The rest of it

A rare opportunity on this labor day, with one kid asleep and the other playing very nicely by himself, I find myself with some precious non-work non-parental time. At least for the next few moments. We'll see how far I get.

After Minnesota, we packed up the family and our old college friend (who, at Danny's urging, Jack calls by his full and proper band name, Saturday Night Fever) into my parents' car and set off for Wisconsin. A gaggle of former bandies were converging on our friend Liz (who, at his own discretion, Jack calls not by her band name "Cream Puff" but an entity far more dear to him, "Lizard"). It was Lizard's 30th birthday, although you hardly need an excuse to visit her at her lake house in Green Lake, WI.

Liz took us on a boat ride around the lake, which Jack was a little leery of at first, but before long he was requesting that we go "VERY SO FAST!" and Liz was more than happy to oblige.  There was also some swimming, some frolicking in the grass, some frog-hunting, and an appreciation of a sunset or two.



A lot of revelry was also enjoyed by the grown-ups once the kiddos were asleep. There are no photos of that because this is a blog about my children.  Beany came up from Chicago, and Jack was happy to reunite with her daughter Samara.



Actually, he was happy to have to have a new friend, and took our word for it that he'd met her before. She was barely recognizable from their first meeting last summer-- she was younger then than Sadie is now, and now she's running around, pointing at Sadie and saying "hi baby!"  This is the problem with seeing your friends once a year, when kids are in the mix. We send each other photos and/or read each other's blogs, but it's clearly not the same. But I hope over the years they will grow up together and it will be like an extension of our family. I don't really have a role model for this, because I don't remember meeting many of my parents' friends' kids, and if I did, it wasn't a regular occurrence. The best analogy I can draw is the kids I watched growing up together at Sierra Camp-- they only saw each other for a week a year, but they'd known each other since they were 3, so they were best friends for that week they were together. I hope we can recreate that, I have too many friends in far flung places that I'm unwilling to let go of. Especially now that they have adorable children I want my adorable children to adore.

And speaking of adorable children, our friends closer to home have some, too, we were reminded this week upon our return. Ezra came over for Sadie's first real play-date. I say "real", because although Sadie and Ezra have been hanging out since they were in their respective wombs (remember this photo?), and although they have been in the same room outside of the womb plenty of times, they had never actually interacted before. But look here, they're grabbing for the same toy! Playing!

And the same week, a visit from Anders, who's only ten weeks old, so not a playmate quite yet. But Sadie was fascinated by him and tried to grab his face more than once, which I had to police fairly sternly because the girl has a grasp of steel. My baby is officially old enough that I have to tell her to be "gentle with the baby." Not that she listens.

Other rites of passage: Sadie had her first ice cream yesterday. And her second and third. This marked a rite of passage for us, as well: our first "ice cream crawl" down College Ave. In the heady days of our youth, we joined our friends (many pictured above, actually) on pub crawls down that same street. But now our priorities have shifted and we have found a different way to combine caloric excess with aimless ambling, and it turns out there are almost as many places to get ice cream in our neighborhood as beer.

I'm kind of excited to discover that the stage that comes after adulthood is reliving your childhood through your children.