The Tetz Visit - The Wrap-Up

Hey, y'all - 

Grandpa Ron visited for a little over a week, and spent lots of time with each of you. He's a semi-legendary golfer, and he took Laney and your dad golfing. There are no pictures of this, because your dad doesn't believe in taking pictures. He also listened patiently as Hagen told him all about dinosaurs and puppies and Rescue Bots and things that transform and LEGO bricks.

At the end of the week, he said, "I think Hagen's going to grow up to be a great engineer." "That's good," your dad said, "because we're worried he's going to grow up to have a much older girlfriend who drives a Trans Am."

On one of the last nights of the big family visit, all of the boys (Grandpa Ron, your dad, Hagen and Uncle Mark) went to see our minor league baseball team play. 

The girls (Grandma Sue, Aunt Nancy, Laney and me) went downtown to the Top Hat to hear a live band and dance and eat delicious munchies. Laney was in hog heaven. Here's a few minutes of you special girls of all ages:

Everyone left town over the next day or two, and we were back to our normal family unit.

Seems awfully quiet around here now...

Love,
Mom

You Hated It. We Hated It. BAWK!

Dear Laney,

Missoula has one of the pre-eminent children's theatres in the country (this is not a joke) and they also offer a summer theatre camp for kids 6-13. I signed you up for a week-long camp earlier this month; you were going to attend classes and workshops and at the end of the week, you'd perform in a production of Blackbeard the Pirate. Anyone who has ever met you and then been forced encouraged to watch your stand-up routines or circus acts or dance combinations or mime shows or pop concerts or instrumental performances or rhythmic gymnastics or trampoline stunts or puppet theatre would have thought this would be a slam dunk.

Instead, you hated theatre camp. You, the child who likes to clutch her imaginary pearls and shout "HOW DARE YOU?!?" when you discover your brother taking the last granola bar from the box, were not about drama school.

On the first day, they assigned roles for Blackbeard, and you and your friend Laila (and all the other 6 year-olds) were cast as parrots. Coming off a triumphant (but uninspiring) run as Snow Chickens, you had each hoped for a better role. There's a lot more sitting around in theatre - and in TV, oh man - than you had expected. You thought the whole week was more or less a drag.

After paying for camp registration, parents also had to pay for tickets to the weekend's show. With my "Snow Queen" experience fresh in my head, I called Laila's mom and arranged for each of us to attend ONE performance; we'd take the matinee and she took the evening show. That way, you and Laila would have a friendly face in the audience at both shows, and none of the grown-ups would have to see the show twice.

Let me tell you - and I say this with all the love in my heart, and as someone who would literally hurl herself in front of a bus for you should the need arise - the show was terrible. It made no sense. No one seemed to be having a good time. There were too many kids (20 parrots! 14 mermaids! 8 crabs! 11 sailors! 6 pirates! 4 pieces of seaweed!) and no plot. There was a moment in the show when Parrot #1 said something like "I want a cracker!" and then Parrots #2 - #20 each repeated "Yeah! A cracker!" I guess so each child could say they had a speaking part. But listening to 20 kids in a row intone "Yeah! A cracker!" almost made my brain melt out of my ears. Again, I say this with love.

The camp sent a letter home that parents were NOT allowed to take photos during the show, but could come back after the evening production for a 6:00pm photo call. I respected their wishes and left my camera at home. I came BACK to the theatre later in the evening. I arrived at 5:45p so I'd be sure to get in and find a spot before the photo call. Instead, I discovered that the play had ended early and they'd decided to go ahead and have everyone come out for pictures, so at 5:45pm, I had just missed the 6:00pm photo call.

You know how sometimes I can fixate on a little logistical thing-gone-wrong until I wind myself up in such a tizzy that my peripheral vision starts to blur and my blood pressure escalates and I end up writing letters to half of Missoula suggesting various activities people should undertake with the horses they rode in on? This was one of those. Your dad urged me not to e-mail the theatre in the midst of my rage stroke. Instead, I sent them an e-mail the next day about how disappointed I was. To their credit, they e-mailed me back right away (correctly assuming they were dealing with an unhinged woman who lives just twenty blocks away and is willing to use her powers for evil) and suggested I bring you back to the theatre at my convenience, where they would put you back in costume and make-up and I could take all the pictures of you I wanted until I no longer wanted to burn their houses down. Instead, I took a deep breath and e-mailed them back and said I appreciated their offer, but instead I was going to remind myself that you were playing Fourth Parrot From The Left, and not accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Theatre Wing. La la la la, life goes on.

Fortunately, Laila's mom snapped some photos with her phone, so we can always remember your brief stint as a parrot:

If ever there was a photo of someone thinking, "This is bullshit," ^ that one is it.

When all was said and done, you and Laila were in much better spirits, and if anyone asks you what your favorite thing about theatre camp was, you'll probably say, "When it was all over and we got to go out for spaghetti."

That was the audience's favorite part, too.

Polly wanna cracker. Mama need a beer.

Love,
Mom

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