Summer Is A Clown Car

Hey, y'all -

How much can we fit in?

This week, we've kept Nancy and Mark and added your great-grandpa Ron, with a guest appearance by your uncle Nate.

We all took the day off yesterday and went up to Seeley Lake:

We paddled around the wetlands and saw a baby otter (who was excited to check us out) and its mama (who yelled at her baby to stay the hell away from us). We saw a blue heron (or an egret or a crane or something like that - I don't do birds). And we saw two deer (though if you'd tried to convince me they were oryxes or something, I'd have believed you because nature eludes me). Hagen spent most of the day absolutely content to float in his inner tube and talk about rocks. 

You'll notice that Laney isn't in these pictures. She's spending every day this week at theatre camp and she is NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT. Not one little bit. First, we're having fun without her. Unacceptable! Also, she has been cast as a Parrot in this weekend's production of "Blackbeard The Pirate." It's the Snow Chicken situation all over again, and Laney Burbach was not made to wither away in the chorus. We've had to promise that we're all going to come cheer for her this weekend and we will no longer have fun this week before 5:00pm. 

Love,

Mom

Sports Camp (Lord Help Us)

Dear Hagen, 

In a rare fit of optimism last month, I decided to sign you up for a week-long Rookie Sports Day Camp at the YMCA. Rookie Sports is for kids 4-6 and wraps up every day by lunchtime. Each day, your group would be learning about and playing a different sport: Hockey on Monday! Football on Tuesday! Tumbling on Wednesday! T-Ball on Thursday! Soccer on Friday! 

The night before camp started, I stayed up fretting that the whole thing would be a disaster. When I'd asked you in the past why you didn't want to go outside and play soccer with the kids at your preschool, you'd answered, "I usually like playing with zero other people." You don't like sports or humanity, so I worried that sports camp was going to be a mistake. I explained to your dad in the middle of my tossing and turning: "Look, if I'd signed him up for Computer Coding or Advanced Pterodactyl Studies or How To Build The World's Great Structures Out of Tinkertoys, I would have no concerns. But instead, I've signed him up for a week of everything he hates." If your dad freaked out every time I freaked out, this family would accomplish nothing. Still, I was irritated by his lack of anxiety. 

Laney and I took you to camp on Monday (picture above) and you were in remarkably good spirits about the whole thing. We left you in the capable hands of a gaggle of teenage counselors and ran back to the car. At noon, when we picked you up, I asked, "So....how was sports camp?" You said, "It...was...AWESOME!!!" You even gave a little fist pump. Three seventeen year-old girls were running Rookie Sports, and they each thought you were "The cutest thing in the world," and every time I dropped you off, they gathered to give you a hug, and when I picked you up, you were always sitting in the lap of one of 'em. So that's part of the mystery solved. 

You also made friends with an older (6) girl who always picked you to be on her team, and when I showed up at noon to get you Wednesday, you looked at me and shrugged and said, "She wants me to stay." "Yeah?" I asked, "Well, I need you to come with me, so we're gonna go." I'll be damned if I'm going to wait in the car so my preschooler can chat it up with a girl. 

Today was the last day and I'd heard there was going to be an awards ceremony. I didn't figure it applied to Rookie Sports people, but when I walked in the gym this afternoon, your favorite counselor met me with "Hagen won an award today!!" I'm embarrassed to say I may have hollered, "For WHAT?!?" She told me, "Hagen won the 'Honest Camper' award, because he always tells you the truth...AND THEN SOME."

"We all played soccer today," she also told me, "except for Hagen, who spent the class running up and down the gym howling, because why Hagen?" "Because I'm a coyote," you explained. "He's just got more personality in his body than I've ever seen!" she gushed.

You won a soccer ball for being the Honest Camper. It's flat, so you're wearing it as a dome hat. 

Everything went exactly like I thought it would. 

Yay, sports.

Love,

Mom

Nancy and Mark - The Summer Visiting Season Begins!

Hey y'all - 

Your great-aunt Nancy (Grandma Sue's sister) and her husband Mark are visiting us this week, making them our very first summer visitors. As I've mentioned time and again, if you live in Montana, people only seem to want to visit you in the summer. It's a marvel to me that any work gets done in this state at all between June and August. Nancy said she wanted to be first on purpose so we wouldn't be suffering from visitor fatigue. 

For our first big outing, your dad decided we should go to Lake Como. It's absolutely beautiful, but at an elevation of 4500', it's about 20 degrees colder than I'd like it to be. That didn't slow down this crowd, though:

Your great-uncle Mark is originally from Boston, and still talks like it. Before we could start driving to the lake, we had to wait for him to run get some swim shorts at Tahhhhget.

Nancy is a former Head Start teacher who now leads kids on science and nature-based excursions, so you guys are always in hog heaven when you hang out with her. She is infinitely patient and knows dozens of songs about dinosaurs. After teaching you a song about T-Rexes, Hagen made one up about a triceratops. This is you guys with your triceratops horns:

If only we could get Hagen to be more comfortable around her:

All around, a great way to kick off our summer of visitors.

Love,

Mom

Last Day of First Grade / Best Friends Day

Dear Laney,

Yesterday was your last day of first grade. Your class celebrated with a picnic at a local park, followed by a party at the splash pad of your school's playground.

It was also Best Friends Day, which is apparently a thing. I remember when people used to just be able to complain about Valentine's Day and Administrative Assistant's Day as "Hallmark Holidays," fabricated by the greeting card industry. Now there are all KINDS of pseudo holidays as manufactured by social media, like Best Friends Day and Siblings Day. Also Doughnut Day, though I have less of a complaint with that one because I can whine to your dad, "But Thooor! We NEEEED to go to Krispy Kreme. It's a holiday!!"

While you were off celebrating the last day of school, Hagen was celebrating Best Friends Day with his best friend, Finley. Hagen and Finley have deep (for 4 year-olds) discussions about philosophical topics, like magnets and stegosauruses and if a truck could change color by itself and if not, why not. They can do a 40-piece puzzle together without fussing and one of them can assemble a car building set while the other one reads the "constructions." Finley's mom, Ms. Katie, says she's worked with hundreds of preschoolers over the course of her career and has never seen anything like it. 

I told the boys I would walk them up to the splash park to see your class party, which they seemed pretty excited about. In the end, it all came down to waiting for Hagen to get his shoes on. At his former preschool, Hagen was NOTORIOUS for taking forever to get his shoes on. His teacher once told him he'd need to put on shoes if he wanted to go out to recess, and your brother said, "Then I'll just sit here because you're going to come back this way in a while, anyway." To him, it wasn't worth the effort of putting on his shoes for half an hour of outside time. Yesterday, when I got irritated and said, "Hagen - your shoes are literally the only thing keeping us from going to the playground," Finley got down on the floor and put on his shoes for him. That's the sign of a best friend. Or a super enabler. Sometimes, it's a gray area. 

We found you sitting by the splash area with your first-grade-equivalent-of-a-crush, Alex. You've been telling us most of the year that you're going to marry Alex, with his sweet demeanor and exotic allergies to peanuts and coconut oil. I spent a lot of time talking to you about what's appropriate - romantically - in the first grade, but I've since given up and just started being grateful that he seems to come from a nice family. 

The atmosphere at the spray park was wild and jubilant and you all seemed so happy to be celebrating together as rising second graders. 

Of course, you got to share it with YOUR best friend, Laila.

When we got home, you showed me a "word map" project that your teacher had done. The teachers had all the first graders describe each other, and then put the adjectives for each kid in a computer program that would make a map of the most commonly used words to describe them. The bigger the word, the more often it had been used by your fellow students to describe you. This was yours:

That "kind" was twice as large as the next word, meaning that's how most of your classmates would describe you, made me so proud I actually teared up a little.

And then your dad and I discovered this note on the bottom of your final report card:

We do not disagree. 

Happy last day, kiddo.

Love,

Mom

You're Going To Get Sick Of These Posts

Hey y'all -

Summer in Montana: You've gotta make the most of it. We seem to be going on a big adventure at least once a week these days. Most recently, we went to Seeley Lake with some friends last weekend. This time of year, the shores of the lake are full of lily pads, which makes for some fun snorkeling if you're into that kinda thing, which Laney most definitely is. Hagen likes to stand by his teacher Miss Julie in two feet of water and every once in a while yell "NOW WE DANCE!!" and then be-bop around her.

When your dad and I were dating, Peg Peg and Tex came to visit us here in Montana and your dad offered up all sorts of recreation options...We could raft! We could canoe! We could hike! In a moment that has become the stuff of family legend, Peg Peg touched him sympathetically on the arm and said in her best "Bless your heart" tone... "Honey, we don't do stuff."

Credit where credit's due, my mother DID get in a raft on that trip and (attempted to) paddle and was a (mostly) good sport about her hair moving, despite the healthy dose of Rave Mega Hold hairspray she'd applied.

I don't know if there's really a point to my telling you this, other than I like to dig out these photos of my mama every few years, because they tickle me to death.

I've had to adjust to being married to a guy who loves to do ALL the stuff. Turns out I like LIKE doing stuff. Minus mountain biking. Still not sold on that.

So every weekend this summer we'll probably end up doing something like this:

What a grind.

Love,
Mom

The Ninja Sleeps Tonight

Dear Hagen,

Ninja School (a.k.a. Introductory Taekwondo) continues to be a disaster and a delight.

The class happens twice a week, and your dad and I have been taking turns so we each only have to endure it once. You're still having issues with focus and spend a lot of time in each session staring into space and then wondering why suddenly everyone has started running or punching or kicking, because you didn't get the memo. At the same time, you're mad as hell that you don't have a red belt yet.

Last Wednesday, you were paired with a teenage girl as your teacher/helper for the day. As you two faced each other to spar, you stared at a point off in the middle distance...and then she bopped you on the head. "Hagen," the head teacher asked, "Do you know WHY she just hit you on the head?" And you threw out your arms in a giant shrug as if to say, "'Cause girls are crazy, man."

This Monday, your class did a lesson on self-defense techniques, and the teachers ("the bad guys") faced off against the tiny students ("the good guys.") The head teacher, Master Corbin, faced off against you. When he saw your attention start to wander as you probably started daydreaming about Transformers and cheetahs and dinosaurs and grape jelly, he bent down, looked you in the eye and said, "Hagen, I need you to really pay attention because I'm about to try to punch you in the face." "AAAAAAAHHHHH!" you shrieked, and ran away from the line.

You might have focus issues, but you're no dummy.

The whole family carpooled home together. It's a 20-minute drive across town at that time of day, and here's a condensed version of how that went:

Note: You got bitten by a mosquito on the back of your right ear, which is why it's bright pink and twice the size of your left ear. It's not a ninja injury.

Love,

Mom

Fun Run 2016

Dear Laney,

Today was your school's annual Fun Run fundraiser. I'm not sure how this fundraiser works, because back in my day*, you had to get folks to pledge a certain amount of money per lap (or per word spelled correctly at a spelling bee, or successful jump at a jump-rope-a-thon). But for the Fun Run, people just pledge a flat amount, so you're not really incentivized to run. I blame the Millennials. (Just kidding, youngsters!)

I went even one step lazier and just wrote a check instead of having you ask grandparents for pledges. Grandparents, you each owe me $10. Every year, I tell the teachers that the fundraising forms that come home in the kids' folders should include an "opt out" fee...like "For $40, you can pretend this race isn't happening."

Hagen and I walked up to the school to watch you run. He's available for these sorts of social engagements ever since I pulled him out of his school in a snit.

He was so, so, so excited to stand on the side of the race route and put out his arm for a high five every time you came around:

But then, of course:

He took off running after you, and crashed the Fun Run. You and your friend Jude held his hand all the way around the school. 

You ushered him across the finish line, where Mrs. Carter noticed, "Hey, you look a little small to be a Fun Runner!"

For the last several laps, you mostly hung out with your friend Laila, walkin' an little and talkin' a lot...

...and then consoling each other over how exhausting the whole thing was.

Great job raising money for your school! (I guess. Maybe.)

Love,

Mom

* This is one of the phrases you think you'll never say, until you become a parent and find yourself saying it. "I can't have anything nice" is another popular one around here.