was delightful to get away from work and my house and the cold. Wish Jon could have come, of course. While we were there Eli got into the habit of swimming laps in the pool with his grandparents. I often sat out of these sessions, and a couple times I got to watch them criss cross the pool from the balcony eight stories up. Eli does a good job keeping up with his grandparents. Theo, on the other hand, doesn't really do laps. He does zigzags. Hard to tell if this is on purpose or not, but it was fun to watch him do his little quiet backfloaty-flipper thing back and forth...he'd happen into the pathway of Jean and they'd share a smile and a laugh, she'd send him off in the 'right' direction and he'd soon enough bounce into Rodg's orbit and they'd have a little giggle, and on and on Theo went. It's very similar to how he goes through life- we're never sure exactly where he's headed, but he spreads a lot of love and smiles along the way. Anyway, now that we are back in the hinterland of MN, Eli wanted to continue his swimming, so we took him to the Y and he promptly churned out 20 laps using his unique left arm dominant trudgeon type stroke. I checked the chart on the wall, and sure enough, the kid had covered a half mile in really an impressively short period. He came home and started a chart with a goal to get to 1000 laps by 2010. Considering he has covered over 1/10 of that distance in the past week, I think he may make it. I've noticed him checking out his muscles in the mirror. Love that skinny kid.

When we weren't swimming laps, we perfected our beach combing techniques, uncovering such treasures as a full (and fully dead) crab, the picked clean skeleton of a sting ray, and lots of stunningly beautiful shells. Many of these will eventually find their way to The Collectors' Corner at the science museum and be traded for other fabulous natural objects.

One day Jean and Rodg rented a pontoon and took us out into the bay where we watched a flock of pelicans dive bomb a school of fish as a large pack of dolphins skimmed around the area. It was like we were in a real live "Mutual of Omaha" special. I was pointing and squealing and totally giving myself away as a landlocked landlubber from the frozen north.

I do think that the highlight of my trip was realizing that my two little guys have evolved into fully competent travellers who get a thrill out of new adventures. They hauled their own bags and navigated our way through the airports- I swear that they could do it without me. But I won't let them. Not yet.